Christianity
Birth Narratives 1: A Virgin Birth in the Line of David?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 04, 1999
Monday, 05 April 2004
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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 ready 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 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 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 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 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 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.
