I know you're a Classicist, so it's hard to grasp this idea, but only the New Testament (and not the whole Bible) was written in Greek. The Greeks and Romans didn't create the whole world. The Old Testament (like other Ancient Near Eastern texts) constructs genealogies in various lexico-semantic ways, all of which are patrilineal. However, someone's mother is still often used in a construction of a genealogy of their children, especially if they were of note. I can think of dozens of examples in the Old Testament, the early Mesopotamian texts, Egyptian texts, Akkadian and Hittite royal correspondence texts (which often utilise a brief genealogy), etc.
This is my bad. Given the context I thought using the word Bible was self-explanatory but on second guess it really wasn't, however in the case you quoted I was referring to the New Testament and not the entirety of the Bible. I'm well aware that the Old Testament is not written in Greek, of course.
But going back to the Greek of the New Testament: I'm not fluent in Koine Greek and I'm not particularly familiar with the New Testament texts as you claim to be, however:
- Luke (3:23-) traces Jesus' lineage with ᾿Ιησοῦς ... υἱός ᾿Ιωσήφ 'Jesus, son of Joseph', but then has τοῦ x 'who was of x' for all the people going back to God,
- Matthew (1-) traces Jesus' lineage via two constructions: either x υἱοῦ y 'x son of y', or x ἐγέννησε τὸν y 'x begot y'.
As far as I can tell, neither of the two Synoptic Gospels' accounts of Jesus' genealogy is constructed with anything like 'sperma'. 'Sperma' seems to be used in the sense of 'Jesus was born from the seed (sperma) of David', but what other way can they express that Jesus was a descendant of David; 'Jesus was born from the womb of David'?.
Yes, 'Jesus was born from the seed (sperma) of David' and this word is used in such a context consistently throughout the New Testament to refer to Jesus' relation to David. Jesus, according to the Old Testament, cannot be the messiah without being of the seed of David.
Now you say "but what other way can they express that Jesus was a descendant of David; 'Jesus was born from the womb of David'?", and that's a valid point and rather my point exactly. The genealogies given are those of Joseph and not of Mary. Had they wished to show that Jesus was related to David on the mother's line, then they were entirely capable of doing so.
So what we have are two Gospels that include male genealogies of Joseph which are present in order to show and fulfill the messianic requirement that he be directly related to David. We then have a direct contradiction in that this link is then severed immediately by the concept of virgin birth, because the language used and the ideology involved is completely incompatible with such an idea; it would not have recognised such a line if Jesus had, for example, been adopted by Joseph.
The language used in the rest of the Bible, especially in the epistles of Paul (where that quote is from "Jesus was born from the seed (sperma) of David") that represent the earliest development of the Christian theology and myth of Jesus, describes a relationship that, in such a sense, could not be fulfilled by the feminine side of Jesus; it has to be the 'sperma' of David from which he is born - a female of the line of David with the 'sperma' of someone not of the line of David would not do for the purposes of the prophecy or even to be consistent with the earliest theology of the Christian church.
So we have the genealogies that would not only make inherent logical sense without the concept of virgin birth but would be theologically and linguistically consistent with the theology of the Bible including those parts that represent the most early and pure (if I may be allowed such a use of the word) stage in the development of the Jesus myth.
Like I say, the most likely option is that the original text of Matthew and Luke did not contain references to the virgin birth and were predicated on the idea that Joseph was the biological father of Jesus, as many of the epistles of Paul and other parts of the Bible are, and that these were edited in by an early Christian Church looking to compete with other mystery religions and seek some kind of poetic or mythic legitimacy in the face of other rival messianic cults.
Not that we seem to be arguing over anything of particular detail, as you seem to agree with me (from other remarks you've made) that the New Testament went through several periods of revision and being edited and that what we have now is by no means the original text; why does the profoundly inspired word of God need to be 'fixed' by men that never met Jesus in order to create a consistent theology? etc. There are logical questions that arise, and this is all ignoring the fact that the New Testaments make several basic historical errors (Judas was, for example, paid by the chief priests who "weighed out thirty pieces of silver" where weighed silver went out of circulation 300 years prior to the times described, currency was rarely in silver and always minted, not weighed out, at the time), poorly translate Hebrew prophecies and fabricate historical events in order to suit their agenda with regards to theology and prophecy.