Farmers bathe the land with chemicals. Many have the simpleton’s philosophy that, if a little fertilizer is good, a lot must be better.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Birth Narratives 1.1

The Myth of the Virgin Birth
Joseph and Mary
Bethlehem and Nazareth

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 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

The Churchmen always had a clear idea of the meaning of Sin

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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.