Christian Birth Narratives

Christian Birth Narratives 1 of 56 Christianity Christian Birth Narratives Abstract The Virgin Birth is unknown to Paul. The earliest Christian writings, Paul's Epistles, do not mention it. Jesus was of the seed of David according to the flesh (Rom 1:3), and Jesus was born of a woman under the law (Gal 4:4). By any natural standard, Jesus was illigitimate—her husband did not impregnate Mary so Jesus was not the son of her husband. He was therefore not a son of David as the genealogies seek to show. Nor was Jesus a son of David because he himself, according to the synoptic gospels, denied it. If Paul was right in saying, “Christ was descended from David according to the flesh”, Christians have to conclude he meant Mary’s flesh so as not deny the miraculous birth. Then the genealogies of Joseph are spurious and superfluous. Joseph is unnecessary to the story, and Mark did not mention him at all. But Christians like the idea of a Davidic descent of Jesus, and believe it, even though God as the Son denied it. The virgin birth narratives spoiled the purpose of the genealogies, so must have been needed. It was because Jesus had been called Ben Pandera, Son of the Panther, a black man. A virgin (Greek, parthenos) birth explained the rumour that Jesus was a bastard. Pandera was a slur on the word parthenos, Christians said. But Pagan demi-gods were often sons of virgins, so the pun is an unlikely invention of Pagans, though not the opposite. Even normal birth by the impure route was too ignominious for the Christian Son. It had to be spotless, or immaculate, and the mother had to remain a virgin. So, Christians quickly took Mary to be as intact as a pious nun, a perpetual virgin like Pagan goddesses, even after Jesus had been born. Yet Luke describes Jesus as Mary’s first-born, and all the gospels mention brothers of Jesus and sisters too. © Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Sunday, July 04, 1999 Fridat, 13 March 2019 The Myth of the Virgin Birth Joseph and Mary Bethlehem and Nazareth The Line of David The Genealogies Mary Prophecy of a Virgin Pantheras Virgin Mothers Perpetual Virginity and the Holy Family Mary, Joseph and the Holy Family A Brotherhood? The Magi and the Star of Bethlehem Shepherds and Angels The Massacre of the Infants Christian Birth Narratives 2 of 56 Early Proof of Divinity The Immaculate Conception of Jesus Christ a Powerful God The Myth of the Virgin Birth Mankind will not emulate extraordinary leaders but instead fall to their knees, adore and worship them. Rather than follow a difficult example it is easier to deify the exemplar thus providing an excuse for not emulating him—“How can mere men do what gods can do?” This inclination to worship Jesus as a god rather than follow him as a man stems from the earliest days of Christianity. Christians take the belief that Jesus was “son of God” to mean he was divine. Proof is his Virgin Birth, a myth found from end to end of the Hellenistic world. Divine heroes were not the product of human fathers. Their mothers were impregnated as virgins by the god in some supernatural way. If our ideas about the dates of the gospels are correct, within 60 years of the crucifixion, Jesus’s adoring followers had created the myth of the conception of Jesus by the Holy Ghost making him at least half a god from the start. He thus became an impossible role model for merely mortal men. Yet even the half of him that was human passed on by his mother was too much for the adorers—they wanted a fully fledged god. After centuries as a tolerated heresy, in 1854 the doctrine of “The Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God” was adopted by the Roman Church. It made Mother Mary into another perfect being, free of original sin, like Jesus. From her own birth date she was incapable of sin throughout her life. She was defined as a sinless mate for God Almighty to conceive a divine son. Jesus as a fine example of principled and dedicated manhood had been usurped by the adorers and worshippers. Nothing certain is known about Jesus’s birth, childhood and early manhood. Indeed, few doctrines of the Christian faith are so slight in their foundations as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. The virgin birth was not attested early in Christianity. Mark, John and Paul never mention a special birth, Paul even denying it explicitly, as if he had heard the rumour and wanted it scotching. The earliest Christian writings are Paul’s epistles, and no mention is made of the Virgin Birth in them. Paul could not be more explicit in recording that Jesus was “of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Rom 1:3) as if he were refuting the suggestion. He insists that Jesus was “born of a woman under the law” (Gal 4:4) but he does not know, or apparently care, who she was and he knows of no miracle in the conception. For Paul, Jesus was the Son of God through the “Spirit of Holiness” which did not require a supernatural conception. Christian Birth Narratives 3 of 56 Mark and the last gospel, John, have no narratives of Jesus’s birth and upbringing. The gospel of Mark is the next writing chronologically after the epistles. We have no proof it existed within forty years of the death of Christ yet it is ignorant of the tremendous miracle of the Virgin Birth. Both Mark and John begin the history with Jesus heralded and baptized by John the Baptist at the age of thirty. The original Mark was a description of the active career and death of a Jewish leader, appointed by John in his early manhood. The implication of the omission of the birth stories from the final gospel might be that its author did not accept them. Since they were also omitted from the first gospel, either Mark did not know about them or he also did not accept them. These observations alone seem sufficient to treat them with distrust. The wonderful story of the birth of Jesus does not publicly appear until at least a century after the event. What would an historian make of a legend about the birth of Napoleon which did not appear until a hundred years after he was born? Indeed, no church father cites the birth narratives as we now know them until Irenaeus in 177 AD. The early church could not consider the mother of God having a sexual relationship with any man lest doubt be cast upon Jesus’s title as Son of God. So it suited the church fathers to compose the birth narratives and justify them from the “prophecy” they found in Isaiah. Joseph and Mary Mark and Paul never mention Joseph, and nor does Matthew when the birth narrative is excluded. Contrast Mark 6:1-3 with the parallel Matthew 13:53-55, written about 25 years later. In Mark, Jesus is the carpenter, and his father is not mentioned. In Matthew, Jesus is the son of the carpenter. Mark has nothing certain to suggest the nuclear family of the birth narratives. The Jewish custom was to associate a son with his father’s name not his mother’s. Joshua ben Miriam is absurd and insulting, implying precisely what early critics claimed—Jesus was illegitimately born. To speak of someone as the son of Mary is to imply he has no father. Elsewhere in the New Testament, Jesus is the son of Joseph, a contradiction of the birth narratives, unless Jesus was adopted. More likely is that Jesus was a son of Judas, meaning Judas of Galilee. Jesus might have been a natural son of Judas, but he could have been called a son of Judas in the sense that he was a follower—he was a member of the Galilean bandits founded by Judas. This tradition would have had to be dropped like a hot cake, as soon as it began to emerge, and evidently it was too hot to mention Christian Birth Narratives 4 of 56 in the earliest gospel, Mark, though no alternative had been substituted. To get rid of the accusations that Jesus was a son of Judas of Galilee, later gospels made Jesus the son of Joseph, and Judas was the name given to Jesus’s “betrayer” to complete the revision. Joseph is therefore fictional. In Matthew 1:19, Joseph is called a “just man” which is code for an Essene. Joseph was chosen as the name of the father of Jesus as a sop to the Samaritans who were amongst the first Nazarene converts. Samaritans lived in what was the Northern Kingdom of the two Jewish kingdoms where the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, descended from the Joseph of the Torah, had settled in legend. Samaritans thought of themselves as “sons of Joseph”. Jesus was therefore given a father with the name Joseph so that the messiah was a “son of Joseph” in line with their expectations. Further proof is that Matthew tells us Joseph’s father is Jacob, just as the father of the scriptural Joseph was Jacob. Mary the Virgin is central to the gospel narrative only in the birth stories in the early chapters of Matthew and Luke. Elsewhere, she travelled to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve (Lk 2:41-52), she urges Jesus to change water into wine at a mysterious wedding at Cana (Jn 2:1-12), she is snubbed by Jesus (Mk 3:31-35; Mt 12:46-50; Lk 18:19-20; 11:27-29), her neighbours at Nazareth have little respect for him (Mk 6:1-6; Mt 13:53-58), she is present at the crucifixion where Jesus entrusts her well being to John, according to John (Jn 19:25-27), and finally she appears, in Acts 1:14, at prayer with the apostles. It is not a lot to build a historical picture of her, especially when she is unique in history if not in mythology, as parthenogenesis has never been attested in human beings, or even vertebrates, yet miraculous births were common in the classical myths for both gods and outstanding men. Mary was certainly called “The Virgin” from the time of Matthew and Luke, around the end of the first century, and Mary could really have been a virgin. If she were a sister in the women’s branch of the Essene sect, akin to the female Therapeutae, she would have been chaste by choice, just as the male Essenes were, and many a pious Christian nun. She could not then have been a natural mother, but she could still have been a ritual mother. Catholic priests call themselves “Father” and nuns still call themselves “mother”, even though they are lifelong virgins. Christians automatically reject any notion that their superstition did not begin with the man described in the gospels, even though much of the terminology seems to have been already established before Christ. Mary was a type of nun. She officiated as a ritual mother at a rebirth ritual, part of the rights of passage of any Essene, but being a ritual mother did not relieve her Christian Birth Narratives 5 of 56 of her virginity! The apologists will say that this is hypothetical, and so it is, but it is a better hypothesis than one that actually requires a virgin to give birth to a natural son while still remaining a virgin. In the two gospels with the birth stories, Joseph was betrothed to Mary. The implication is that she was too young to marry, yet Joseph is her husband (Mt 1:19, although the words “to be” are inserted in some texts), and they seem married too in Luke 2:5. Apologists, like Geoffrey Ashe, once a devotee of Mary (The Virgin), claim betrothal was like marriage in practice—when the man took the girl into his house they were effectively married and sexual relations could begin. It is unlikely, and, though it doubtless happened, it was not proper. Even so, it was not true of Joseph for Mary was already pregnant when he supposedly took her for his wife (Mt 1:20), meant to denote when she joined his household. He found she was pregnant and decided to divorce her, but the angel appeared and persuaded him otherwise. Apart from the angel, which solves the problem for believers but for no one else, Joseph had found his virgin bride to be pregnant when he took her in. There is only one honest interpretation of this. Mary had allowed herself to be seduced as a minor. The fourth century Jewish work, Toledot Yeshu, the History of Jesus, explains that this was the case, though it is too late to be good evidence. What is closer to the events is that the same allegation was considered by Origen as a widespread rumour in the second century. That Christians had two quite different traditions of Mary and Joseph at the birth of Jesus gives us no confidence in the historicity of either. In the story that Jesus was illegitimate are three possibilities, and the absence of the story in several of the sources suggests other possibilities—Jesus had an utterly unremarkable birth, or he was an orphan brought up by a home for destitute boys and girls. The Essenes took in such children. The Essenes in the Scrolls called themselves the Poor or the Ebionim, and early forms of Jewish Christianity had the same name. The more Jewish of the Ebionite sects of the second century rejected Paul, and the miraculous birth stories. They saw Jesus as a prophet who would return in glory, but had been born as a normal man. Apologists say they were just anti-Paul but Paul advocated no miraculous birth either. Paul’s epistles prove that the first Christian missionary made no use of the supposed miraculous birth of Christ! So, it seems no far-fetched inference that these Ebionim were in the tradition of the Jerusalem Church of James the Just. Their fathers were the first Jewish Christians. They were said to have used a Hebrew version of Matthew. Geoffrey Ashe, one who considers himself a careful historian, calls the Ebionite gospel “a Christian Birth Narratives 6 of 56 censored text of Matthew in Hebrew”, inferring from it that the Ebionites were a breakaway group of Christians rather than the original ones. Like most biblicists and pseudo-historians, he is careful to fill his book with footnotes, but gives no authority for this statement and the conclusion from it. It is simply his own assumption derived from his own belief in Christianity. It is more likely that the Hebrew Matthew was a Syriac sayings document, perhaps the one known to scholars as “Q”, a variation of which seems to have appeared as the Gospel of Thomas. The Christian Matthew was the Greek recension of this book amalgamated with Mark, the editor retaining the original authorship of the sayings work, Matthew. When the same procedure was followed elsewhere, the book was given a new name, whether the name of the editor or not, Luke. If this is so, then it confirms the hypothesis of the Ebionites as the earliest Christians, and enjoys the characteristic of plausibility, to use a favourite Christian criterion of truth. Ashe is as bogus a scholar when it comes to his beliefs as most other Christians. A reason he offers for disregarding the Ebionite evidence is that it is from outside the Church, an excellent reason for accepting it, the Church never having been noted for its honesty. Moreover, the Ebionites were outside the Church because Rome had expelled them as heretics. Bethlehem and Nazareth Matthew and Luke both have birth narratives but each has a different story. Matthew, the next gospel after Mark, seems in its original form to have known nothing unusual about the birth of Jesus. The first two chapters are an afterthought. The gospel really begins, at the third chapter, in the same place as that of Mark. Then someone prefaced it with one of the two genealogies of Jesus that were in circulation (1:1-17). Next—the new beginning is quite clear—somebody added a short account of how Jesus was born (1:18-25). Lastly some other hand added the legends of Chapter 2. The Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem as the Old Testament is interpreted as saying: But thou, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. Micah 5:2 Matthew renders this citation as: And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the Christian Birth Narratives 7 of 56 princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel. Mt 2:6 Not much difference, you might think, but Ephrathah has been omitted and the prophecy has otherwise failed unless Jesus became, at some stage, the ruler of Israel. The significance of dropping “Ephrathah” is that, with it included, it is much clearer that a legendary son of Judah, Bethlehem Ephrathah (1 Chr 4:4), 123 of whose children supposedly returned with Zerubabel from exile (Neh 7:26), is meant and not a town. In the quotation from Micah, “thousands” is more accurately translated as “houses” or “clans” as it is in the RSV, and Matthew actually gets it correct in referring to Bethlehem as a prince! Confirmation that the reference is to an aristocratic “father” and not a place is that the pronouns and adjectives applied to Bethlehem are masculine, whereas towns are uniformly feminine in Hebrew grammar. Since Jesus does not seem to be a member of the House of Bethlehem, Matthew has to pretend that the Bethlehem meant was the town. So, in Matthew, Jesus’s parents came from Bethlehem in Judæa but on returning from Egypt they settled in Nazareth in Galilee. Jesus was born at home in a house in Bethlehem. In Mark, Jesus is simply of Nazareth and Bethlehem is not mentioned. In Luke, the Holy Family lived in Nazareth and went to Bethlehem to be taxed, where Jesus was born in a stable. The Emperor Augustus decreed that “all the world should be taxed”, and each man was to go, with his family, to the city of his fathers. This meant a journey of eighty miles for the poor carpenter and his pregnant wife, and since every family in Judæa had to get to the city of his ancestor of a thousand years earlier, Judæa must have presented a highly interesting spectacle. The most practical government of ancient times, the Roman, is supposed to have ordered this piece of lunacy, through the Governor Cyrenius (Quirinius). But we learn from the historian Josephus that what Cyrenius really did was a much smaller matter, and that it was done in the year 6 AD, or ten years after the death of Herod. Moreover, northern Palestine was not under Cyrenius, but under the independent prince Herod Antipas and the Jews had so little in the way of tax-registers that in the year 66 AD they had to calculate the population from the number of paschal lambs. A papyrus discovered in Egypt in 1905 AD and now kept in the British Museum is an edict dated 104 AD of the Prefect of Egypt, Gaius Vibius Maximus, declaring that a census by households had begun and that everyone away from their normal administrative district had to return to their own “hearths” to register, unless they had a sound reason for Christian Birth Narratives 8 of 56 registering in a town because they had some essential function. Dishonest apologists tell us that this is the same as moving to the district of their ancestors, just as it was supposed to have been in the bible narratives. The whole sense of it was that people who were working away from home had to return home to be counted unless they had some duty that could not be left unattended, when they could register their presence locally. In the bible, Joseph’s “hearth” was supposedly established in Nazareth and he had no reason to go to Bethlehem, some notional ancestral region. The birth arrived, and it was romantic, in the manger of a stable, usually depicted as a cave. The cave at Bethlehem said to be the birthplace of Jesus was, the Christian father Jerome tells us, actually a rock shrine to the god Tammuz (Adonis—Lord) whose symbol was a cross. The Christians took over a Pagan sacred site as they did many times over, and adopted the cave, a common symbol of Pagan religions. Apollo, Cybele, Demeter, Hercules, Hermes, Ion, Mithras and Poseidon were all adored in caves. Hermes and Dionysos were wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in mangers. By introducing the village of Bethlehem, Luke and Matthew connect Jesus as messiah with David the warrior king whose home town this was. There is nothing else in the gospels to associate Jesus with Bethlehem. In Luke 1:26 Nazareth is a city! But Nazareth was probably not even a village—it did not exist until Christianity became the official religion of the Empire in the fourth century AD when Helena, the mother of Constantine, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was horrified to find Nazareth did not exist. She named an obscure site in a suitable location Nazareth to fit the story. Neither Luke nor Matthew refer to the birth story again and indeed it contradicts the main story. Presumably his family or at least his mother would have been aware of all that feting by kings and shepherds, and glory in the heavens, and the reason for it all. Yet later they are continually puzzled and disappointed by Jesus’s behaviour. And why bother trying to establish a divine conception when both refer to Joseph in the main narrative as the father of Jesus. The Ebionites accepted Joseph as the natural father. Jesus himself never claimed to have been born miraculously. He did not once allude to it, though it is hard to see why he should not have done to prove his divinity if, as Christians claim, he was divine. The Virgin Birth was tacked on to Luke and Matthew, years after the event, to prove Jesus’s divinity. and to hype up the new god. Yet now most Christians are outraged if its truth is questioned. The mystical Book of the Revelation of John the Divine does not mention it, though it would be perfect for inclusion in such an allegorical piece. None of Christian Birth Narratives 9 of 56 the Jewish patriarchs were born of virgins and, though older women beyond the menopause had their wombs “opened” to conceive Isaac, Jacob and Samuel, no divine impregnation was suggested. Line of David Saviours had to have royal blood to give them dignity, but they had to have a humble birth to allow them to be identified with the struggling masses. Their unpretentious births in poverty in stables or caves were intended to make a virtue of abject conditions. The genealogy of saviours is not always given in their myths but certainly some other saviours besides Christ were descended from kings and began their life in humble circumstances to suggest the benefits of poverty and humility. Buddha is directly traced through a royal pedigree. His mother was betrothed to a rajah, and her son belonged to the same royal caste as Krishna. The Prophet of Islam, Mohammed, began life humbly and, like Christ, had nowhere to lay his head. A cloak spread on the ground served him for a bed, and a skin filled with date leaves was his pillow. The genealogy of the God Yu of China is traced through a line of princes to a very remote origin, though Yu only became the most prominent Chinese God in popular culture from about 600 AD. His whole life was a lesson of practical humility, and he proclaimed at every step the mantra of Christianity: This is the way. Walk ye in it. The dubious birth narratives of Matthew and Luke each include a genealogy that shows Joseph as the father of Jesus, and trace his lineage back to David, Abraham, and even Adam. The Jewish messiah was to be a son, meaning a descendent, of David. The Old Testament predicted that the messiah was to be of “the seed of David” as the Pharisees are made to remind Jesus in the gospels. So the evangelists made Davidic genealogies—which seems to have been unknown to Jesus when the Pharisees wanted his pedigree—for Joseph. Joseph was the father of Jesus except in one sense—he had not impregnated his wife! The virgin birth narratives kick both these genealogies into touch. The birth stories in the two gospels come from different sources and differ widely but both contradict their central thesis that Jesus’s mother was a virgin by giving a genealogy to show that Joseph was descended from David, an irrelevancy if Joseph had not impregnated his wife. The original idea was obviously to trace Jesus’s lineage through Joseph to David to fulfil messianic prophecy. Then the idea of making Jesus more divine through a virgin birth Christian Birth Narratives 10 of 56 arose and was tacked on spoiling the object of the genealogy. Then they could no longer serve their purpose of showing Jesus as descended from David. That is no problem to Christians, keen to find the most ingenious ways of upholding what they call the “Truth”, and simultaneously proving that, for God, all things are possible. The editors of both gospels see the problem and try to avoid it. For Christians, the line of Mary was sufficient for the Davidic descent, so that both Joseph and Mary were in the line of David. QED! To establish this, though, a cacophany of unlikely things have to be yelled out, and direct evidence such as the Syriac Matthew found in 1892 has to be ignored. This work, confirmed by an ancient citation of it, states unequivocally that “Joseph begat Jesus who is called Christ”, though Mary is mentioned as the betrothed of Joseph. Thomas Boslooper (The Virgin Birth) notes that another Syriac text, describing the appearance of the angel to Joseph, has it announcing, “She shall bear to thee a son”. In Luke, it was done by inserting “as people thought” to show Jesus was not really Joseph’s son and in Matthew by slyly separating Joseph from his son by inserting, after Joseph, “the husband of Mary, of whom was begotten Jesus”. The genealogies of Joseph in Matthew and Luke (Matthew 1:2-17 and Luke 3:23-38) give Joseph different fathers. Did the gospel writers intend to show that Jesus was so remarkable that, not only was God his father but he had two mortal fathers as well, because the two Josephs must have been different men having, in the male line, different grandfathers? Christian commentators try to suggest the two genealogies are not both of Joseph. That in Luke is really Mary’s, even though Luke says it is Joseph’s (Luke 3:23), and Jesus was of the house of David through his mother’s lineage. But if the intention was to imply that Mary was begetting Jesus then the person inserting the story was either ignorant or depended on the ignorance of his readers, for only men could beget according to Jewish convention. In the Syriac Matthew, “Joseph begat Jesus”. Fertilisation of the ovum by the sperm was only discovered in the nineteenth century. Though Genesis 3:15 refers to the seed of the woman, implying that the Jews knew about eggs carried by women. Perhaps some did, but not average people. Jews, like the Greeks, thought the whole human being was present in miniature in the male sperm. The woman was simply the soil for the seed to grow. They wrote of a woman who had no children as a spent field, as infertile or barren. This idea was carried into Christian Europe and held until the Middle ages. Christians had no idea that women had their own seed. This is why Mary nor any other woman could participate in a genealogy. Matthew’s inclusion of four women in his genealogies was for Christian Birth Narratives 11 of 56 other reasons and their presence would have highlighted them to an educated Jew. The reason Christians believe Jesus was in the line of David has little to do with any evidence that he really was the heir to the throne. Though the Jews were assiduous keepers of genealogical tables to enable them to prove their nobility, we have to believe that they kept these records accurately for over a thousand years, through the disruptions of multiple conquests, loss of the leading classes in exile and so on. The habit probably stems, as most things Jewish really do, from the “return” from “exile”. The colonists were keen to establish themselves as the true Israel, and quite different from the locals. They therefore set up their right to the priesthood on hereditary grounds and, at some stage claimed descent from Aaron and Zadok who had become legendary. Thereafter, they freely altered the record to according to the political circumstances. In 1000 years at a reproductive rate of a generation every 25 years there could have been a million million descendants of David, even if each family had only two surviving children. In a small country, these descendants were interbreeding considerably, impying that everyone in Palestine, except for the most recent immigrants, must have had some of the blood of David coursing in their veins. Almost everyone could have traced their lineage to David, given the genealogical tables. Jesus must have had some Davidic blood, had his great ancestor existed, but it is most unlikely that he could have proved he was heir to the throne. He was a waif taken in by the Essenes according to their custom. An excellent reason for him to have been left with them by his mother is that he was illigitimate. Jesus could not have been first in line to the throne of David, even if the order of precedence was known. Christians admit that by any natural standard, Jesus was illigitimate—her husband did not impregnate Mary and Jesus was not the son of her husband. He was therefore not a son of David whether he was the son of God or the common bastard of a Roman soldier. It is certain that Jesus was not a son of David because Jesus himself, according to the synoptic gospels denies it. In Mark 12:35-37 and parallel passages at Matthew 22:42 and Luke 20:41, Jesus pointedly explains that the messiah could not be the son of David. Jesus’s proof that the messiah was not a son or of the line of king David satisfied the attendant crowd. They accepted that a son of David was a man in the mould of David and not necessarily of his stock. The only reason he could have had for making such a reply was that everyone knew he could not fulfil the Davidic criterion of messiahship. Jesus was not a claimant to the throne of Israel by lineage. He was a star, a man whose destiny it was. Son of Christian Birth Narratives 12 of 56 David was a position to be attained or granted by God not one that came by birth. Mark can have had no reason for including any passage in which Jesus seems to deny what the church already accepted unless it was genuine tradition and he felt obliged to put it in this particular spot, and the authors of both Matthew and Luke felt obliged to copy it. Since in Mark, Jesus refutes the idea that he is the son of David, he had no need to provide genealogies that contradicted this teaching of the Christian Christ. The authors of Matthew and Luke reproduced the same refutation of Jesus’s descent from David without noticing that they had done their best to prove it earlier. It is that Hopeless Ghost asleep on the job again. So, though the genealogies were unnecessary from Jesus’s own teaching and from the imposition of God as the actual father, they remained in the gospels. The Davidic descent was a myth the Christians liked. Ask any Christian whether Jesus was a son of David, meaning a descendant of the ancient Jewish king, and they will readily assent that he was. Ignatius (c 100 AD) writing respectively to the Ephesians and to the Trallians that Jesus Christ was conceived by Mary of the seed of David and of the spirit of God and was truly born. Either Mary was of the seed of David or the Holy Ghost was but Joseph was not involved. The apocryphal gospels and Justin Martyr had the same view. How is the view of these early Christians compatible with Jesus’s own refutation of it in the synoptic gospels. Nobody denies that Mark’s gospel at least must have been written by the time of Ignatius, and Matthew and Mark were also in circulation by the time of Justin. So, it seems that the correct tradition in Mark was overlaid by the romantic necessity of having a messiah with proper Davidic credentials. These were provided by the genealogies in the early editions of Matthew and Luke but then the birth narratives were added. The truth that Jesus was illigitimate therefore is rejected in the genealogies then re-admitted in the birth narratives in the Greek convention of having a demi-god conceived by a God. Why then do Christians think that Jesus was the son of David. Since both Matthew and Luke refute their own assertion that Jesus was the son of David by putting in birth stories that show he was not, the idea that Jesus was the son of David must have been an early misconception. It is not surprising. It was the messianic preconception that the messiah was the son of David, and it was the old tradition rather than the truth which prevailed. In Mark, Jesus refuted the idea and, in this gospel, it only reappeared when blind Bartimaeus addressed Jesus as the Nazarenes were leaving Jericho. Luke accepted these as the only two instances but nevertheless included a Christian Birth Narratives 13 of 56 genealogy which purported to prove that Jesus was a son of David. Matthew did the same, and although he mentioned “son of David” ten times, it is mainly as the title chosen by unclean spirits or the blind in addressing Jesus. Jesus did not want to be seen as a messiah in case the authorities should get to know, so his disciples had instructions to silence anyone addressing Jesus with a messianic title. Once Jesus was accepted as the Messiah, he was given messianic features whether he had them in reality or not. The acceptance of Jesus as a son of David by the church was one of the first pious sins of omission of the bishops. Not the apostles, though. Revelation and Acts do not state that Jesus was a son of David. Nor, interestingly enough does John which otherwise was keen on building up the legendary aspects of Jesus Christ. Indeed in John 7:41-44 the dispute among the multitude about the messiah coming from Galilee instead of Bethlehem and of the seed of David refutes both the Davidic origin of Jesus and the myth created by Matthew that he was born in Bethlehem. The only epistles of the apostles to speak of it are Romans 1:3 and 2 Timothy 2:8 where Paul pointedly admits it was his gospel not the gospel. Paul of course, knew of no miraculous births categorically saying in Galatians 4:4 as if to refute any contrary suggestion that Jesus was “born of a woman under the law” (in short, legitimately). Paul, knowing nothing else, was ready to accept messianic convention—the messiah was the son of David. We must conclude that Paul, who knew hardly anything of the real circumstances of the life of Jesus, spread his own gospel that Jesus was of the line of David. The Genealogies Christians are even able to hold to the truth of both genealogies and the virgin birth, yet quite apart from the difficulties with believing a virgin birth, the gospel genealogies differ widely with each other and contradict the Old Testament. If Paul was right in saying, “Christ was descended from David according to the flesh”, Christians have to conclude he meant Mary’s flesh so as not deny the miraculous birth. If Jews allowed a descent via the mother, then the genealogies of Joseph are spurious and superfluous. Joseph is unnecessary to the story, and Mark did not mention him at all. Luke, in his gospel, names forty-one generations from David, to Joseph, though he had previously represented it as being forty-two. Matthew says that from Abraham to David are fourteen generations, but according to his own list there are only thirteen. Then he tells us there are fourteen generations from David to the exile but, according to 1 Chronicles 3, there Christian Birth Narratives 14 of 56 were eighteen. And the names in the lists of Matthew and Luke are so widely different from that found in Chronicles as to defy all logic. From David to Joseph, the two lists only agree twice, the names of Salathiel and Zerubabel alone agree in both lists. Matthew tells us that the son of David, from whom Joseph descended, was Solomon, but Luke says it was Nathan. The next name in Matthew’s list is that of Rehoboam, but the corresponding name in Luke’s list is Mattatha. Matthew’s next name is Abijah, which Luke gives as Menna, while Chronicles supports Matthew and gives it as Abijah. Matthew says Joram begat Uzziah, but Chronicles virtually declares Joram had no such son, although he had a great-great-grandson Uzziah. But Luke says, in effect, there was no such person in the genealogical tree, or family line, as either Joram or Uzziah. Matthew says Josiah begat Jechoniah and his brethren, about the time they were carried away to Babylon. But Chronicles declares that Jechoniah was Jehoiakim’s son, and not Josiah’s, and that Josiah had no such son. We also learn, from 2 Kings 13, that Josiah was killed eleven years before the exile to Babylon, and could not well beget a son after he had been dead a decade. Matthew, after naming twenty-four generations as filling out the line, and making it complete between David and Jacob, concludes with his and “Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary”. Luke, besides making his list fourteen generations more than Matthew’s, declares that Joseph was the son of Heli. So that Joseph either had two fathers, Jacob and Heli, or Matthew or Luke, or both, were glaringly wrong, with all their inspiration by the Holy Ghost. One Christian answer—their excuse for the ineptitude of the Holy Ghost—is that Joseph’s mother married twice, and one line is through Joseph’s natural father, Jacob, while the other is through his step father, Heli. We have to believe, therefore, that a stepfather can “beget” a stepson, and Christians assure us he can. What is true of Joseph is true of Jesus, so that Joseph, merely Jesus’s stepfather, could beget Jesus. Again, Luke says that Salathiel was the son of Neri, but Chronicles says he was the son of Jechoniah. And after Chronicles had registered Zerubabel as the son of Penniah, Matthew and Luke both declare that he was the son of Salathiel. They agree here in contradicting Chronicles, which is the only instance but one of their agreement in the whole list of progenitors from David to Joseph. With this exception they contradict each other all the way through, and in many instances that of Chronicles, too. Such is the harmony in the words of divine inspiration which Christians admire so much. Pious liars need gullible believers. Because Christians liked the idea of a Davidic descent, they had to try to Christian Birth Narratives 15 of 56 explain it in the light of the Virgin Birth, and for long they argued that Luke’s was the genealogy of Mary, Heli being her father, Joseph being Heli’s son-in-law, not his son. We must accept that Jews saw no need to distinguish a son from a son-in-law since Heli is described as begetting Joseph, not Mary. The author of the genealogy was conscious that Jewish women did not beget, and to make her seem to do so would have declared Jesus as fatherless—a bastard. Luke’s genealogy appears in an odd place (Lk 3.23), when Jesus begins his ministry at 30 years of age not at his birth, but the birth narrative of the first two chapters of Luke is in a style and language distinctive from the rest of Luke. It is Greek with a strong flavour of Hebrew as opposed to the normal Greek of the rest. It is as if someone today deliberately wrote in biblical English. Theologians claim it is a deliberate stylistic device to give continuity with the Old Testament. However, the elaborate dating given in Luke at the start of Jesus’s ministry (Lk 3:1) suggests that the original gospel started here and the birth narrative in its peculiar style was added. The genealogy therefore originally came near the start of the gospel, where it would be expected, but associated with Jesus’s baptism on his thirtieth birthday. It shows that Jesus was a king after the fashion of the Pharaohs who were reborn at their thirtieth birthday and, indeed, Essene practice was to consider people mature only at their thirtieth birthday. The Damascus Rule says that the Essenes kept lists of the “Sons of Zadok, the elect of Israel, according to their generations”. These lists will have offered a source for the genealogies of Matthew and Luke. Luke’s genealogy gives Adam as “the son of God” making all men sons or descendants of God, though he missed out the word “son” in each case except the first, as if to suggest they were not literally “sons of”. Adam was made of the dust of the earth, and the gospels recognise that God had the power to raise sons from stones. Why then did God have to make his redeeming son by impregnating a human woman supernaturally, like the Greek gods? Christians might respond that the saviour had to have a human mother to be human but the Virgin is now a goddess, herself immaculately conceived, so how is she human? The gradual accumulation of pious lies has led in Christianity to absurd contradictions like these, yet Christian punters are never detered by the irrational. Mary In Luke, Mary and Elizabeth and Zacharias had remarkable experiences but kept them such a dead secret that Paul and Mark never heard of them! Pious liars always come up with plausible explanations of these anomalies and Christian Birth Narratives 16 of 56 satisfy the alarm of some of the faithful who were beginning to look a little askance. Now, Christianity is such a tissue of lies from end to end, believers believe it because it looks so implausible! A priest named Zacharias had a barren wife, and “an angel of the Lord” appeared and told him that his wife would have a son. This son is to be “great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink”, and then the angel went and said much the same to Mary, except that her son was to be fatherless. Now, clerics avoid bringing to the notice of their readers another passage of the bible, referring to the birth of Samson: And there was a certain man of Zorah… and his wife was barren and bare not. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto the woman, and said unto her: Behold, now thou art barren, and bearest not, but thou shalt conceive and bear a son. Now, therefore, beware, I pray thee, and drink not wine nor strong drink, and eat not any unclean thing; For, lo, thou shalt conceive and bear a son, and no razor shall come on his head, for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb. Judges 13:2-6 Familiar? The angel tells Mary that she will conceive. As she is engaged to be married, this should not be a startling announcement but Mary is troubled and expostulates that she “knows no man”. Mary might have been a little deaf or simple, and misunderstood him to say that she had already conceived, but the oldest Latin manuscript of Luke has not the words, “How can this be? I know no man”. Has somebody, later, interpolated the words? An apocryphal gospel of the second century, considered below, describes Mary as vowed to virginity for life, not engaged to Joseph, and such virgins sometimes observe their vows. It would suggest that the virgin Mary was a type of nun, a female Nazarite consecrated to God, and had a ritual role as a mother. There were more miracles and “these things were noised abroad through all the hill country of Judæa”, by the shepherds as you would expect, and created an enormous sensation, but everybody forgot in a few years. The incarnate God submitted to the delicate operation known as circumcision and there were more miracles. Yet, when this wonderful being, at the age of twelve, showed signs of precocious wisdom, his father and mother “were amazed” (2:48) and apparently as irritated as parents of any naughty boy would be. The story in Luke of the boy Jesus remaining in the temple when his parents spent three days looking for him contains no elements of Nazarene Christian Birth Narratives 17 of 56 tradition, except that Jesus might have been intensively coached by the Essene priesthood. No Jewish boy would have been so rude to his parents as to say: “Why are you looking for me? You ought to know I’d be about God’s business!” Such lack of respect for parents, then or now, is quite un-Jewish. Since Mary and Joseph did not understand this reply, the circus of the nativity must have been nonsense. The composition of this brief episode preceded the nativity as the use of the word “parents” shows. So, despite kings, gifts, shepherds, heavenly hosts, precocious intellect and what have you, Jesus’s mother later on did not know her son had been designated a king. An editor of Luke in 2:19 and 2:51 acknowledges the problem, pretending that Mary kept it to herself. Apparently everybody else forgot all about it all too, and the secret was only let out a hundred years later. Matthew goes so far as to make Mary and her sons think of putting Jesus under restraint as a madman! So Mary definitely had forgotten it all for the duration of the rest of the gospel stories. The final verse (Lk 2:52) of this section indicates that Jesus was himself a Nazarite—he was “in favour with God”, a scribal formula meaning he had been consecrated to God, which was why he was being coached by sages. Prophecy of a Virgin An attempt was made, in Matthew 1:22-23, to justify the virgin birth story by referring to Isaiah 7:14 where is written: Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel. Though Matthew interprets this as a messianic prophecy it is not—it is part of a warning Isaiah is giving regarding events of that time—and indeed it is absurd even in the gospel because Matthew’s angel has just directed Joseph to call the child “Jesus”, not “Immanuel!” Nevertheless, Matthew’s reading of it as a messianic prophecy is the sort of thing that Essene pesharists did. Matthew even uses the pesharist’s formula, “which being interpreted is”. In their books of commentaries, Essenes would take parts of the scriptures and reinterpret them in ways that suited them. That Christians freely did the same indicates their common roots—and they still happily call Jesus “Immanuel” though that was never his name. The word translated “virgin” employed in the Greek version of the Jewish scriptures was “parthenos”, but a reference to the original Hebrew yields the word “almah”. Both “parthenos” and “almah” did not necessarily mean a Christian Birth Narratives 18 of 56 virgin as we understand it, a woman who had never had intercourse. In Greek, it could mean youth, the state of unmarriage, or even a person who is first married. In Hebrew, it could mean, beside the usual meaning, an immature girl who could not conceive because she had not yet started to menstruate. The Hebrew word for “virgin” is “bethulah ” and would surely have been used in Isaiah if “virgin” was the meaning the author intended. Young girls were betrothed to their future husbands until they could legally marry at the age of twelve and a half—menstruation usually started later. A married virgin could therefore conceive—in Joel 1:8 a virgin’s husband is mentioned. Mary was described as betrothed to Joseph implying that she was a minor under the age of twelve and a half—Joseph might have broken the law by having sex with a minor, and pretended he was surprised at the outcome to protect himself. Matthew 1:25 is at pains to refute any such thought by stating that Joseph “knew her not” till she brought forth her first born son—the euphemism “knowing her” meaning having sex with her. In any event, the virgin Mary could have given birth with no miracle involved. The idea of a virgin as a premenstrual girl allows her to have children and still be a virgin. If she were to conceive from her very first ovulation, she would not have menstruated but would be a mother and still a virgin. If she conceived at the first ovulation after the birth, she could be a virgin mother of two children of different ages. Since Jewish girls often married before menstruation, “virgin” mothers were not unusual, explaining the case in Joel 1:8. Mary was a minor who could become Joseph’s wife when she reached the age of twelve and a half. Thus the “virgin” Mary could have given birth. If she did, the truth was misunderstood in the gentile world of the Roman Empire, and indeed beyond, where it was de rigeur not only for gods but also great men to be born of virgins. Ra, Hatshepsut, Amenophis III, Cyrus the Great, Julius Caesar, Pythagoras, Alexander, Augustus and others, were thought to have been born miraculously. Plato was born of Paretonia, begotten of Apollo, not Ariston, his father, according to one authority. Perseus, Apollonius of Tyana, Fu-Hsi, Lao Kium, Zoroaster and Attis all came of virgin mothers according to their believers. Pantheras The earliest gospel written, Mark, has nothing to say about Jesus’s father. Though Jesus is described as a carpenter, his father is nowhere mentioned either as the carpenter or as Joseph. This suggests that, in the earliest tradition, Jesus was a waif or a foundling. The earliest refutation of Jesus is that he was the illigitimate son of a Roman soldier called Pantheras. The Christian Birth Narratives 19 of 56 name Pantheras was found among Roman soldiers. W C B ? Several saviours are sometimes shown as being black, including Jesus Christ. There is more common sense evidence that the Christian saviour was black or dark skinned, than there is of his being the son of a virgin. Though the gospel writers say nothing about Jesus’s appearance, his earliest disciples obviously knew. In the pictures and portraits of Jesus by the early Christians, his complexion is black, but care is taken to show his lips as red, suggesting realism rather than an odd convention. Solomon’s declaration in the Song of Songs, “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem” (Song 1:5), has always been taken to mean Christ, a curious belief unless it stems from a very ancient tradition perhaps going back to Jesus himself. If the belief of the Christians were to come true and Jesus were to return at his second coming as a black man, how would he be received by negro-hating Christians? Would they bow their knee to a black god, asking forgiveness for the grave error of their racialist ways? Or would they decide that he was an imposter and crucify him afresh? According to Origen (185-254 AD) in Contra Celsum, the Pagan philosopher Celsus, who was famous for his arguments against Christianity, claimed in 178 AD that he had heard from a Jew that Jesus’s mother, Mary, had been divorced by her husband, a carpenter, after it had been proved that she was an adultress. She wandered about in shame and bore Jesus in secret. His real father was a soldier named Pantheras, possibly a Moor to judge by the name. Tertullian, in 198 AD, quoted the Toldot Yeshu, where Jesus is several times called Ben Pandera to the same effect. So, Jesus was the son of the Panther, ben Pandera, and so he was known from an early time by the Jews. In the Jewish material, besides Ben Pandera, Jesus is called Ben Stada. In one story, this is a besmirching name of Mary, from a pun on “stada” as meaning a woman who has rejected her husband. Interestingly, this Mary is called a braider or hairdresser, implying a meaning of “magdalene”. Christians always argue that this is an attempt to denigrate (oops) Jesus because “son of a virgin” is “huios parthenou”, in Greek, and “huios pantherou” (son of a panther) is a plain enough pun on it. The presence of the name, Ben Pandera, in the Jewish writings shows that the rumour probably began in Palestine, yet Pandera is not a pun on the Hebrew or Aramaic words for a virgin, so it arose among Greek speakers. If the excuse is true, some Greek speaking Jews must have been laughing at the Christian birth story by punning on the word “parthenou” to get the name “Pandera”. Equally, however, the stories of the virgin birth could be a way of trying to explain that Jesus was called Ben Pandera. There was nothing unusual in Paganism about demi-gods being born of virgins, so there seems no obvious Christian Birth Narratives 20 of 56 reason why the pun should have been invented by Pagans, but that it should have been used by gentile Christians to defend their new god against a true but undesirable rumour seems quite likely. Which is the chicken and which the egg is not evident, but since Matthew all but admits the truth writing about 100 AD, it is rather more likely that the virgin birth narratives were invented to dispel the rumour that Jesus was the bastard son of one Pantheras than that Pantheras was invented to denigrate the birth stories. There must have been a pressing need for them because they spoiled the purpose of the genealogies. With a convenient interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 as a messianic text, though it plainly is not, Matthew was able to justify his invention. Luke’s version is also aimed at refuting the same rumour, so that when an angel appears to Mary to say she will conceive, she immediately replies, with no thought of Joseph to whom she was betrothed: How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? Luke 1:34 The gentile bishops came up with the ruse of changing the Greek name “Pantheros” to “parthenos”, the Greek word for virgin, to explain the defaming story of “the panther”. It is not a mistake that is easy to explain accidentally in Greek. Not only do the “n” and “r” interchange, but also the vowel “e” in Pantheros and Parthenos differ in the Greek. One is epsilon and the other eta. The bishops pretended the misunderstanding was in Hebrew, the name “Pandera” being a Hebrew attempt at pronouncing—“parthenos”— but problems remain, and the change still looks deliberate rather than accidental. Since the birth stories are accepted as late additions to the gospels, Jesus did not have the title, “Son of the Virgin”, until late in the second century of Christianity, and the Pagan pun on the title could not have arisen before, unless it was not a pun but a genuine tradition. The tombstone of a soldier was found in Bingerbrück, Germany, inscribed: Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera of Sidon, aged 62, a soldier of 40 years’ service, of the first cohort of archers, lies here. The first two names are the obligatory Roman names he took when he was granted Roman citizenship. “Abdes” is his own Semitic birth name. “Pantera” is the personal or nick name his friends knew him as. Eventually, in typical fashion, the Christian bishops incorporated a Panthera into the holy family, as the father of Joseph, to have an excuse for the name. “Pantheras” (Greek, “panther”, “leopard”, whence “hunter”) was popular as a personal name of Macedonian soldiers in the armies of the Seleucids. Christian Birth Narratives 21 of 56 Epiphanius (320-403 AD), with no evidence he was willing to quote, cites Origen as saying that “Panther” was the nickname for Jacob (James) the father of Joseph. He took the name as an epithet giving him some dignity, thus explaining the name “Pandera”, but in that case, it implied that Jesus’s ancestry was not Jewish but Macedonian. He was fair and red-headed, after all! Now you have to question the motives or efficiency of God, or the Holy Ghost, one of whose tasks was to ensure the inspiration of the Holy Word. Why was all of this necessary? Why did God make the twelve year old Mary pregnant before she even got married? Or why did the Holy Ghost have to tell the story as if she had been impregnated as a minor, causing all the questions and doubt. She could have married Joseph normally, and God could then have seen that the “Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee”, making her respectably pregnant by the Holy Ghost without any knowledge of Joseph or any impropriety to the outside world. It is not a question that Christians are supposed to think about, but the need for it from the plain fact that the girl was illegally pregnant is obvious. The silence of the gospels over Mary’s condition cannot dispel the doubts about it any thinking person must have. The easy acceptance of the miracle does not gel with the harsh treatment the Jews meted out to promiscuous women, indeed, even victims of male lust. It tells against the Christian myth that this was a family. A Jewish husband would have been outraged, and notionally the adulterous woman could have been stoned to death. Had the girl been raped, then the rapist could have been stoned, but, as today, the suspicion fell upon the victim as encouraging the act. In practice, stoning under the Roman Peace was probably itself illegal, but the social attitude behind it must have remained strong, and it happened as a mob action. Where stoning was impossible, social rejection must have been the usual rersponse. The Essenes had systems of fines and penances, leading to ultimate expulsion from the community, so their attitude might have been more like that of Jesus in the instance in John, where he invited the guiltless to throw the first stone. The crime was dire and frowned upon, but could be dealt with less harshly than death. So, if the scandal is to be accepted as real, then the seduction of the maiden looks more compelling within an Essene community than in Judaism at large. The Essenes famously maintained their numbers by taking in those troubled by the vicissitudes of life, and what could have been more of a vicissitude than being born in scandalous circumstances? Since the perpetual virginity of mother Mary is absurd, what could have Christian Birth Narratives 22 of 56 suggested it other than the need to hide a scandal. Apologists like Geoffrey Ashe (The Virgin ) think this is “inadequate to inspire such a doctrine or secure general assent”. The story was invented a minimum of half a century later, among gentiles not Jews, in a country distant from Palestine, and among bishops who had already secured themselves a following among Godfearing gentiles and Hellenised Jews. Are we to imagine that believers, even then, would accept the scandalous truth when the bishops had a well prepared explanation? These believers, as they are today, are not called sheep for nothing. The lie was perfectly acceptable in a society that expected miraculous conceptions and births of gods and demi-gods. Believers were happy that the new Christian demi-god, Jesus Christ, conformed. Ashe concedes “the logic of the son of God concept” was enough. The miraculous nature of the relationship between the god, his son and the chosen virgin was sufficient. These early believers noticed the parallels with the previous gods and demigods, and virgins that had given birth and remained virgins because they received the same titles and epithets as their illustrious predecessors. What right has a poor Jewish girl to the title Queen of Heaven? The simple fact is that Mary was not the first Queen of Heaven, nor was Jesus the first son of God. These honours were transferred from classical precedents. Ashe accepts that religious fiction was indeed written, but he cannot bring himself to believe that it was written from the outset over the basic events of Christian and Marian belief. But the ultimate truth could uphold the origin of the mythology as not being utter fiction, though at another cost. A suggestion on these pages is that the Essenes had various rituals that have not come fully to light, but can be hazily seen in the New Testamant and Christian practices. One was a rebirth ceremony, one a ritual wedding and one a ritual feeding, the precursor of the Eucharist. We know there were women Essenes, because some Essenes married and the strictness of their practices would demand that they married wives of the same beliefs. We do not know that there were female celibates to match the male ones, but the graves of women have been found at Qumran, and the closely similar Therapeuts, described by Philo, had female celibates in the order. Moreover, women as well as men could be consecrated to God as Nazarites. It seems most unlikely that there were no female Essenes, and to judge from the gospel ceremonies they served ritual roles. Mother Mary was one of these celibate nuns and she served as the ritual mother of Jesus at his rebirth ceremony, a ritual probably associated with Baptism, as it still is. This Mary, therefore had an important relationship of a ceremonial kind with Jesus in the order, but she was not his natural Christian Birth Narratives 23 of 56 mother, indeed could not have been because she was a chaste nun, but was his ritual mother. As a ritual mother, she could remain utterly virginal forever, while having a son. Equally, Jesus could have this ritual mother, but have no recognisable earthly father, but consider himself reborn of God. It is likely that all the Essenes considered themselves reborn as angels, at least from the age of thirty, and therefore directly sons of God. Barabbas was the ritual name of these born-again men. Virgin Mothers Thomas Boslooper, considering the assertion of many Christian critics that other religions had precedents for the miraculous birth of gods and demigods, is quoted by Ashe as saying: It is difficult to find a statement in all the literature of biblical criticism which is more misleading. There is no example so clear of the Christian technique of argument. Come out with the devastating criticism whether it is true or not, and every Christian will automatically believe you. It is the Christian big-lie technique. This “devastating” assertion is true only in the sense that no other miraculous birth precisely matches that of Christ. Few of them are known in more detail than a sentence or two, or a short account at best, so it is easy to claim—with Boslooper—that there are actually no precedents at all. It is a popular Christian apologetic ploy. What does not match in every detail does not match at all! What does match does not match in meaning or interpretation! The central point is that conception in classical mythology was often unusual. The details are irrelevant so long as the character has an unusual introduction to the world that marks him out as special. The degree of restraint or flamboyance in the telling is a cultural matter with no bearing on the peculiarity of the conception. Christianity began opposing sexuality as sinful, so no sexually prurient detail entered into the story, whereas the classical religions were more sexually honest. Christians now, after two millennia of indoctrination over sexuality, think the “tastefulness” of the Christian stories proves them. No justification could be more circular! A man, even if he were thought of as a god, had to be born of a woman, and this could not be concealed, but paternal parentage is never so obvious, being known only to the mother, if anyone. The ancients felt that an offspring of a god, a son of god, should have a purer maternal origin than mortals, and this was evidence of his supernatural or divine origin. So, the Christian Birth Narratives 24 of 56 purity of his maternal parentage required the saviour to be born of a pure woman—a maiden. Hence, saviours often were born of virgins. Pure, holy and chaste virgins, just like Mary, mother of Jesus, gave birth to gods, sons of god and saviours, but often long before her. The Christ had to be a man, so had to be born like a man, but with a father who was God. The age old magical conception was the best that could be invented given the constraints, but Luke is suggestive: The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee. Luke 2:35 Today people would rightly not believe a woman, however virtuous, giving birth to a child and saying she had not had sexual intercourse. In an age of miracles and ignorance of natural law, she was believed with credulity and many maidens claimed that gods fathered their sons. At one time it became so common in Greece that a decree made death the punishment of any woman insulting a god by charging him with fathering her child. The idea of miraculous birth goes back to ancient myths that preceded any direct knowledge of how people were conceived. Birth seemed arbitrary, and primitive ideas of why conception happened involved natural phenomena like wind, sunlight, eating things, and seeing things, and it could be by touch, through the ear, the navel and the eyes. Moreover, in societies of extended families, the identity of the father was not known until taboos, even in primitive societies meant that people sought partners outside the extended family. Another source of the myth was the practice of priests of deflowering virgins, or curing the barrenness of infertile matrons (often the impotence of their husbands) by allowing the woman to sleep in a temple when a god might impregnate her. Details came from the woman’s dreams, because when the ploy was successful, the clues were in dreams, just as they were in the biblical stories. Like Freudian psychoanalysis, to dream of a snake or a swan was to dream of phallic symbols, and the child would be that of any god symbolised in the dream. Olympia, the wife of Philip of Macedon, conceived Alexander while she was sleeping in the temple of Apollo, where she was impregnated by Zeus in the form of a snake. How can a woman be impregnated by a snake or a swan, unless she too is in that form? Ultimately, these are psychological matters, but careless young girls found them useful excuses for the consequences of their adolescent adventures. Christians might smile, but how is Mary different? A man, according to Luke, pretended to be an angel called Gabriel. He was charming and persuasive, and the young girl was naïve and innocent because she was only Christian Birth Narratives 25 of 56 twelve. What is so impossible about this that Christians deny it, substituting something utterly unbelievable, that they then say is proof it is divine? In remote time, the virgin mother of Osiris claimed her son was begotten by the father of all gods. The likeness of this virgin mother, with the divine child in her arms, is commonly shown in old temples in Egypt. Scholars have said that the worship of this virgin mother, with her God-begotten child, prevailed everywhere. Her son of God was shown in effigy, lying in a manger, just as the infant Jesus was afterward at Bethlehem. The worship of this virgin mother and her god is of ancient date as is proved by ancient sculptured figures. In their myths, virgin births were familiar to every Greek. Christians will complain that these virgin births were utterly unnatural, forgetting that all virgin births are! Herakles had a virgin birth. His mother Alcmene (Alcmena) was married, but had vowed to remain chaste until the death of her brothers had been avenged. Zeus had selected her as the mother of a mortal hero he needed to help him win a battle against the giants. Alcmene was still a virgin [Note] when Zeus impregnated her. Zeus’s heavenly spouse, Hera, was against the child and opposed him in every way she could. Eventually she promised Zeus that she would desist if the young demi-god would achieve twelve great works. In the end, the wife of Herakles poisoned him, and he made a funeral pyre and got a shepherd to ignite it. A cloud came down from heaven, and the disciples of Herakles saw him rise from the summit of the pyre physically in the cloud to heaven. Hundreds of years later, the virgin-born Saviour from Nazareth was “taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight” from the summit of a hill (Acts 1:9). Note Homer was regarded as sacred or almost sacred. Just as people take inspiration from the bible, the Greek poets and playwrights took their inspiration from him. Nowadays, Greek myths are collected from everywhere and all are included in the corpus. It would be like including the story of every biblical novel and epic film in the corpus of biblical mythology. So, there are often different versions because they came from different authors each of whom had their own purpose in changing the story, and from different regions because people were always glad to claim a god or demi-god as their own just as Christians claim various saints. Anyway, that really is not your problem, it is just that your source is pretty narrow in its scope. If you go to any library or good bookshop, you should find a book about Greek myths that will give you the story. I have for example a book called, in the UK, Who’s Who in Classical Mythology, by M Grant and J Hazel which is a Teach Yourself book published in the US by David McKay and Co Inc, 750 Third Avenue NY. It explains that Alcmene refused to sleep with Amphitryon until he had avenged her brothers. When this had been accomplished Zeus appeared to the beautiful and wise Alcmene looking like her husband and Christian Birth Narratives 26 of 56 impregnated her. Soon after, Amphitryon himself arrived and was disappointed by his tired reception, whereupon his wife explained why she was cool about his seeming vigour. Told what had happened by his wife, he sought the explanation from the prophet Tiresias, who said Zeus had cuckolded him, because he had chosen Alcmene as the mother of the valiant mortal who would save the gods the bother of fighting the Giants. Amphitryon, fearful of divine jealousy, resolved never to have intercourse again with his wife, who went on then to have the twins from her only two occasions of sexual dalliance. The Greek Myths by Robert Graves is another good source. Have several sources, to get some variants. In one variant, Amphitryon tried to burn Alcmene to death for her infidelity, but Zeus saved her with a rainstorm. It is all ultimately solar mythology. Alcmene is the moon, Zeus the sky and Heracles the sun. According to Hesiod, the single night that Zeus slept with Alcmene the God gave the length of three by having Helios unyoke the chariot of the sun and rest for a day! So the period of conception of the sun is three nights! According to Chinese mythology there were two beings—Tien-Chu and Shang-Ti—worshipped in that country as gods (Lords of Heaven) in the Chou dynasty more than twenty five hundred years ago, born of virgins who knew no man. Shang-Ti also was the father of the first emperor of the Chou dynasty, impreganting the mortal woman when she stepped on his footprint. Maia, mother of Buddha, Semele, mother of Dionysos, and Persephone, mother of Zagreus, Shing-Moo, mother of Fu-Hsi all had miraculous confinements and births, as did Io, called in Æschylus, the chaste virgin, whose son was the son of god. The Latin inscription “Partura Virginis”, “the virgin about to bring forth”, has been found on Pagan temples in Celtic countries. Mayence was, it is said, the virgin-mother of the god-sired Esus of the Druids. In images more than two thousand years old, she is depicted enveloped in light, with a crown of twelve stars upon her head, exactly the same as the apocalyptic figure of the Christian Book of Revelation. She is also shown with her foot on the head of a serpent. Apologists say that the classical stories are not virgin births like Mary’s. Ashe declaims that “male sexuality is always present” in Pagan birth narratives. He knows it was not in the Christian case. Why? Because he believes it was not! That’s faith for you! The Virgin Birth of Christ was without sex, without physical agony. But why is he so certain Mary’s was? The original Pagan idea was that the mortal girl should have been a virgin before she conceived, like Alcmene, not that she remained a virgin after she had given birth! Besides normal Christian Birth Narratives 27 of 56 conception ordinary birth was also too ignominious for a god. It had to be spotless, or immaculate. Jesus Christ in an apocryphal gospel, like Krishna was born through his mother’s side, rather than the impure route. Though not in the canonical works, some of the Christian fathers endorsed this story. And, in some cases, the mother, like the mother of Krishna, was still held to be a virgin, even after she had given birth to other children—a greater miracle than the biblical version, though deprecated by Christians. Yet even this parallels Mary, who remained a virgin even though she had given birth to Jesus and his brothers and sisters. Christians, for no good reason, believe that Mary was perpetually a virgin, but again this is just like important Pagan goddesses. However, what goddesses can do, human women cannot. No woman can physically give birth while remaining a virgin—her hymen remaining intact—even if she had managed to conceive somehow while remaining one. Even if a fatherless conception is possible, a birth in which the woman remains a virgin is not, unless we are to admit Caesarian sections, like Krishna’s, into the reckoning. If they are admitted, then it is another miracle that Mary survived what was possible but dangerous until recently, but such a birth was not miraculous. Because of the danger to the mother, the Romans usually permitted it only on dead women, to save the foetus in the last four weeks of a pregnancy. None of this is available for discussion among Christians. They know Mary was a perpetual virgin, and Pallas Athene was not, despite her myth. Many ancient goddesses were perpetual virgins such as Athene, Isis and Cybele. Apologists claim these are only myths or metaphors! When Philo speaks of “God-begotten children” and “virgin mothers”, apologists dismiss it too as metaphor. Could the whole of the Christian gospels be just metaphor? Askance looks of hatred and incomprehension. Ashe concedes that the ancient goddesses were indeed virgins and mothers, but that is to “leave humanity behind”, meaning they are myths about supernatural beings! There is some subtle difference between a Catholic praying to Mary and a Canaanite praying to Anath, so at least Christians think, though what it is is impossible for the outside observer to see. In fact, it is different for no other reason than that they believe it is. The doctrine of immaculate conception is ancient but the manner of the holy conception was different in different countries. Fu-Hsi (Fo-hi), the legendary founder of China, was conceived when his mother ate a flower she found while bathing. His gestation period was twelve years. His successor was also miraculously conceived. Christians will bleat that being conceived by eating a flower is not the same as being overshadowed by the Holy Ghost. Quite so! It is utterly different in the detail, but the detail is not what is important in these stories. It is the theme of a miraculous—particularly Christian Birth Narratives 28 of 56 fatherless—conception that is the same. It is without sex and without physical agony despite the enormous brain Fu-Hsi must have developed while twelve years in the womb. No Christian can admit it as equivalent, though, to the Christian birth stories. It is actually too miraculous. When Luke says “the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee”, there is a broad hint of sexuality. Something “kind of” sexual happened! But a flower? Don’t be silly! When pushed on this “overshadowing”, the Christian apologist can retreat again. Whatever it implies, a spirit cannot enjoy normal sex with a material woman. But then neither can a flower. If these stories were meant to be true in any sense, it could only have been that the desperate mother made some such excuse for her condition. Mary was penetrated in her excuse by the Holy Spirit, or the archangel Gabriel, if he is different—Gabriel simply means “man of God”. Gabriel is the messenger of God, so he equates with Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods but who was also a phallic god. Gabriel therefore brought more than messages to Mary. Perhaps, like saintly Christian nuns, she had fantasised it in her adolescent dreams. S Theresa of Avila dreamed she was penetrated by Christ. The mother of Fu-Hsi dreamed she had eaten a water lily. In reality, such stories meant she had dallied with a human seducer but was too young to understand what he was up to, what she had done, or what the risks were. Zoroaster was immaculately conceived by a ray from the Divine Reason or Word. Herodotus also explained that such conceptions occurred by way of a ray of light and according to Plutarch’s book on Isis and Osiris it entered through the ear. Tertullian confirms it was a ray of light. Thus medieval pictures of Mary at the moment of conception show a ray of light entering her ear. But the idea of being “overshadowed by the Holy Ghost” seems to have been most current. God, the father of a god was believed to “overshadow” the mother of a god, to impregnate her. In 550 BC, Pythias, the mother of Pythagoras, conceived by a spectre or ghost of the god Apollo, the sun god. Does the ghost of the sun god differ in principle from the Christian Holy Ghost? A Chinese sect worshiped a saviour known as Xaca, who was conceived of his mother, Maia, by a white elephant, which she saw in her sleep, and for greater purity, she brought him forth from one of her sides. Tamerlane’s mother conceived having had sexual intercourse with the god of Day. The mother of Ghengis Khan, being too modest to claim that she was the mother of the son of God, said only that he was the son of the sun. Juno of Rome also grew pregnant at the touch of a flower to give birth to Mars. No impregnation could have been purer. So the most immaculate Christian Birth Narratives 29 of 56 conception of all was that of the god of War! If it sounds absurd, how is it more senseless than conception by a ghost? Botany has shown that, at least, a flower can fertilise other flowers but no science has yet investigated the virility of ghosts. The Greek Juno, Hera, was immaculately impregnated by the wind to give birth to Vulcan. Here is a close parallel indeed for the word habitually translated as spirit or ghost in the scriptures and continued into the Greek of the New Testament really means breath or wind! So literally the virgin Mary was impregnated by the wind just like Hera. Regarding the observations of G Higgins on Juno, Andreas Ardus writes by email to correct the citation, and offer the suggestions which follow: The Goddess Februa, or Februata Juno, became the Purificata Virgo Maria. The old Romans celebrated this festival in precisely the same way as the moderns—by processions with wax lights, and so on, and on the same day, 2 February. The author of the Perennial Calendar observes, that it is a remarkable coincidence that the festival of the miraculous conception of Juno Jugalis, the blessed Virgin, the Queen of Heaven, should fall on the very same day the modern Romans have fixed the festival of the conception of the blessed Virgin Mary. Being merely a continuation of an ancient festival, there is nothing remarkable in it. G Higgins, Anacalypsis Andreas Ardus also notes: This festival of the Purification of the Virgin corresponds with the old Roman festival of Juno Februata (purified) which was held in the last month (February) of the Roman year, and which included a candle procession of Ceres searching for Proserpine. ECarpenter, Pagan and Christian Creeds—their Origin and Meaning Oskar Seyffert says Juno was known under many names as the goddess of nuptials, and the name Iuga (Yoke) is one of them. He gives no feast day for her but he says the calends were a bad day for marriage, one reason perhaps why the festival was on 2 February, another being that the first was devoted to Juno Sospita, the national goddess. 2 February is actually the date of the “Presentation of the Lord” in the Catholic Calendar, celebrating when the infant Jesus was presented in the temple, and Mary was purified (Lk 2:22). This seems to be the real link between Juno and Mary, Godfrey Higgins was suggesting. It was not the conception but the purification of the virgin that was celebrated on this date. William Woods (A History of the Devil ) confirms that 2 February was the Roman day of purification. Since the Church adopted 25 December as the birth date of Christ, in Mosaic law, 41 days later would have been Mary’s date of purification, 4 February. It fell so close to the official Roman festival on 2 February, that was the day chosen. Christian Birth Narratives 30 of 56 The second century Stoic, Aelianus, in De Natura Animalium, describes what seems to have been a version of the virgin birth of Christ. He says in Herod’s reign a Judaean maid had made love to a serpent, become pregnant and fathered the son of a god. At the time, Asklepios of Epidauros was well known as fathering many a demi-god to matrons who made the appropriate sacrifices and slept overnight in the sanctuary. She would dream that Asklepios appeared to her as a serpent, and if she later had a child, she was sure it was the offspring of the god. Augustus was called “Divus ”, it is said, because his mother conceived him in the temple of Apollo, the god appearing to her as a serpent. Julius Caesar too was immaculately conceived, being the son of the beautiful virgin Cronis Celestine and begotten by the Father of all Gods, Jupiter. Both Buddha and Krishna, of India, were immaculately conceived. The mother of Krishna was overshadowed by the supreme God, Brahma, and the Holy Ghost was Naraan. Krishna’s mother had given birth seven times previously but remained a virgin. Philostratus, the biographer of Apollonius of Cappadocia cites his source Damis as saying the virgin mother of Apollonius—the contemporary and rival saviour of Jesus Christ—gave him birth by being overshadowed by the god, Proteus. Several of the virgin mothers of gods and great men go ten months between conception and delivery. The tradition of the miraculous conceptions of gods, sons of gods, saviours and messiahs was prevalent in the world from ancient times on, beginning long before the mother of Jesus was overshadowed by the ghostly representative of the Most High. The belief in immaculate conception extended to every nation in the world. The furtive pregnancy of young women by a god is a recurring theme in Greek mythology. Dishonest Christians will insist their own fantasy is unique, but it is no more unique than any other. Both the prevalence and antiquity of the idea of divine conception among the heathen is conceded by earlier Christian writers in their arguments from precedents of the divinity of Christ. S Augustine, Origen and Lactanius tried to persuade us of the immaculate virginity of the mother of Jesus Christ by the example of similar Pagan events. They conceded that the doctrine of divine conception was long anterior to Christ and not unique in his case. In Luke, the birth of John the Baptist is no less miraculous than that of Jesus. John’s mother is an old woman, Elizabeth, and his father is an old priest, Zachariah, who complains that he is past it! Yet John is conceived and born six months before Jesus, according to Christians. So, an impotent old man and a barren old woman have a son. Are we to assume that this was Christian Birth Narratives 31 of 56 old Zachariah suddenly became a stud again, once his old dear had turned into Liz Hurley? Objectively, this is a better miracle because the factors of age and impotency preclude pregnancy utterly. Presumably Elizabeth was not a virgin, so this was not a virgin birth, but that is often not the point—it is the miraculous conception. Perpetual Virginity and the Holy Family From as early as the second century, Christians took Mary to be, like the Pagan goddesses, a perpetual virgin, and so, rejecting any other of Mary’s possible confinements as supernatural ones, she must have remained as chaste as a pious nun, once Jesus had been born. S Jerome insisted on this article of dogma. Curious, then, that the leader of the Jerusalem Church was James the Just, described by Josephus as “the brother of Christ”. Matthew 1:24-25 implies that Joseph had sexual relations with Mary once she had given birth to Jesus. In Luke 2:7, Jesus is described as Mary’s “first-born”, implying she had others. All four gospels speak of brothers of Jesus, and two mention sisters. The direct and simple interpretation is that Jesus had a large family of brothers and sisters, children of his own mother, Mary, and the Christians in the first century accepted it as so. Catholics, who still believe the perpetual virginity tale, say the “brothers and sisters” of Jesus were really cousins, indicating more incompetence by the Holy Guardian of the Word, and that the Jews were indifferent to proper family relations. Christians delight in finding excuses for the lapses of the Holy Ghost, but the frequency of the need for it illustrates the immense credulity of the believer. Why is God, or His spiritual agent, so incompetent at putting over the message of salvation? The most cunning excuse invented by professional Christians is that God made it hard to believe to test the believer’s faith! Thus faith becomes synonymous with foolishness. Joseph could have been an elderly man who had married before and had several children by earlier wives. Thus, the brothers and sisters of Jesus were his half brothers and half sisters. The word used for brother is “adelphos” usually meaning a blood brother, but the Septuagint uses “adelphos” for other relationships like that of Lot and Abraham (Gen 14:14,16), Jacob and Laban (Gen 29:12.15) and 1 Chronicles 23:22 where it means cousin. Moreover, the assignment of Mary to the care of John (Jn 19:25-27) suggests that Mary had no other family. The brothers of Christ in Mark are James, Joses, Jude and Simon, but none of his sisters are named, perhaps because they were all called Mary! The Jude who supposedly wrote the epistle called himself the brother of James but “a slave of Jesus Christ”. He does not sound like a brother of Jesus Christian Birth Narratives 32 of 56 Christ, even though he is a brother of James. The Essenes were a brotherhood but they had ranks, and the lower ranks were servants, or slaves, of the higher ones, explaining this usage. Jesus was of the highest rank among the Essenes, but had, in the view of his followers gone on to an even higher status in opening the gates of God’s kingdom. Everyone therefore was a slave to him. Followers of deities were their slaves from the earliest times in Sumer. Jude ranked himself below Jesus but level with James. In fact, Jude’s letter is a later pseudepigraph, but shows that the Essene terminology was still in use over a hundred years after the crucifixion, and continued in use into modern Christianity. It is again something that Christians have to deny since it shows that Jesus did not bring an original revelation. He was a part of the Essene brotherhood. Mary, Joseph and the Holy Family Two men, James and Joses, appear in Mark 15:40 with a Mary: And also women were watching from a distance, among whom also was Mary Magdalene, also Mary the mother of James the less, and of Joses, and Salome. Mark 15:40 Are these part of Jesus’s family, or is she the “other Mary”? And there was Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre. Matthew 27:61 In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. Matthew 28:1 And is she the Mary described as “mother of Joses” or “the mother of James” or “of James”? And Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses beheld where he was Mark 15:47 laid. And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint Mark 16:1 him. Among which was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Christian Birth Narratives 33 of 56 Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s children. Matthew 27:56 It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles. Luke 24:10 And who is who in this passage in John? Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. John 19:25 Is this four women or three? Is Mary of Cleophas (or Clopas) the sister of Mary his mother? Here “the wife” is inserted by pious translators before “of Cleophas”, whereas in the previous cases above, “the mother” is inserted before “of James”. So, the natural reading of it becomes that Mary the mother of Christ had a sister, also called Mary, who was the wife of Cleophas. If this sister of the Virgin Mary were the mother of James and so on, then they were Jesus’s cousins, as the Catholics always maintained. But could Mary the Virgin have had a blood sister also called Mary? It has to be accepted as possible, but God’s agent is again doing a terrible job of arranging the story to be understandable because it seems so unlikely. If the Inept Ghost arranges for brothers-in-law to be called brothers, then sistersin-law can be called sisters, and then this Mary would be the sister-in-law of the Virgin, and Cleophas is possibly her brother—who married another Mary (the other Mary)—and Heli was their father. If Joseph joined this family as an apprentice, he would have been taken as an adopted son of Heli, so he too could have been listed as a son of Heli. Geoffrey Ashe surmises that Joseph eventually married a Mary, one of Heli’s daughters. When Heli died, his son, Cleophas, became the head of the family, continuing to employ Joseph. The brood of children of Cleophas grew up with the solitary son of Joseph and Mary, so that they all seemed to be brothers and sisters to their friends and neighbours. So it is that Ashe ingeniously explains away the extended family of Jesus in the gospel accounts, but Joseph remains a cipher, less significant than Cleophas in this scheme. Since we are speculating as hard as we can, the “other Mary” could have been Joseph’s sister and still been the sister-in-law of Mary. Cleophas was therefore married to Joseph’s sister, or perhaps Cleophas was Joseph’s blood brother, taking in the young widow when Joseph died young. These reconstructions might be plausible, the main criterion of Christian “history”, and it seems more plausible in Judaism that a brother would take into his family his brother’s widow and child than that a brother-in-law would, but Christian Birth Narratives 34 of 56 the figure of Joseph never gets any clearer. He has to die young leaving the young girl a widow, or unmentionable is that he was feckless and had only one son by Mary because he left her destitute, perhaps before they were even married, being only betrothed, the girl being a minor. Mary the Virgin then depended on her sister’s husband or Joseph’s brother to support her. Christians do not want to hear that. Another excuse could be that Joseph was an elderly man with several children including a daughter, Mary, the “other Mary”. Perhaps this old man took in the poor naïve girl who had been ravaged by a Roman soldier called Pantherus—a Moor from north Africa. Joseph legitimised the “adoption” by betrothing the girl, and she and her son were brought up in this old man’s large family. When he died many years later, his own son, Jacob (James), grandson of Joseph’s father, Jacob, according to one of the genealogies, it being a social custom to name eldest sons after their grandfather, became head of the family. Jesus hated Romans for the treatment meted out to himself and his mother, becoming a leader of a rebel band and dying on the cross. Fine for Christians except for the end of it. Ashe boasts that even if the virgin birth doctrine is nonsense his reconstruction of Mary’s family relations is an “unsuspected answer”, “implicit in the record”. Yet to get the unsuspected answer the “Mary of Cleophas” has to have “wife” supplied by the reader for it to mean anything. Why then do we not have a “Mary wife of James”, supplying “wife” in these cases instead of “mother”? The words are missing but reconstructions depend on them. Arbitrary insertions become gospel truth, and then “history” is rewritten by pious liars on their basis. Whether Ashe’s reconstruction is valid or not, the great historian convinces himself that it is, and so is blind to its omissions. There is something about the myth of Christ that taints otherwise honest people, turning them into liars and confidence tricksters. A Brotherhood? It is an entertaining game, reconstructing the bits of the story the Holy Ghost forgot to clarify, but where does it get us? Such reconstructions are meaningless when there is nothing to distinguish them. All are plausible but desperate attempts to keep the idea of a Holy Family, maintaining as much as possible of the gospels’ persistence that Jesus had brothers and sisters, yet had to be an only child if the virginity of Mary was perpetual. The criterion of parsimony demands the simplest explanation of the central historical facts set in the proper historical context. All of it is better explained by rejecting the invisible holy family as a Christian Birth Narratives 35 of 56 construction of the early Church, and accepting that Jesus was a member of an apocalyptic fraternity with an associated sorority, and one that has undoubted and extensive similarities with Christianity. The James the Less, son of Mary (Mk 15:40) is listed as an apostle. The epithet will signify rank in the brotherhood. Another James had a higher rank. If it is James the son of Zebedee, then James the Less became the leader of the Jerusalem Church. The last shall be first! James the Less also seems to be the son of Alphaeus, a problem solved by equating Alphaeus with Cleophas, both being different Greek attempts to translate Halpai or Chalpai, according to the degree of gutterality of the “h”. Chalpai is a form of the name Caleb (Chalubai), who was, with Joshua, the only two of twelve spies, each standing for a tribe, sent into Canaan to bring good news back about the prospects. Caleb stood for the tribe of Judah. God, therefore, allowed only these two to cross into the Promised Land. Jesus identifies with Joshua, so Chalpai/Cleopas seems to be another title in the Essene setup, their idea of entry into God’s kingdom being modelled on the original entry into the Promised Land. If the ceremony of inauguration of an Essene required a rebirth, then each Essene had a ritual mother. It begins to look as if these ritual mothers were called Mary. The Book of James, later called the Protevangelium, written in the second century but showing signs of an Essene original, offers yet another plot. It says Mary was the daughter of a wealthy but previously childless couple. Told by an angel she would give birth, the woman, Anna, resolved to consecrate the child to god. It is a copy of the mother of Samuel, also called Hannah, doing the same (1 Sam 1). The child was therefore a Nazarite! The story says Mary became a temple maiden, living in the temple precinct, and ministered to by angels. The High Priest, Zachariah, eventually entrusted the adolescent Mary to the guardianship of Joseph, an elderly carpenter, who already had sons. Mary remained in the service of the temple and was spinning thread (suggesting the word “magdalene” meaning braider!) when the angel Gabriel brought her his news. Joseph the guardian was suspected of illegal seduction, but the accusation passed by and Mary thereafter remained a virgin. Here, then, is yet another version of Jesus’s brothers, but Mary’s father is named as Joachim, not Heli. The great historian and apologist, Geoffrey Ashe, tells us “it is not history” and has “little genuine tradition” behind it. He knows the author was ignorant of the setting, but for no other reason that he believes the gospel accounts rather than this one. That is not good historical methodoloy. The people in the Protevangelium were members of a village community of “Israel”, in which they were all close neighbours. Moreover, the Jerusalem temple did not employ young virgins! Ashe thinks it comical to imagine the small girl skipping about the feet of the armies of workmen employed by Christian Birth Narratives 36 of 56 Herod who was rebuilding the temple at this time. So, the author was ignorant. Unless, that is, it is Christian apologists who are ignorant. Ashe knew about the Dead Sea Scrolls, though it did not dent his prejuduces. The Essenes called themselves “Israel”, as opposed to Jews generally who were “All Israel”. The distinction between them was righteousness. Only the Essenes were, and that is why they alone were the true Israel. So, James, if he was the author of the Protevangelium, was quite plainly and characteristically describing an Essene community. They, above all Jews, kept themselves apart from All Israel when they could, although they were practical enough to have a book of rules, the Damascus Document, for those who had no choice but to meet the impure and unrighteous in their everyday business. They preferred to live, like the modern day Amish, in their own “camps” or villages separated from the villages of other Jews, and those who lived in cities, like Jerusalem, had their own houses in their own Essene quarter, where intercourse with their impious neighbours would be minimised. Thus they were clearly identifiable with the community described in the Protevangelium. What Ashe thinks utterly proves the author’s ignorance is that Mary was a temple maiden. Essenes rejected the built temple, but considered their own congregation as a living temple. They themselves were in transit between heaven and earth and so were embryonic angels. Anyone not aware of the Essenes, or not wanting to admit it if they were, would have read the references to the temple and angels as being actual, and not the product of a particular understanding. Gentile Christians quickly wanted their belief to seem to be a unique revelation, and so they expunged everything obvious about the Essenes. They never appeared in the New Testament for example, and here Mary was depicted as a maiden brought up in the Jerusalem temple. It rather convincingly shows that the community were indeed Essenes because of the way they thought of themselves as a living temple. The prejudices of the great historian, and Christian apologists in general are inexcusable. They believe the gospels are God-given, with no proof other than what they have always been led to understand, and that therefore suffices. It does not suffice for anyone who is properly scholarly. Christians cannot be scholarly and simply believe their childish fairy stories with no conclusive proof they should have the respect they give them. It does not matter that their parents believed it and so do millions of their friends. They all suffer from the same lack of discernment. They just believe what they are told. No historian could make such cavalier assessments of competing texts. The fact that the texts they prefer are religious texts is an excellent reason for treating them with suspicion. People will give them excessive credence simply because they have been accepted as authoritative in the past, Christian Birth Narratives 37 of 56 irrespective of their validity. Once the canon of acceptable books had been decided by the Church, other books that were historically more valid, were forgotten, or even deliberately destroyed in the Church’s timeless war against unorthodoxy and heresy. So it is that a book like the Protevangelium, long ignored, might contain genuine tradition quite contrary to the beliefs of the dogmatised. In this book, Joseph is not the husband of Mary but her guardian. The reason is given—she has been devoted to God as a life long Nazarite vowed to perpetual virginity, and could not marry, just as modern Catholic nuns cannot without breaking their vows. She was seduced by a charmer pretending to be Gabriel, or by her own guardian, betraying his trust, or by one of his sons, or by a Roman soldier called Pantherus, to consider the various options open, and gave birth to an illicit child. It might well have been that he too was consecrated to God as a Nazarite and an Essene, becoming a great but unrecognized Jewish martyr, and gentile god. Gabriel is not described as appearing to the girl at Nazareth, but contrary to the views of the apologists, that is a point in its favour, for Nazareth seems to be another Christian fiction. She is, though, described as would a Nazarite, a much more likely origin of the description Nazarene than Nazareth is. That Mary was vowed to chastity also explains her question to the angel, “How shall this be?” It is typical of apologists that Ashe asks, “How is it that she married if she had a vow of virginity?” When Christ enters, all reason departs. The different story offered simply does not register in their consciousness. The evidence mounts up that the girl was seduced contrary to her vow of chastity. Mysteriously getting pregnant was itself a scandal, as it generally has been ever since, and the Church found it convenient for more reasons than one to hide it as a miraculous conception. The putative marriage was to legitimise what seemed illigitimate in fact. But the truth might be the idea offered here, that the girl was a ritual mother, and no scandal occurred, merely a misunderstanding that could not be righted without the Church having to admit it had emerged from an older Church—the yahad or congregation of the Essenes. In summary, Joseph is a cipher. His son is homeless and owns nothing but a coat. His wife had to be left to someone else’s care when the son died, yet Jesus had brothers. This is not a description of a family. The Essenes owned nothing except their clothes. Yet everyone had a means of support from the communal purse, and everyone had somewhere to stay in the communal houses. Acts is utterly clear that the first Christians lived in the same way, and it was a crime to violate the rules of poverty. The Holy Family was a brotherhood! Christian Birth Narratives 38 of 56 The Magi and the Star of Bethlehem As soon as god-begotten saviours were born, they were often visited by wise men—called in the apocryphal Christian gospels Magi, Persian priests. Magi, magic and magician are derivations from the same root, all suggesting a wisdom handed down by the gods. When the fame of Pythagoras (600 BC) reached Miletas and neighboring cities, their wise men came to visit him. In the Anacalypsis, Magi came from the East to offer gifts at Socrates’ birth, bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh, the very same offerings given to Christ. Gold, frankincense and myrrh were traditionally offered as gifts to the sun in Persia more than two and a half thousand years ago, and in Arabia about the same time. Zoroaster of Persia (700 BC), says he also was visited by Magi at his earthly advent. Matthew tells us of a miraculous star bringing from the east to Judæa three wise men bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. We have seen his star in the east, and have come to worship him. Mt 2:1 Details of now well known gospel traditions given by early writers in respect of the birth narratives show that they were not known in the same way as they emerged. This Christian Star story makes its first appearance about the year 119 AD in Rome and, curiously enough, three wise men had in 66 AD been brought to Rome from the east to worship the emperor! Moreover, a precursor of the story of Matthew’s travelling star occurs in Virgil (60 BC) where a star guides Æneas westward from Troy. Ignatius of Antioch in a letter of about 110 AD describes the star which appeared at the birth of Jesus: A star shone in heaven brighter than all the stars. Its light was indescribable and its novelty caused amazement. The rest of the stars, along with the sun and the moon, formed a ring around it, yet it outshone them all. This description sounds like a possible supernova, and the description in Revelation 12, if that is the same event, sounds more like a spectacular comet sweeping across the sky towards the sun rising in Virgo. Supposed astronomers have made a publishing industry latterly out of identifying the star of Bethlehem without arriving at anything conclusive. Though they call themselves scientists, all they really have is their own speculation to offer irrespective of the historical evidence that they seem uninterested in, depending simply on the gospels alone. Really most of them are Christian Christian Birth Narratives 39 of 56 apologists trying again to get bogus historical evidence for the gospel events. Apologists have stupidly suggested that the star was a meteorite, even though they move at huge speed and burn out in seconds. For hundreds of years, astrology and meteorology had been used for predicting the future in Babylon and Persia, and even quite trivial celestial events had meaning, including the sound of thunder. Conjunctions of stars, and their relations to the moon, and the zodiac were common enough events, and the supposed star need not have been a supernova, or any complex meeting of the stars in the sky, even if the star described meant anything like this at all. It was a misunderstanding or deliberate dramatisation of the messianic title, “The Star”! These wise men, led by a star, which nobody sees but themselves and which moves in such a way as to guide them across country, arrive at Jerusalem and lose the scent. The divine guidance then acts in a way which certainly perplexes the mere human mind. The sages go and tell King Herod that a new “King of the Jews” has been born somewhere and Herod, in a fury, and believing the statement with childish credulity, orders the murder of all the children in Bethlehem and the entire region under the age of two and a half years. The little Almighty is taken, presumably on donkey-back, hundreds of miles across the desert, to get out of the way, and let the innocents suffer murder. Miracles and apparitions crowd the narrative but the simple miracle of changing the king’s heart and sparing the children does not occurs to God, or his chroniclers. An apparent absurdity in Matthew’s story, is that the wise men followed the star in the east, when they were coming from the east. Unless they circumnavigated the world or walked backwards so that they pretended they were travelling east because that was the way they faced, they must have been travelling westward, which would place the star to their backs. The tale of the Magi reads like fairy tale but note, Matthew does not say the wise men followed the star but simply that they had “seen his star in the east”. He writes it was his star not just a star or even the star, suggesting a astrological or prophetic meaning—it could still contain genuine Nazarene tradition. The stars have a clear role at the births of several of the saviours and to mark important events in their subsequent history. The ancients thought the arrival of gods and great people would be announced by a star. A star figured either before or at the birth of Abraham, Caesar, Pythagoras, Yu and Krishna. Zoroaster, about 1000 BC, prophetically announced to “the wise men” of that country that a saviour would be born, “attended by a star at noonday”. Simlarly when Nared had examined the stars, having heard of Christian Birth Narratives 40 of 56 Krishna’s fame, he declared him to be from God—the Son of God. The Roman Calcidius speaks of a wonderful star, presaging the descent of a God amongst men. A star foretold of the birth of the Roman Julius Caesar. The Chinese God Yu was not only heralded by a star, but conceived and brought to mortal birth by a star. All nations once believed that the planetary bodies or their inhabitants controlled the affairs of men, and even their births. That is astrology which still holds sway over many gullible people. Early people thought a star was alive, because it appeared to move, and acted as though controlled by a living spirit. In Job 38:9, the morning stars join in a chorus and sing together. Pliny in his Natural History records that the people of Rome fancied they saw a man they took for a god in a star or comet. The apocryphal book of Seth relates that a star descended from heaven and lighted on a mountain, in the midst of which a divine child was seen bearing a cross. Jews, Pagans and Christian could have had no idea that stars were immensely bigger than the earth and even the nearest was untold millions of miles away and could hardly hop hither and thither as international guides. The practice of calculating destinies by the stars had long been popular in the East at the time of Christ’s birth and, indeed, the Essenes were adept at it, as the astrological texts of the scrolls indicate. An astrological interpretation of the star of Bethlehem makes more sense than the notion of a star leaving the firmament and travelling untold light years to stand over the young child Jesus, as he lay amongst the oxen and asses in a stable (Mt 2:7). To those who like to see God grossly violating his own laws of nature, they might as well believe, since it would have been much easier, even for God, that the star was a large electric light bulb suspended on a wire from heaven. Using Chris A Marritt’s SkyMap Pro to look at the movements of the planets from Jerusalem, 5.00am on 21 September 11 BC proves to be a likely time for ancient astrologers to think that a great king had been born. It was the autumn equinox. Mercury, the messenger of the gods, had risen at 4.02. Venus had risen at 4.34. The sun was to rise at 5.25 and Mars at 7.38 followed by Jupiter at 8.37. Most important however was that the constellation of the Virgin with her infant Spica rose at the very time that the sun itself rose. Thus Spica, the infant, seemed to be the sun on this occasion, and had been preceded by the planet Venus and the messenger only shortly before. The heliacal rising of Spica was not itself unusual, so the portents depended on the planets coming into conjunction with it. Moreover, within a few days the four planets Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Mercury were in the same part of Christian Birth Narratives 41 of 56 the sky as the sun, the new born infant, and so were eclipsed by it. On 6 November 11 BC, all five heavenly bodies set together in Scorpio. It might well have been seen as an eschatological omen by Persian and Babylonian astrologers, and soon would be seen as an omen of a great victory over the eagles, the Romans, Scorpio being also considered the eagle by the ancients. It seems odd that the divine Father chose to reveal the birth of his son, Jesus, to heathen idolaters hundreds of miles distant in Persia. And why should a skill in astrology give them the privilege of seeing the world saviour at birth while people of God’s own election—His Chosen—were denied the honour? Indeed they were denounced as fools and a vipers, despite their having put up with countless troubles at His behest, in attempting to stave off the pressures of mightier surrounding nations with their heathen gods in favour of Him, Yehouah, the ungrateful god. Matthew mentions the word east three times in nine verses, and curiously it is the same word translated “dayspring” in Luke 1:78 which also means a branch! Now this might seem coincidental since a title of Jesus was “the Branch” but “the star” referred to is a metaphorical use of the messianic scriptural citation Numbers 24:17. Since the reference to “a branch” is also messianic, the coincidence is beginning not to look accidental. Matthew records: When they saw the star they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. Matthew 2:10 This verse makes much more sense if in “the star” they recognize a man of destiny rather than a twinkle in the sky. The first part of Matthew 2:11 has been inserted, for without it the wise men rejoice with exceeding great joy then fall down and worship him—all very natural if “the star” is human. Essenes were organized such that there were twelve leaders and three priests. It seems from the clues remaining that the three wise men are really three Zadokite priests, the leadership of the Essenes. In reality they were present to participate in the crowning ceremony, the baptism in the gospels, but have been moved back thirty years in Matthew to appear at the actual birth rather than the ritual rebirth of the baptism. It seems then that a call on the lines of, “Where is he that is born prince of Israel? for he is the star, and he is the branch”, was part of the coronation ceremony. Matthew immediately records that Herod heard of this and was troubled. Herod was the paranoid Idumaean king of the Jews who murdered half of his sons, young princes he suspected of plotting against him. When Augustus Caesar heard of Herod condemning his son Antipater, he remarked: “It is better to be Herod’s pig (hus) than his son (huios)”. If Herod had discovered that part of an Essene ritual involved crowning a Christian Birth Narratives 42 of 56 prince, he would have been outraged. Now Josephus says that Herod and the Essenes were on good terms but that seems belied by the fact that the Essene centre at Qumran was deserted during most of Herod’s reign. If Matthew 2:1-18 is anything to go by, Herod did not get on with the Essenes. Shepherds and Angels In many mythologies, as soon as god-begotten saviours were born into the world they were adored by shepherds. Instead of wise men Luke 2:8-21 has lowly shepherds, who had been “watching their flock”, coming a-visiting, notified by angels of the birth of God. Sometimes the visitors were angels, leaving the splendid perfection of heaven to adore the new born saviour of this wicked world. Christian imagery usually has both! Angels and wise men appeared to Confucius who was born in 598 BC. Five wise men came from afar to the house where the infant lay to present their offerings to him. Celestial music was heard in the skies, and angels attended the scene. The only difference in the Christian story is the number of wise men. Matthew (Mt 2:1) does not give the number, but popularly it is three. Luke speaks of a multitude of the heavenly host praising God (Lk 2:13). Popularly the heavenly host was singing its praises so we have another way of saying that celestial music was heard. How complete the parallel! It goes further. Confucius, like Christ, had twelve chosen disciples. He was descended from a royal house of princes, as Christ from the royal house of David, and like Christ was born poor. He had a disagreement with a monarch and retired for a long period from society into religious contemplative seclusion. He taught the same Golden Rule of doing to others as we desire them to do toward us, and other moral maxims equal in importance to anything in the Christian scriptures. In Luke, an angel saluted Mary: Hail, thou that art highly favoured; the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women. Lk 1:28 In the next chapter the angel joins with the heavenly host in praising God. The same is found in the Ramayana, when Brahma and Siva, with a host of attending spirits, came to the mother of Krishna, the eighth avatar of India (1200 BC), and sang: In thy delivery, O favoured among women, all nations shall have cause to Christian Birth Narratives 43 of 56 exult. When Krishna was born, he was inundated in flowers by the gods, the equivalent of Christian angels. Pipes and drums were played in the heavens, trees blossomed and pools were filled with clear water. The room was illuminated by his light, and the countenance of his father and mother shone with its brightness and glory. They had an image of him as a king and, realising he was the preserver of the world, they began to worship him, but like the virgin Mary quickly forgot all this and soon regarded him as an ordinary infant! The ninth avatar of India, Buddha (600 BC), is similar. On a silver plate in a cave in India is an inscription stating that a saint in the woods, at the time of the advent of Buddha, learned by inspiration that an avatar had appeared in the house of Rajah of Lailas. He flew through the air to the place beheld the new-born saviour. He declared him to be the great avatar destined to establish a new religion. The metaphor of a shepherd is one of those that the Essenes were fond of— which is why it appears so often in Christianity. The Essenes, among many other things, called themselves “the watchers for the kingdom”. Thus the Master in the Community Rule is commanded to watch always for the judgement of God. We have noted that the Damascus Document interprets Zechariah 13:7—a very important passage for Essenes and Christians—by applying the metaphors the “humble of the flock” and “those who watch for him” to the Essenes themselves. Luke has used the same metaphor of the watchers and their flock, the children of Israel, and dramatized it into the birth story. One scroll fragment, discussing the expected visitation, even uses the same terms as Luke—“the holy spirit”, “the meek”, “glad tidings”, “the messiah shepherds the holy ones” and “commands the heavens and the earth including the heavenly host”. The heavenly host in Luke 2:14 are calling for the kingdom of God when they sing: Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good will towards men. Though a desirable sentiment the offer of goodwill to all men is not meant. The proper translation of the best manuscripts is given as: on earth peace to men in whom He is well pleased. The men in whom God is well pleased are the Essenes, His righteous, to Christian Birth Narratives 44 of 56 whom glory and peace come in His kingdom, because those who… …walk by the spirit of truth shall receive abundance of peace and everlasting joy in a life without end. Next Luke 2:22-38 has Mary and Joseph—described as the parents thus acknowledging Joseph as the father (in short, a passage preceding the invention of the Virgin Birth)—present at the temple for Mary’s ritual purification after childbirth. There an unknown man described as “just” and “devout”, “waiting for the consolation of Israel”, and “having the holy spirit upon him” chants his Nunc Dimittis before Jesus. These words denote him as an Essene. The word translated “devout” is peculiar to Luke and might be his translation of “Nazarite”. The clergy have always denied any connection with the Nazarites, perhaps because they did not like others besides Jesus in the story consecrated to God, and because the word is remarkably similar to Nazarene, suggesting that the latter might have had nothing to do with Nazareth. So Luke or an editor avoids it. “Waiting for the consolation of Israel” meant he was waiting for the messiah and therefore the kingdom. The word “Lord” beginning the song in Luke 2:29 is a mistranslation—it should be “Master”, immediately showing its Essene origins and that it is the departing Master recognizing the new Master. The song is litany from the coronation or transference ceremony of the Nasi. Luke being a gentile has altered verse 2:32. Originally, following Isaiah 9:2, it will have read, “a light to lighten the darkness”, meaning the sins of the people, but Luke had a good knowledge of the scriptures and knew that Israel was “the light of the gentiles” (Isa 49:6) and merely substituted this here. Anna the prophetess is one of Luke’s female additions to placate the church’s female congregations. The Massacre of the Infants Matthew 2:13-18 says Joseph learnt in a dream that Herod would kill the baby and so took off to Egypt just in time to miss the massacre of the innocents of Bethlehem by Herod, who sure enough decreed the murder of all children under two years old. Joseph heeded the divine warning, and fled as directed, only returning after Herod had died. Such a massacre and hiding of a child of great promise from the wrath of a king is one of the oldest themes in mythology. Many of the infant saviours were threatened with death and yet were miraculously preserved—the saviour saved! The tyrant king or ruler of the country usually feared the Christian Birth Narratives 45 of 56 young god, by his superior power and goodness, would prove a rival king, and so took measures to destroy him. It has already happened in the Christian bible: And the King of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives… And he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the stools, if it be a son, then ye shall kill him. Exodus 1:15-22 And so Moses was, like Sargon of Babylon a thousand years before, hidden in an ark of bulrushes on the river. Herodotus, the Greek historian, tells us that King Cyrus of Persia had similarly to be hidden away at birth from a jealous king, and every Jew knew the story of Cyrus. Suetonius, the Roman historian, gives a similar legend about the birth of the Emperor Augustus. The wholesale “massacre” alone is peculiar to the Jesus story and that horrible detail is enough of itself to damn it. No Roman or Jewish writer ever heard of the horror. Not one writer of that age, or of any nation, makes any mention of Herod’s massacre even when they are listing crimes. Even the Rabbinical writers who detail his wicked life so minutely, fail to record such an atrocious act, which must have been published far and wide. Josephus, a Jew contemporaneous with Matthew, who records all the crimes of Herod, does not mention this atrocity (about fourteen thousand in number) in Judæa. Roman historians who give us any account of Herod’s character do not say anything about any such deed. Nor does Luke, who has a reputation among theologians as a good historian. Nevertheless the story places the nativity in the reign of Herod the Great, 37 to 4 BC, and so Jesus was born sometime before 4 AD. Dionysos Exiguus, a sixth century monk, calculated the year of Herod’s death and assumed it was also the year of Jesus’s birth. Unfortunately his calculation was four years out and so our calendar has been ever since. Herod’s death is now recorded as 4 BC rather than 1 AD as it would have been if the monk were correct. In any case was he right to assume Jesus was born in the same year that Herod died? For it to be true, Jesus must have been born before Christians think he was. Herod died in 4 BC when the holy family was already hiding in Egypt where they had fled to escape him, according to Matthew. When they fled, Jesus was no longer a new born child, because Herod had been looking for boys up to the age of two. The implications are that Jesus was born before 4 BC and possibly even before 6 BC to allow time for fleeing, the infant to be up to two years old and an indeterminate number of years abroad. Christian Birth Narratives 46 of 56 Since Herod was an old man when he heard the news of the birth of his rival—not less than sixty-eight according to Josephus—he could hardly have been worried about an infant rival. By the time the infant was adult Herod would have been dead. Nor can it be argued that he worried for the sovereignty of his children, who he treated abysmally, if he allowed them to survive at all. The elements of truth in the story of Herod are that he was an ogre and that at this time Herod suppressed the Essenes. He literally did murder thousands of children but they were the same Children as those of the gospels. They were not infants but the Children or Sons of Israel, meaning the Jews. And he certainly was paranoid because the children he could correctly be accused of murdering were his own children—some of his own sons who he feared as rivals—but they were adults when murdered. Josephus says the Essenes were favoured by Herod because one of them, Menehem, had accurately prophesied that Herod would be king. They were allowed not to make an oath of fealty to him unlike all other Jews except Pharisees. Essenes would not, of course, recognize any Lord but God and, short of butchering them all, Herod perhaps had no choice. Josephus relates this tale immediately before he describes Herod’s reconstruction of the temple in 19 AD even though the event itself occurred twenty years before— even before Herod became king. The association of the favouring of the Essenes with the construction of the temple implies that Herod sought the Essenes’ support in his project which was initially unpopular. The help he might have needed was an army of priests trained as masons to build the sacred inner buildings, the holy of holies and its approach. Bribed with the promise that the Zadokites would be established as the accepted priesthood, it seems the Essenes agreed only later to find they had been tricked. Assembling the materials must have taken a year or so, the construction of the inner buildings took eighteen months and the outer cloisters another eight years, but the surrounding porticoes and the immense platform supporting the temple courts took many more years to build. The Essenes might have been fobbed off with Herod’s excuses for not instating them during the eight year period but surely for no longer and so they could have fallen out of favour between about 15 and 8 BC. Luke 2:1-7 tells us Caesar Augustus decreed a taxation and associates the birth with the necessary census. Matthew has no record of there being a census and no census in the reign of Augustus is known in Judæa near the supposed year of Jesus’s birth, though there certainly was one about 6 or 7 AD conducted by Quirinius, Legate of Syria, putting Jesus’s birth date at least ten years later than Matthew. Such a late date means either that Jesus Christian Birth Narratives 47 of 56 was crucified at the age of 30 in the year that Pilate was recalled, or that he was younger than 30 when he died. If the length of his ministry in John is correct, Jesus must then have been only around 25 when he started his ministry. And, if the census was that of 6 AD it is not clear why Jesus’s family had to be assessed for tax by the Romans when Quirinius taxed Judæa since they lived in Galilee and Galilee was not ruled by the Romans but by the puppet king Herod Antipas. Furthermore Roman custom was to register people for a census at their place of residence not at their place of birth which would impose absurd burdens on people who had established themselves elsewhere, and many enterprising Jews had done this even in those distant times. Christian apologists try to explain all this by asserting without sure foundation there was another census ten or fourteen years earlier—from Augustus, Romans carried out a census every fourteen years in their dominions—and indeed Herod could have agreed to a census when the Jews were persuaded to pay tribute to Rome. This takes us again to about 8 BC by which time the Essenes had fallen out of favour with Herod, and Jesus’s family was fleeing to Egypt in Matthew. It is also about the time that Qumran began to be reoccupied after several decades of desertion. Indeed Egypt might have been Essene code for Qumran. It all ties together but there is no evidence for the earlier census. Why, for example, doesn’t Matthew mention it? And why was there no rebellion when the earlier taxation was imposed as there was for the later one? The Essenes would certainly have been opposed to it. We have to admit that there is no solid evidence about when Jesus was born, though it was before 4 BC when Herod died. Christian clergymen teach the children in their charge the dates of Jesus’s life as if they were certain of it. Perhaps when the children are a little older the priests admit that no one really knows, but then they say it does not really matter. For professional Christians, truth does not matter. Only God’s truth matters. What then is God’s truth but pious lies? If Matthew was written in Alexandria in Egypt, his birth narrative is merely a little touch to humour the large Jewish population of the city, suggesting that the Son of God was sheltered in Egypt, presumably by Egyptian Jews. An angel and a dream save the baby saviour from massacre. It was not new! The same methods had earlier rescued other heroes.The story is the same as that of Abraham who Nimrod attempted to murder by killing all the infants in the land, the Jewish first born in Egypt who were threatened by the Pharaoh to eliminate Moses, and Hadad, who fled to Egypt when Joab tried to account for him by killing all the men of Edom. Suetonius says that the Roman Senate tried to get rid of the baby Octavius, (the Emperor Augustus) Christian Birth Narratives 48 of 56 in the same way. Matthew wants to show Jesus as the equal of Moses and so exalts him by giving him an equal history. The story of the popular Hindu deity, Krishna, is strikingly similar in nearly every feature. It is so close in some details that earlier scholars thought that these were derived from an early Christian mission to India. Modern scholars reject the idea, and they wonder only if some parts of the Christ and the Krishna legend did not come from a common source, a source which some find in the legends about the Persian King Cyrus given by the Greek historian Herodotus. The Hindu branch of the Hindu and Persian race, the eastern part of the Aryan race, lost the severity of the original religion, and developed its phallic and sensual elements. Buddhism failed and the cult of Krishna gained in popularity until it appealed more than any other of the numerous religions of India. It flourished in India two or three centuries before Christ, but no one is sure whether there is a historical person at the root of it, as in the cases of Buddhism and Jesus. The legend of Krishna is that he was born of a married woman, Devaki, but like Maya, Buddha’s mother, she was considered to have had a miraculous conception. King Kansa was warned in a vision that the son of Devaki would destroy him, and take his place, and the child had at once to be taken away out of reach of the monarch. The king had Devaki’s earlier children put to death (“murder of the innocents”), and Krishna had to be saved, as King Cyrus was saved from the King of the Medes and Moses from the King of Egypt. Krishna, moreover, gave signs of his real divine origin soon after his birth and in his boyhood. In the end Krishna—who is most unchristlike in his amorous adventures among the milkmaids, which endear him to the unascetic Hindu—killed King Kansa, took his place, and wrought marvelous things for his people. A familiar religious emblem of India was the statue of the virgin mother, Devaki and her divine son Krishna, an incarnation of the great god Vishnu. Christians say the story was taken from Christianity, but, if the Hindus were to adopt any foreign model for their own gods, they had extensive contact with Egypt and Isis and Horus would be models rather than the hero of some minute and unimportant sect of a minute and unimportant people. In fact mother and child images are age old in religion and probably go back to Mother Goddess religions. Among features in common is the angel warning, and Krishna’s angel was not only thoughtful enough to warn the parents to flee, but informed the tyrant ruler, to make sure he played his proper role. Kansa, the ruler, heard an angel voice announcing that a rival ruler had been born in his kingdom. Christian Birth Narratives 49 of 56 In the Christian story it was slightly hit and miss, depending upon the Magi to inform Herod almost accidentally. Kansa, like Herod, set about devising a way to destroy his infant rival. Herod’s decree required the destruction of all infants under two years of age (Mt 2:16), even though he had commanded earlier that the young child should be sought diligently (Mt 2:8). Kansa decreed that active search be made for whatever young children there may be upon earth, that every boy in whom there may be found signs of unusual greatness be slain without remorse. There was in a cave temple at Elephanta in India a sculpture—universally admitted to be much older than Christianity—of a king with a drawn sword, surrounded by slaughtered infants. The slaughtered infants in the cave are all boys surrounded by groups of men and women in supplication. For those with ears to hear, the story in Matthew is copied from the Hindu religion and was surely learnt from Sadhus in Alexandria or from Persia. In each case: There was an angel warning about the impending danger The governor or ruler was hostile to the mission of the young saviour A bloody decree was issued aimed at the destruction of the infant Messiah The hurried flight of the parents takes place the Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus, for hundreds of years believed by Christians to be inspired by divine authority, relates that Christ and his parents sojourned for a time at a place called Matarea. One place claimed as the birth place of Krishna was Mathura. As Krishna and his parents crossed the River Jumna in their flight, they nearly drowned but the infant Krishna noticed and with his foot parted the waters and they passed over safely, like Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. Egyptian legend has similar stories. The mother of Zoroaster had alarming dreams of evil spirits seeking to destroy her unborn child. A good spirit consoled her, saying: Fear not. Ormuzd, Most High God, will protect the infant, sent as a prophet to the people and the world who are waiting for him. Christ and Krishna are otherwise quite different stereotypes. Yet worshippers on the plains of India saw the appearance on earth of their god much as the Christians of the first century saw theirs. Was there a common source in some of the older myths, or simply a parallel evolution of the Christian Birth Narratives 50 of 56 religious imagination playing about the birth of a god? Who knows but The Jesus ideal is just one version of a legend which stretches over three thousand years of time and is found equally in Egypt and Syria, Greece and Rome. Early Proof of Divinity Asiatic religion had its Christs as well as the religions of nearer Asia and of Europe. The Sheng Mu (Holy Mother) of the Chinese and Japanese is commonly represented with a divine son. The God Yu, who was concealed in a manner similar to that of Moses was depicted as a babe on the knee or in her arms of his virgin. Even Kong-fu-tse, who escaped the common fate of reformers—deification—was credited with supernatural portents at birth. It is a natural urge of the devout mind to invest its hero with superhuman experiences. Buddha’s teaching, as settled by modern scholars, was so decidedly nonreligious that one would not expect him ever to be adorned with a supernatural halo. He not only plainly disavowed all the gods of India, but he bade his disciples waste no time in disputing about God and personal immortality. He was an Agnostic, a humanitarian. Yet, pure Buddhism almost perished from the earth. What is generally called Buddhism in Asia has no more relation to Buddha’s teaching than Roman Catholicism has to the teaching of Jesus. It is a system of temples and statues, priests and monks, rosaries and censers, rites and vestments, heavens and bells. Buddha himself was degraded to the divine level. What would seem admirable and superior in Buddha and Jesus if they were men, becomes petty and trivial when one measures them by a divine standard. Christian apologists deny that there is any parallel between Buddha and Jesus because Buddha’s mother, Maya, was married. The real parallel is that Buddhists were like Christians in that they could not have their god born of carnal intercourse, and so his conception was miraculous. It does not matter that a woman who is not a virgin gives birth without intercourse. The point is not that the woman had had intercourse but that she had not had intercourse on this occasion. Buddhists did not call Maya “a virgin”. They believed in a “virgin birth”. Krishna, Hercules, Zoroaster, Yu, Bacchus, Romulus, Moses and Cyrus, were each threatened with death but were miraculously preserved. The case of Augustus is related by Suetonius, that of Romulus by Livy, and that of Cyrus by Herodotus. Pharaoh, like Herod, to kill the infant Moses, ordered the death of all the male infants—though Herod did not exclude female infants. And cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia relate the same story Christian Birth Narratives 51 of 56 as that of Moses about the great semitic king Sargon of Akkadia in the third millenium BC! Saviours generally in early childhood have the ability to conquer danger or mental superiority over their opponents in argument. Christ proved his divine nature by equalling the doctors in the temple when only about twelve years of age. The fame of Christ went out through all the region round about, according to Luke 4:14. The voice of fame soon published the birth of a miraculous child—not Christ this time but Æsculapius—and the people flocked from all quarters to behold him. In China, Confucius’s extensive knowledge and great wisdom soon made him known, and kings were governed by his counsels, and the people adored him wherever he went. He was rational and able from infancy. When the God Shang-ti, was questioned on the subject of government and the duties of princes while yet a child, his answers were such as to astonish the whole empire by his knowledge and wisdom. One Grecian god killed serpents which attempted to bite him while in his cradle. The proof of Osiris’s divinity was a blaze of light shining around his cradle soon after he was born. Pythagoras displayed such a remarkable character, even in youth, he attractd the attention of all who saw and heard him speak. He was never at any time angry, never laughed, never acted irrationally or behaved badly. Because of his fame people flocked in multitudes to see him. The people were astonished at Christ’s understanding and answers (Luke 2:47). The Gospel of the Infancy says that his tutor Zacheas was astonished at his learning. In the Mahabarata, the parents of the Saviour Krishna, to secure his education, sent him to a learned Brahmin, whom he astonished with his learning, and under whose tuition he mastered the sciences in a day and a night. Men, seeing the wonders performed by this child, told Nanda, his adopted father, that this could not possibly be his son. As soon as Buddha was born, a light shone around his cradle, when he stood up and proclaimed his mission, and the River Ganges rose in a miraculous manner, but was stilled by his divine power, just as Christ stilled the tempest on the sea. He was born amidst great miracles, and soon as born, most solemnly proclaims his mission. The divine power and mission of Yu of China was very early evinced by the display of great miracles. Moses, Solomon and Samuel showed mental superiority in early life; proving that if they were not considered by the Jews as gods, they were at least “from God”, endowed by him with divine power while yet mere children. Christian Birth Narratives 52 of 56 The Immaculate Conception of Jesus The natural conception of Mary is exclusively “The Immaculate Conception” to Catholics, dirty and sinful though Christians consider sex to be, especially out of wedlock. But surely there can be no more immaculate conception than a conception by God Himself, not by the normal sinful biological appendage but by a miracle. Let us conclude with a concise summary of some puzzles and questions about Jesus’s supremely “immaculate” conception and virgin birth. The gospels show that Christ himself did not claim to have a miraculous birth. He did not once allude to it, though as the principal evidence of his divinity, as Christians claim, he would have done so. His paternal genealogy, as made out by Matthew and Luke, completely confounds his Virgin Birth. They both trace his lineage through Joseph, which they could only do if Joseph was his father. His own disciple, Philip, declared him to be the son of Joseph, and several texts show that it was the original belief. The story of the Virgin Birth rests on the slender foundations of an angel and a dream. Mary got it by an angel, and Joseph by a dream, and thereby we have the whole of the story of the divinity of Jesus Christ. However, we have neither Joseph’s nor Mary’s report of these things, but only Matthew and Luke’s. We do not know that either of them ever saw or spoke with Joseph or Mary on the subject. If Christ were a miraculously born god, would his mother have reproved him for misconduct when she found him in the temple, as she, if no one else, must have known his nature? If Mary conceived miraculously, why was it kept so long from Joseph? Did the concubine of God intend to deceive her lawful husband? An angel had to be sent from heaven to let him into the secret. Why did not God inform Joseph by “inspiration” instead of using the round about way of sending an angel to do it? “Mary was found with child of the Holy Ghost”, but as we are told nothing more about the circumstances, does it not leave us suspicious? Since it all seems to have been based on dreams, was carried on through dreams, and has no better foundation than dreams, why should we give it better credit than similar stories found in heathen mythology? Or is it that Christianity is just a dreamy religion? In an educated and scientific age, should we accept reports of the birth of a God based on no better a foundation than dreams, angels and the legends of oriental mythology? In particular, can any scientist entertain the idea of infinite beings, themselves mere conjecture, actually impregnating human females? Christian Birth Narratives 53 of 56 Essene belief was that sexual intercourse was sinful, procreation was impure and human children were born thus contaminated. Human beings were imperfect and any god sent into the world as a saviour had to avoid such contamination. The solution was that incarnate gods entered the world through human virgins to avoid the impurity and the slander that the saviour might have arisen in more normal ways if the mother were not a virgin. Can anyone unbiased deny that such thinking is the source of the origin of the story of Christ’s Virgin Birth? If Christ had to come into the world avoiding the impurity of human conception and birth, why did he not descend directly from heaven in person? If he can descend on the clouds at his—still awaited—second advent, why could he not do the same at his first advent, thereby preempting reasons for doubt and saving far more of fallen humanity? Could anyone, free of religious guilt and indoctrination, presented with these stories as the truth today, willingly and joyfully accept them as proof that someone was a god? Or would they consider them to be fraudulent inventions, intended to gull the credulous? There are so many incongruities in divine revelation that it becomes knavery to dismiss them as God’s mysterious ways, as Christians and Jews do. Yet both agree that God gave us reason. So why doesn’t He expect us to use it when He chooses to reveal something to us? Why are Christians so sure that they have not been hoodwinked by the Devil posing as God? As a supernatural theory of the events of the world, it makes more sense than the Christian idea. Christ a Powerful God The birth of an incarnate god had been annually celebrated for ages in the ancient world, and particularly where Christianity developed. Then, according to Christians, it actually happened! It is as plausible as Superman arriving today from the planet Krypton. The early Christians obviously attributed to their Saviour the kind of birth that was ascribed to rival gods. Admittedly, this is a deduction, not a known fact, but the late acceptance of the idea among Christians noted for their gullibility tells against it being known among the first followers of the Christ. It is plausible if later converts from Pagan religions expected that such a god would be born in the conventional way for gods, and eventually so it was. Paul knows nothing of it. Mark, which on many grounds we know to be the oldest gospel, knows nothing of it. Matthew in its original form knows nothing of it. Luke, the latest of the synoptics, has a long story about it. We reach something like the third decade of the second century before the story Christian Birth Narratives 54 of 56 appears, though it must unquestionably have circulated in the Churches for some time before Luke could write it. We are invited to believe that Christ the saviour is really a powerful god merely adopting the cloak of human form so that he can save the human race. A god disguised as an infant is surely still a god with the powers of a god. Why then is it that the powers of this disguised god seem to grow as a human grows? He is vulnerable to human enemies as an infant because he has not yet grown powerful enough. As an infant this saviour of the world cannot even save himself from wicked human beings. If that is the case why did the hugely powerful Devil, the supposedly evil god, not notice and take advantage of the baby god’s weakness? Millions of human beings were later to die as devils, condemned by the professors of this loving religion, Christianity, yet the Devil was so weak or stupid that he could not succeed even when his enemy deliberately made himself helpless! If murdering innocent people is the criterion of the work of the Devil, then Christianity is the best candidate. Christians claimed Pagan religions were devilish yet took from them. Some modern Christians think this is an unanswerable refutation of Christian “borrowing”. It is not at all unanswerable or a secure position. Those that think it is, think in terms of Christianity as it is now—complete, as they see it. In the early years of its adoption into the empire, it was not complete, was extremely malleable and church Fathers often used Pagan arguments as arguments for Christianity. They were ready to say, “Our religion is just like yours in such and such a respect”. Rome, when it forced Christianity upon Europe, deliberately adopted a large amount of Paganism. Bits of ritual, altars, statues, hymns, local deities, were taken into the new religion. Does even the orthodox suppose that Jesus ordered the use of candles, incense, holy water and vestments? Yet these things were adopted by the new religion. We have little historical knowledge of the Christians of the first century. Between the simple groups of Jesus worshippers of Paul’s Epistles and Acts, and the developed Christian doctrine of the second century, lies a whole world of evolution on which we have no positive light. The reasonable view is that the influence of the Old Testament, the shape given by the Jews to the supposed messianic prophecies, the natural impulse of ascetic and Essenic believers to isolate Jesus from all sexual intercourse and the broad beliefs of the Persians, Egyptians and Greeks about the birth of their saviours, together gave shape to the traditional figure of Jesus. The impregnation of a woman by a god was a familiar idea, and, if she had Christian Birth Narratives 55 of 56 been hitherto a virgin, she was held to be a virgin mother. Most prominent of all were the greatest of Egyptian goddesses, Isis, and the greatest of Greek goddesses, Cybele. When at last the Church was forced to permit a veneration of a semi-divine mother, to compete with the most popular feature of Pagan religion, statues of and hymns to Isis and Cybele were appropriated to Mary. If religious history is to be believed, God had many well-beloved sons, born of pious and holy virgins, besides Jesus Christ. Despite this each is his only begotten, or his first begotten, son. All are as well authenticated as the story of Jesus Christ, that is, not very! -oOo- Dr Michael David Magee Michael D Magee was born in Hunslet, an industrial suburb of Leeds, Yorkshire, in 1941. He attended Cockburn High School in South Leeds. He won a studentship to the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, where he graduated with an honours degree in natural science in 1963. He went on to obtain a PhD degree from the University of Aston in Birmingham in 1967 and a teaching qualification, a PGCE, from Huddersfield before it was a university. He carried out research at the Universities of Aston and Bradford, and at the Wool Industries Research Association, taught in a Further Education College in Devon for seven years and for ten years was an advisor to the UK government at the National Economic Development Office in London. He has written three books, and, mainly in collaboration with Professor S Walker, a dozen scientific papers on the structure and interactions of small molecules investigated using microwave radiation. Working for the government he has written or edited some forty publications on microeconomic issues, and very many discussion papers and reports for the Sector Working Parties (SWPs) and Economic Development Committees (EDCs)—Wool Textiles, Man Made Fibres, Footwear and Electronics—of which he was secretary at various times in the 1980s. He was brought up by Christian parents but was never indoctrinated into one dogma and was able from an early age to make his own judgements about the Christian religion. Christian Birth Narratives 56 of 56 http://askwhy.co.uk/index.php