Anthony Buzzard’s (and hence the Restora­tion Fellowship’s) posi­tion of retain­ing the vir­gin birth doc­trine hangs largely on this sin­gle verse.

Luke 1:35
The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will over­shadow you; and for that rea­son the holy child shall be called the son of God.

How­ever, if we read this verse in con­text we dis­cover a cou­ple of prob­lems with it as some­how it doesn’t fit into the context.

Luke 1:
30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 Youwill con­ceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descen­dants for­ever; his king­dom will never end.”

34 Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a vir­gin?” 35 The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will over­shadow you; and for that rea­son the holy child shall be called the son of God. 36 And behold, even your rel­a­tive Eliz­a­beth has also con­ceived a son in her old age; and she who was called bar­ren is now in her sixth month. 37 For noth­ing will be impos­si­ble with God.”

The angel has just told Mary “behold, you WILL con­ceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name Him Jesus”. Notice, no tim­ing is given. Just as with Abra­ham, God announces the event ahead of time, but with no indi­ca­tion about WHEN the event will take place. In that con­text Mary’s ques­tion sounds quite fool­ish: “How can this be, since I am a vir­gin?” — lit. “I know not a man”. The angel did not tell her that she HAS con­ceived, but that she WILL. She was betrothed to Joseph, her legal hus­band, and she knew that one day she would have sex­ual rela­tions with him.

The expres­sions “the Holy Spirit will come upon you” and “the power of the Most High will over­shadow you” are sim­ply say­ing the same thing twice, which often occurs in Jew­ish writ­ings and used for empha­sis (funny that these two expres­sions actu­ally iden­tify the Holy Spirit with the “power of the Most High”, rather than with the Most High Him­self, yet, trini­tar­i­ans ignore it).

Then the angel makes the state­ment: “for that rea­son the holy child shall be called the son of God”.

Let’s just read again what the angel said to Mary a bit earlier:

Luke 1:
31 You will con­ceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descen­dants for­ever; his king­dom will never end.”

So Mary would con­ceive, give birth and name her child Jesus. No men­tion of him being the son of God. But then he will be great AND will be called the son of the Most High. The title “son of God” is related to his great­ness, that is, it is his right­eous life that guar­an­tees him this title, not his birth.

For this rea­son Luke 1:34–35 seems to be com­pletely out of step with the rest of the pas­sage. Hence, I think there is strong inter­nal evi­dence that these verses are spu­ri­ous. Do we have ANY tex­tual evi­dence, that these verses were not part of the orig­i­nal auto­graph? It seems the tex­tual evi­dence is weak. How­ever, we need to remem­ber that we have no com­plete man­u­scripts before the fourth cen­tury, and there is only about a sin­gle small frag­ment with a few words from the gospel of John on it from the sec­ond cen­tury, which was prob­a­bly the most the­o­log­i­cally tur­bu­lent time. So while tex­tual crit­i­cism is able to recon­struct the bib­li­cal text very well, we have no absolute cer­tainty about what the orig­i­nal auto­graph exactly looked like.

There­fore, when inter­nal evi­dence is against a pas­sage, I think it is appro­pri­ate to put a ques­tion mark against it and ignore it for the­o­log­i­cal purposes.

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