Birth Narratives 2.3
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 04, 1999
Monday, 05 April 2004
Abstract
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 pf 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 incompetance 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 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 laid.Mark 15:47
And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.Mark 16:1
Among which was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and 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 sisters-in-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 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 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 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, 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!
Moses and Exodus
