More About Andrew Lincoln's Book On The Virgin Birth

Larry Hurtado has posted some comments on Andrew Lincoln's book about the virgin birth. For those who don't know, I responded to Lincoln's book in a series of articles last week. Here are a couple of significant posts from the comments section of Hurtado's thread:

My [Larry Hurtado's] review will appears sometime in the Spring 2014 in Expository Times, but I was assigned a limited number of words. So, it won’t be a really adequate engagement on critical issues. That’s something that the book certainly requires and deserves.

And Richard Bauckham commented:

One point at which Lincoln is wrong is that he claims biographers themselves made up stories about portents and remarkable events connected with the births of important people. (Miraculous births and conceptions as such are very rare, prophecies and portents more common.) What the biographers (Plutarch, Suetonius and others) actually do is report stories that were already circulating. They say so. Sometimes they report them without committing themselves to their truth. Sometimes they have no such stories, presumably because there were none available to them. So I don’t think we should assume that such things were understood as just a literary convention or conclude too readily that Luke would have just composed his birth narratives de novo.