Christmas Thoughts - Mary

“With God all things are possible,” said the angelic Gabriel to a distressed Mary. Viewers of the recent movie Nativity might paraphrase Gabriel’s message: “With technology, cinematic license, and funding all religious fantasies are possible.”

Nativity is a marked improvement on its forebears, particularly in its portrayal of the repressive governance of Palestine and the patriarchal culture that impacted on women. However Nativity reminded me of a parish Christmas pageant, uncritically splicing the two infancy narratives together and using unbelievable tricks to explain the miraculous. Unlike the parish pageant though Nativity masquerades as history.

Liberal scholars have for decades told us that most of the supposed facts of the nativity are fictions. Angels, wise men, heavenly hosts, the census, Bethlehem… are all part of the story-telling craft, weaving meanings derived from Jesus’ life back into his birth. It makes for great stories, encapsulates great truths, but is lousy history.

As for the paternity of Jesus, these liberal scholars denounced the biological miracle thesis that Nativity went to some length to replicate. We all know that fertilized eggs don’t drop from the sky into wombs, despite what some in the Vatican think. Joseph, said these scholars, was the most likely father.

Scholarship has since moved on, now less concerned about history and more concerned about what the texts actually say. It makes no sense, for example, for both Matthew and Luke to sow doubt about Jesus’ paternity if Joseph was his actual father. The scandal that accompanied the pregnancy, as the movie Nativity showed, would have diminished if Joseph had owned up. Indeed the pregnancy of a betrothed girl by her fiancé was viewed as more positive than negative, for it was thought to guarantee children and ensure the male line.

Who then was the father? For those who like to use God, as the movie does, to explain the supposed unexplainable please note two things. Firstly, the words used by Gabriel “come upon” and “overshadow” have no sexual connotations. It’s not saying that Mary had sex with the Holy Spirit. Secondly, divine paternity and human paternity are not mutually exclusive. God is the power of all life. In other words, as with King David being called “Son of God”, it is possible to have human parents and still be hailed as of divine origin.

There has been growing acceptance during the last decades of the validity of Jane Schaberg’s work. Jane teaches at a Roman Catholic university. She posits that Mary was seduced or raped, a child was conceived, and that God owned, and declared as blessed, both mother and babe. When the Magnificat sings that God has looked with favour on the lowliness of Mary, and the Greek word for lowliness usually is translated ‘humiliation’[i], one has to ask how she was humiliated. Illegitimacy, despite the indoctrination of multiple Christmas pageants, is probably the answer.

You can read the rest of my article at http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/?sid=74&id=681

Further reading:
1. Schaberg, Jane The Illegitimacy of Jesus, Sheffield Phoenix Press 2006.
2. Summary of Schaberg’s work http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/illegit.html
3. Reilly, Frank “Jane Schaberg, Raymond E. Brown, and the Problem of the Illegitimacy of Jesus” http://muse.jhu.edu/about/publishers/indiana
4. Spong, John Born Of A Woman: A bishop rethinks the birth of Jesus, New York Harper Collins 1992


[i] The word is used in Genesis 34:2, Judges 19:24 and 20:5, II Kings 13:12, 14, 22, and 32; and Lamentations 5:11. These passages all address rapes.