God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (36 page)

One of my favorite all time questions in relation to this ridiculous claim of the virgin birth, and what would be a later argument between Mary and Joseph, is by author Thomas Paine who asked:

Imagine all of this in a modern setting, whereby there is a woman by the name of Sue, who had been having an affair with her neighbor Bob, whilst engaged to Harry. Sue is seated in her lounge, her eyes bloodshot from sobbing as she holds the home pregnancy test swab in her fingers, which reads ‘positive’. Her fiancé Harry, is on his way home but is unaware of the bombshell his soon to be wife is about to drop on him. Conversant of the Bible, Sue knows that stoning to death is warranted. She is riddled with guilt, remorse and panic. With her heart racing at 200mph she suddenly has a moment of clarity. As she lies back on the sofa and ponders her plight, the breeze begins to rustle the curtains and a bright white light shines through the windowpane landing directly on her face. “Is that you God?” she asked. The unseen and mysterious voice replied, “Yes, my daughter. It is God. Do not alarm yourself; I am here to tell you that neither Harry nor Bob is the father of your unborn. It was I who impregnated you whilst you were asleep. The child will be my son and he will rule the world.”

When her fiancé returned home later that evening, she told Harry that God had implanted a fetus in her womb. Now, ask yourself this, if you were Harry, would you believe her?

This virginal conception story was even impossible to explain to my eight-year-old daughter. I tried to tell her that God was Jesus’ daddy and Mary was his mummy. Her elementary school mind tried to process this before stating in a confused manner, “Oh, so God was married to Mary?” I replied, “No, Mary was married to Joseph.” You see this crazy shit ain’t easy to explain even to an inquisitive child.

Matthew, likewise, ties himself up in double-talk on the conception of Jesus when he writes that the virgin birth occurred as a fulfilment of Isaiah’s (7:14) prophecy:

An attempt to fabricate the life of Jesus by crafting Old Testament prophecy to his biographical account, results in the contradictory absurdity that Jesus now has two names. Jesus and Immanuel! Can you see how ridiculous and sloppy the attempt to create Jesus’ story has become?

What is further astonishing in the Gospels’ biography of Jesus is that of the four, Mark and John don’t even mention the virgin birth or anything in relation to the birth of Jesus. Now, I ask you to think long, hard and rationally about this question: what journalist or editor that was given the task of writing a story on the life of Jesus Christ would look at all the facts presented before him and then choose to deliberately leave out the bit about him being born of a virgin? It is the equivalent of a CNN journalist piecing together all the facts of September 11, 2001 and opting to leave out of the story the part where two passenger jets slammed into the World Trade Center buildings.

So, Mark and John opt to leave out the virgin birth story, thus you’d assume that at least Matthew and Luke have some kind of consistency on this matter. Wrong! In Luke’s account of the pregnancy, he makes no mention of any angel visiting Joseph and in fact says the winged messenger appeared to Mary:

Luke writes that Mary was befuddled by the angel’s message as she was not yet married, nor had she done a little of the hokey pokey. To which the angel replied:

The Gospels Mark and John include absolutely no mention of the actual birth of Jesus, which is extraordinarily odd as we do know the birth story of so many famous statesmen, kings and philosophers from this time period, but of the central character of the western world’s predominant religion we know so little.

It is only via a melding of the respective conflicting stories of Matthew and Luke that we know of the Christmas carol narrative of this alleged Son of God. The story that Luke tells us is that Joseph travelled with his pregnant fiancée from the then fictitious town of Nazareth, to Bethlehem to register their ‘shot-gun’ marriage there. Luke is then very matter of fact when he describes the actual delivery:

Luke then writes that, shortly after Jesus had made his first breaths of life in the barnyard, an angel appeared to some shepherds attending to their flocks in a nearby field. The farmers were terrified to see an angel hovering before them, to which the angel said forth:

The angel fluttered off back to heaven and the shepherds left their flock to go see this newborn Messiah. Luke doesn’t mention the shepherds having any difficulty in locating Joseph, Mary and the new born as the very next sentence writes that they found Jesus lying there in the manger. The shepherds soon spread word of their talk with the angel and of seeing baby Jesus.

Matthew’s perspective alters somewhat dramatically to Luke’s, as he writes that it was not shepherds led by an angel to see the arrival of the new baby Messiah, but that it was three wise men led by a star from the east to the city of Jerusalem where they asked the town folk:

After the three wise men had had a brief introduction and conversation with Roman King Herod, the hovering star led them directly to the place where baby Jesus and Mary were. Matthew makes no reference to this place being a manger, stable, barnyard or otherwise, but regardless the travelling men do find their breast-feeding Messiah directly below the floating star. Which given the size of your average star is akin to giving a friend directions to a local restaurant by telling him that you will find the eatery somewhere under the earth’s sun.

The wise men give praise to the newborn and present Mary with a treasure trove of gifts that included gold, incense and myrrh. As you see these are starkly contrasting stories of Jesus’ birth between the two of the four Gospels who deemed his birth to have relevance to the biography of Jesus. But this is not where the contrast between Matthew and Luke ends, as Matthew attempting to paint Jesus as a deliverer, just in the way Moses was a deliverer, hacks together a story almost identical to that of Moses. He writes that King Herod was troubled by news that a Jewish Messiah had arrived and thus became concerned that a celestially sent king would erode what control the Roman Empire had over the Jews, and therefore ordered the execution of every baby boy under the age of two years within the vicinity of Bethlehem.

When the three wise men had ceased kissing the feet of baby Jesus, an angel appeared before Joseph and ordered him:

Before you chastise Herod for being God like in his quest to kill babies, there is no record of King Herod or any Roman ruler ever giving such an infanticidal statute. In fact, ancient historians such as Josephus, who extensively recorded Herod’s crimes, do not mention this baby-murdering which would undoubtedly have been Herod’s greatest crime by far. No doubt a fictitious event to appeal to not only Jewish resentment of Roman occupation, but an appeal to Jewish sensibilities in mirroring the childhood story of Israel’s favorite patriarch, Moses.

The story of a ‘threatened child becomes a great leader’ is commonplace amongst ancient literature and myth. It is a theme of Romulus & Remes, Sargon the Great, and Hercules, amongst many others. And now we see it reworked into the story of Jesus by one of the four biographers.

Matthew completes his account of the birth that the young family returned to the fantasy town of Nazareth from Egypt after two years spent in hiding as news was delivered to them, again from an angel, that Herod had passed away.

This is an interesting story because of the four biographies this is the only story we have of Jesus between the age of two and thirty. Yes, a twenty-eight year gap in the story of unarguably the most famous character in history. We know nothing of Jesus as a teenager. Was he a pimply awkward adolescent that refused to do his chores? Was he bad at sports? Did chicks dig him? Did he play ‘spin-the-bottle’ with the other teenagers in his village? We know none of any of this and, moreover, the only story we do have of the missing years of Jesus is the one Luke tells of Jesus as a twelve year old.

Luke writes that every year Joseph and Mary would travel from Nazareth to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. A normal family outing for a Jewish holiday it would seem, but this story takes a fast turn for nonsense when he writes:

How fricking high would Joseph and Mary have to have been to mistakenly believe that Jesus was right there with them, when he clearly wasn’t? Thankfully, there was no Department of Child Welfare in the day, or this set of parents would be without a child. The story continues that the irresponsible parents return to Jerusalem and at the end of the third day of looking for him, they find the adolescent Jesus preaching to several gathered Jews at the Temple. (For later reference, the fact Luke writes that Jesus was found on the third day is no accident). The young Jesus’ wisdom astonished those that listened and they were amazed that a youth would have such insight of the world. Joseph and Mary upon finding him here, yell to him:

If Jesus had any spunk at all, his reply should have been, “Where was I? I am only twelve years of age, you are my father and it was you that fucking left me here, you irresponsible git!”

Isn’t it interesting that Luke writes that ‘his father’, Joseph, had been looking for him? Again the author’s oversight in maintaining consistency of truth! Nevertheless, Jesus replies to his now concerned parents, who didn’t seem all that concerned for his absence for at least the day or two when they thought he was still in the backseat of the car:

God IS his father? Boy am I confused!

Luke finishes off with what I believe to be an amusing line:

If I were a Christian it would trouble me that nothing in the Gospels illustrates Mary being impressed or proud of her prodigy son. This, after all, is the son that God had put into her womb himself, without the need for her to engage in sweaty, non air-conditioned sex with a pre-deodorant era carpenter fiancé. If she believed Jesus to be the spawn of God, then why does everything that Jesus do, come as some kind of a surprise to her? If we are to draw a caricature of Jesus through Mary’s eyes, based only on the four Gospels, then all we are left with is the illustration of a naughty little boy, and nothing prodigious.