The Action of the Holy Spirit

Gabriel's answer directs Mary to the Holy Spirit and the power of the Most High. Luke describes divine creative action. The account does not describe sexual union with an angel or another heavenly creature.

Catholic teaching receives the conception as virginal and as the beginning of the eternal Son's human life. That means the child's identity cannot be explained through the ordinary heroic picture of a god producing a partly divine descendant.

The mystery concerns God's action and the Incarnation. It is not a missing sexual mechanism that the reader should reconstruct from pagan parallels. The Christian claim supplies a different kind of cause.

This difference is decisive for the rest of the comparison. Superficial resemblance between a divine-birth story and the Annunciation cannot establish that they describe the same event or the same relation between divinity and humanity.