Demolishing Triablogue: The virgin birth story is fiction whether it was a cover story or not

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays entitled

Is the virgin birth a cover story?

Hostile readers assume the account of the virgin birth is a cover story for a prenuptial scandal.

Some of them think it is rank fiction not intended to be a cover story.

That makes sense if you reject miracles out of hand, as well as the larger context of Christ's extraordinary life and ministry.
However, even on naturalistic grounds, why would Mary or early Christian propagandists concoct a story like that?

Maybe because the Jesus whom they wished to worship, really was born in circumstances not becoming a holy "son of God"?

To begin with, no one except Christians is going to believe it. So it will fail to silence suspicion and allegation. The very audience that assumed the worst in the first place will hardly be persuaded by this explanation. 

But you don't know the originally intended audience of the gospel authors sufficiently to justify dogmatizing about whether Matthew and Luke expected their virgin birth narratives to be convincing to unbelievers.  The gospels appear more likely written for believers, and less likely intended to convince unbelievers.   And yet in light of John 20:31, it could be argued that the gospel authors really did, in gullible fashion, expect unbelievers to trust whatever they had to say about Jesus.  Not any more unlikely than the con artists at TBN who "expect" to wow unbelievers with their gossip about Jesus.  It's really stupid, but people sometimes really are THAT stupid.

In addition, it's not even the most plausible naturalistic explanation.

Correct, the silence of Mark and 24 other NT authors on the virgin birth makes it clear that the virgin birth story is more than likely fiction, even if there was no sexual scandal to cover up.

The Mosaic law has a loophole for rape victims. If a virgin says she was raped when she was out in the field, she can't be prosecuted since there were no witnesses to confirm whether it was consensual or not (Deut 22:25-27).

Despite the fact that had God wanted to, he could have given some miraculous sign to the judges so they could determine whether her version of the story was truthful or not, like he allegedly does in causing a dishonest woman's vagina to get gooey and disgusting in Numbers 5.  

But that would make it harder to enforce the law on adultery, since even if a betrothed virgin (or married woman) became pregnant through consensual sex, she would always claim rape. Say she wasn't within earshot of any witnesses at the time.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Mary was pregnant because she had consensual premarital sex, why make up a story about angelic visitations and a miraculous conception when she could simply say she was a rape victim? 

Easy, she wasn't raped, she was a teen slut.  Problem solved.

Don't forget that the virgin birth story clealry does more than cover up some sex scandal, it also promotes Jesus as the divine son of God, so that could be the sole motive of the authors, a cover-up being utterly irrelevant to their motives.

Another answer is that perhaps there's no report of rape because the evidence of her consent was clear to those who investigated?  I.e., the story is covering up Mary's slutty history?

Rape was probably not uncommon back then. So unlike the virgin birth, there'd be no air of unreality to the claim. People who scoffed at the virgin birth wouldn't be in a position to scoff at that explanation.
Given how easy it would be to invoke this loophole, it stands to reason that some women who were guilty of consensual premarital or extramarital sex evaded the allegation by claiming to be rape victims. So long as they weren't caught in the act, there'd be no presumption that their claim was false. 

And since we cannot know to what degree others knew the truth about how Mary got pregnant, your questions do little more than beg for speculative answers.  I'd rather you answer the problem of Mark not mentioning a virgin birth.  I think this is where you suddenly discover that Markan priority is just a trick of the devil, and Mark was simply abbreviating Matthew and Luke.

Yet Mary doesn't say that.

You don't know what Mary herself had to say about this incident.  You have the disputed hearsay of gospel authors whose identity and exact relation to the eyewitnesses or to these events is nearly a complete unknown, yet you act like the reasons they wrote they way they did are perfectly clear.

Matthew and Luke don't represent Mary having said that. 

 And since first-century Christians never lied about anything, atheists have no other choice but to worship bible inerrancy.

If you're going to invent or circulate a cover story, that would be far more plausible to hostile readers than the virgin birth.

But we don't know that the gospel authors were intending to make a cover story, so all you are doing is refuting extreme skeptics who irrationally insist that Mary was raped or a slut.  Let me know when you have something to say threatening MY basis for virgin-birth skepticism.

And if you want Jesus to sound like pre-Christian god-men like Perseus, you invent a tale of virgin birth that puts words in the mouth of his mother, then you kick out of your church anybody and everybody who take issue with what God's annointed apostle Matthew said.

So why didn't Mary, Matthew, and Luke resort to that explanation rather than the virgin birth? For the obvious reason that the tradition of the virgin birth was the true explanation, even though it will invite derision in a way that feigning rape would not. 

Bullshit, the virgin birth story could be covering up Mary's consensual adultery, and THAT could just as easily explain why the rape-hypothesis doesn't make sense of the data.  Leaping from the falsity of the rape-hypothesis to the conclusion that the virgin birth is true, is hasty generalization and the fallacy of false dilemma.

The falsity of the virgin birth is as secure from the silence of Mark and 24 other NT authors as an historical hypothesis could possibly be.  Engwer's trifles about Mark 6:3 cannot explain how Mark could have "chosen to exclude" a story that would have supported his doctrinal beliefs the most, the virgin birth.  The truth is that Mark is silent about the virgin birth because either a) he doesn't know about it, implying Peter doesn't either, implying the story was false, or b) he knew the story but thought it false.

Now go commit a sin and blame it on God like a good Calvinist.