How a piece of second-century fan fiction gave Christianity Mary’s parents, her permanent virginity, the cave, the ox, and a doctrine the Western church spent centuries condemning and then keeping
Oh, but there’s joy in all of this fiction! How delightful are Biblical tales to turn the mundane and ordinary into something more intriguing, whether true or not. At least in the Old Testament, belief in some of the nonsense stories are not required for the religion to be upheld. In Christianity, the nonsense remains a core part of the essential doctrine. Failure to believe in the pure, virginal Mary can only lead to a failure of the dogma the Church insists upon.
There’s a Catholic College in Massachusetts where at one time awhile ago, an Eastern Rite Catholic Priest taught a class filled with religious zealots that Jesus was born like every other human child, and was not the result of a miraculous or divine creation. Well, certainly that produced crazed hysteria among some of his students, so much so that many vacated their seats and walked out into the sunset, Bible in hand, and opened to passages confirming their long held die-hard beliefs.
There's joy in it, and that's why I keep writing about this stuff instead of filing it under nonsense and moving on. The stories are good, which is why they lasted.
Your distinction is the one that matters. Judaism can hold Genesis as a story and lose nothing, since the practice survives without literalism. Christianity welded its claims into the creed and made them load-bearing.
I certainly did grow up with this and as a female in this tradition it was a complete mind fuck and the basis of all the religious trauma from my youth. My dad basically wanting to put me in a chastity belt while telling my brothers to use condoms.
Thank you for sharing that here. It's a lot to carry.
Treating daughters and sons by different rules is one of my trigger points -- it makes me angry fast. What's even more frustrating, and sad, is watching those same daughters grow up to become the fiercest defenders of the misogyny that was handed to them.
And there's an irony to it: in developing countries, especially Muslim-majority ones, feminists and human rights activists look up to the West, assuming all the virginity crap is long finished there. They don't realize the same trauma is alive and well in pockets of those countries, just with different scripture behind it.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of how literature worked at the time this came out. People didn’t write and copy books to influence thought, books were written to capture knowledge already circulating amongst the people. And books were incredibly expensive so the only reason they are written is because a belief is already widely held.
Ancient books captured existing tradition, sure, and plenty of them also existed to change minds. Luke opens by telling Theophilus he's writing so he'll know the certainty of what he's been taught, which is persuasion stated as a purpose. Paul's letters are one long argument with people who disagreed with him. Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen wrote whole books aimed at correcting other Christians, and Jerome's Against Helvidius exists for the single purpose of winning a fight about this exact doctrine.
The pseudonymity is the giveaway. You sign the name of Jesus' brother onto your book when you need borrowed authority to get something accepted. A belief everybody already holds doesn't need a forged apostolic signature stapled to it.
The text shows the argument happening inside itself. Salome refuses to believe Mary is still a virgin, examines her, and her hand burns until she repents and picks up the child. That scene is written at doubters, and you don't compose a rebuttal when there's nobody to rebut. Same with the brothers. Origen cites this book by name to solve the problem of Jesus' siblings, which tells you Christians were fighting about it by the early 200s.
The belief also wasn't widely held. Tertullian, writing around the same period, treats the brothers of Jesus as Mary's own children. Helvidius argued the same thing in Rome in the 380s with enough of a following that Jerome had to publish a book to bury him. Doctrines everybody agrees on don't require that kind of enforcement.
On cost you're right, and it cuts the other way. Somebody paid to copy this thing into Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Old Church Slavonic, and paid again for the 140-plus Greek manuscripts that survive. That's sustained investment in making a text travel.
Using the name of James is also not the giveaway you think it is. Books were frequently written that included names of important people and it was understood it was not authored by them. Enoch, Abraham, Joseph, even Adam all have apocrypha with their makes on them. Ancient people didn’t have the same authorship hangups that we do.
I hear you, and it's a distinction worth keeping. How his contemporaries felt about the signature is a question about his ethics. Whether this book is our earliest source for Joachim and Anna, the temple childhood, the cave, and virginity in partu is a question about the text, and that one doesn't move.
As I think you pointed out in another post, when Jesus was determined to be god as part of the trinity rather than a representative of god, there was a gap left for an intermediary between humans and god. The Maryan tradition supplies that intermediary, the position of the enlightened prophet who intercedes for believers.
Idk about the permanent virginity part. Back in the days of Jesus's birth being a “virgin” only meant you hadn't had a baby yet, it didnt mean you didnt have sex
Rather to hide the original Jesus - Atum the dyad of the Ptah Logos. Atum was the god/goddess whose hand nursed creation into being and is the origin of the word Thomas - Tem/Atum, the Adam.
The Romans removed all references to the dyad like the Gospel of thomas and the direct refs to the Atumic mesu of Egypt, whose hand creates the universe - the feminine side of IUSAAS. Leaving only IUSA or Yeshua and the Logos speaking male God.
The cave birth is the polarity of the hill death - the xp as the place of the head or feminine Tor - as it the T of pTh that becomes the stable base of htp as an altar mat upon which the bread lays. This is imaged in Seti's tomb.
This is all very very intricate Philosophical astrotheological geometry around the celestial pole mythos of Atum-Re . The swaddling clothes and the krst mummy wrappings representing the Orionic transition to the pole, as the transition phase of life to death and recursion. All founded in Enneadic Egypt millennia before Plato and the later Bible.
But this is Greece injected into Judea by Roman redactors that we have been confused by.
It is not to merely make Mary a perpetual virgin. It is to hide the evidence of the Egyptian origins of the Jesus myth.
Oh, but there’s joy in all of this fiction! How delightful are Biblical tales to turn the mundane and ordinary into something more intriguing, whether true or not. At least in the Old Testament, belief in some of the nonsense stories are not required for the religion to be upheld. In Christianity, the nonsense remains a core part of the essential doctrine. Failure to believe in the pure, virginal Mary can only lead to a failure of the dogma the Church insists upon.
There’s a Catholic College in Massachusetts where at one time awhile ago, an Eastern Rite Catholic Priest taught a class filled with religious zealots that Jesus was born like every other human child, and was not the result of a miraculous or divine creation. Well, certainly that produced crazed hysteria among some of his students, so much so that many vacated their seats and walked out into the sunset, Bible in hand, and opened to passages confirming their long held die-hard beliefs.
Sigh …
There's joy in it, and that's why I keep writing about this stuff instead of filing it under nonsense and moving on. The stories are good, which is why they lasted.
Your distinction is the one that matters. Judaism can hold Genesis as a story and lose nothing, since the practice survives without literalism. Christianity welded its claims into the creed and made them load-bearing.
Looking forward to more ‘nonsense’ whether Old or New Testament origin! Both make for a fun trip through religious history. Thanks, Tanner!
I certainly did grow up with this and as a female in this tradition it was a complete mind fuck and the basis of all the religious trauma from my youth. My dad basically wanting to put me in a chastity belt while telling my brothers to use condoms.
Thank you for sharing that here. It's a lot to carry.
Treating daughters and sons by different rules is one of my trigger points -- it makes me angry fast. What's even more frustrating, and sad, is watching those same daughters grow up to become the fiercest defenders of the misogyny that was handed to them.
And there's an irony to it: in developing countries, especially Muslim-majority ones, feminists and human rights activists look up to the West, assuming all the virginity crap is long finished there. They don't realize the same trauma is alive and well in pockets of those countries, just with different scripture behind it.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of how literature worked at the time this came out. People didn’t write and copy books to influence thought, books were written to capture knowledge already circulating amongst the people. And books were incredibly expensive so the only reason they are written is because a belief is already widely held.
Thanks for reading.
Ancient books captured existing tradition, sure, and plenty of them also existed to change minds. Luke opens by telling Theophilus he's writing so he'll know the certainty of what he's been taught, which is persuasion stated as a purpose. Paul's letters are one long argument with people who disagreed with him. Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen wrote whole books aimed at correcting other Christians, and Jerome's Against Helvidius exists for the single purpose of winning a fight about this exact doctrine.
The pseudonymity is the giveaway. You sign the name of Jesus' brother onto your book when you need borrowed authority to get something accepted. A belief everybody already holds doesn't need a forged apostolic signature stapled to it.
The text shows the argument happening inside itself. Salome refuses to believe Mary is still a virgin, examines her, and her hand burns until she repents and picks up the child. That scene is written at doubters, and you don't compose a rebuttal when there's nobody to rebut. Same with the brothers. Origen cites this book by name to solve the problem of Jesus' siblings, which tells you Christians were fighting about it by the early 200s.
The belief also wasn't widely held. Tertullian, writing around the same period, treats the brothers of Jesus as Mary's own children. Helvidius argued the same thing in Rome in the 380s with enough of a following that Jerome had to publish a book to bury him. Doctrines everybody agrees on don't require that kind of enforcement.
On cost you're right, and it cuts the other way. Somebody paid to copy this thing into Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Old Church Slavonic, and paid again for the 140-plus Greek manuscripts that survive. That's sustained investment in making a text travel.
Using the name of James is also not the giveaway you think it is. Books were frequently written that included names of important people and it was understood it was not authored by them. Enoch, Abraham, Joseph, even Adam all have apocrypha with their makes on them. Ancient people didn’t have the same authorship hangups that we do.
I hear you, and it's a distinction worth keeping. How his contemporaries felt about the signature is a question about his ethics. Whether this book is our earliest source for Joachim and Anna, the temple childhood, the cave, and virginity in partu is a question about the text, and that one doesn't move.
As I think you pointed out in another post, when Jesus was determined to be god as part of the trinity rather than a representative of god, there was a gap left for an intermediary between humans and god. The Maryan tradition supplies that intermediary, the position of the enlightened prophet who intercedes for believers.
Yes. That's the main idea. You've put it more clearly than I did.
Idk about the permanent virginity part. Back in the days of Jesus's birth being a “virgin” only meant you hadn't had a baby yet, it didnt mean you didnt have sex
All to make sure that Mary stayed a virgin, because sex of course is bad. It has caused no end of harm in my very humble opinion
Rather to hide the original Jesus - Atum the dyad of the Ptah Logos. Atum was the god/goddess whose hand nursed creation into being and is the origin of the word Thomas - Tem/Atum, the Adam.
The Romans removed all references to the dyad like the Gospel of thomas and the direct refs to the Atumic mesu of Egypt, whose hand creates the universe - the feminine side of IUSAAS. Leaving only IUSA or Yeshua and the Logos speaking male God.
The cave birth is the polarity of the hill death - the xp as the place of the head or feminine Tor - as it the T of pTh that becomes the stable base of htp as an altar mat upon which the bread lays. This is imaged in Seti's tomb.
This is all very very intricate Philosophical astrotheological geometry around the celestial pole mythos of Atum-Re . The swaddling clothes and the krst mummy wrappings representing the Orionic transition to the pole, as the transition phase of life to death and recursion. All founded in Enneadic Egypt millennia before Plato and the later Bible.
But this is Greece injected into Judea by Roman redactors that we have been confused by.
It is not to merely make Mary a perpetual virgin. It is to hide the evidence of the Egyptian origins of the Jesus myth.
https://ivanfraser.substack.com/i/209827855/exact-geometry-and-historical-knowledge