Who was Jesus' baby daddy? What would make a woman not remember getting knocked up? Multiple personalities would explain it. Mary could have had a slutty alternate personality to balance out her saintly side. She would not have remembered what the slutty alter did while she was indisposed. Can't remember how you got pregnant? Must have been God.

The real miracle was Joseph's level of credulity, but he would have been quite young then. Besides, what's a guy to do in that situation? Joseph was like we'll just compartmentalize that. Problem solved.

And, 2000-year-old mystery solved!

Or, she could have made a baby with her husband in the entirely normal way, but we can't have that because women can't be sexual beings, right? Hence, the myth.

Or, it's all bullshit.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/27/2024 01:44PM by Maude.

As fate would have it, NYTimes just published an article on Jesus' paternity. It's paywalled, so sorry about that. Your local public library may have an e-subscription that you can sign in to if you have a library card. Worth checking. SLC has one.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/opinion/virgin-birth-jesus.html

Article by Nicholas Kristof, interviewing Elaine Pagels.

From the article:

K: Merry Christmas! This is a time when Christianity celebrates miracles and wonder — and “Miracles and Wonder” is the title of your fascinating forthcoming book. It raises questions about the virgin birth of Jesus, even pointing to ancient evidence that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier, possibly by rape. But before I ask you about that, I want to be respectful of readers who have a deep faith and may be upset by this line of inquiry. How do we follow the historical research without causing offense?

P: I love these stories from the Gospels. The skies opened up when I heard them. They picture human lives drawn into divine mystery: “God in man made manifest,” as one Christmas carol says. But at a certain point I had to ask: What do they mean? What really happened? They are not written simply as history; often they speak in metaphor. We can take them seriously without taking everything literally.

K: So let’s go back to the Nativity. Of the four Gospels, two describe the virgin birth of Jesus, and two don’t mention it. The Gospel of Mark has people of Galilee referring to Jesus as the son of Mary, when the norm was to describe somebody as the son of his father. So did the neighbors growing up with Jesus regard him as fatherless?

P: We don’t know. Mark is the earliest Gospel written; Matthew and Luke are basically just revising it. Mark has no suggestion of a virgin birth. Instead, he says that neighbors called Jesus “son of Mary.” In an intensely patriarchal society, this suggests that Jesus had no father that anyone knew about, even one deceased. Yet even without a partner, Mary has lots of children: In Mark, Jesus has four other brothers and some sisters, with no recognized father and no genealogy.

K: You note that Matthew and Luke both borrowed heavily from Mark’s account but also seem embarrassed by elements of it, including the paternity question. Is your guess that they added the virgin birth to reduce that embarrassment?

P: Yes, but this is not just my guess. When Matthew and Luke set out to revise Mark, each added an elaborate birth story — two stories that differ in almost every detail. Matthew adds a father named Joseph, who, seeing his fiancée pregnant, and not with his child, decides to break the marriage contract. Luke, writing independently, pictures an angel astonishing a young virginal girl, announcing that “the Holy Spirit” is about to make her pregnant.

=====================

Pagels goes on to describe the evidence from early Christian (actually, anti-Christian, trying to cast aspersions on the Jesus story) that Jesus was reputedly fathered by a Roman soldier identified as Panthera. Roman soldiers did indeed father a lot of children, as usually happens with invading armies, and there is some evidence that there was a soldier named Panthera stationed near Nazareth.

Pagels is a well-respected biblical scholar (translation: I've heard of her), so her research is worth a look if you are into that sort of thing.

Edit to Add: The final sentence of the article has a lovely thought:

As the poet Seamus Heaney writes,
“Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles.”



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/26/2024 09:52PM by Brother Of Jerry.

Jesus is pretend

Sort of what I was thinking, actually. We have an entire history built up around a person who may or may not have actually existed, and even if he did exist, parts of the narrative may be completely fictional. In fact, some parts are pretty much certainly fictional, or, at best, heavily metaphorical.

Yet we go on concocting ever more nuanced "facts" to support/amplify the narrative.

I think Jesus is a mythological character created by the Essenes to publicize their gnostic doctrines that carried over from their roots in ancient Egypt. An insular desert cult can't come at that directly. Having their sock puppet Jesus call them desert simpletons was a nice touch.

Assuming the culture that built the pyramids really did have higher knowledge, as people like Graham Hancock claim, that knowledge or divine wisdom would have been encapsulated in the gospels.

Christianity introduced personal autonomy to a world of slavery and ultimately led to the free world of today. More importantly, the free world of tomorrow as the enemies of freedom continue to lose their grip on power.

So yeah, Jesus is as real as Gandalf. It doesn't mean the stories can be disregarded. They are wisdom from a lost civilization.

Christianity leading to freedom would be news to many of the indigenous people of the Americas.

bradley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Who was Jesus' baby daddy? What would make a woman
> not remember getting knocked up? Multiple
> personalities would explain it. Mary could have
> had a slutty alternate personality to balance out
> her saintly side. She would not have remembered
> what the slutty alter did while she was
> indisposed. Can't remember how you got pregnant?
> Must have been God.
>
> The real miracle was Joseph's level of credulity,
> but he would have been quite young then.

Yeah. As so often, it's the female who is scorned. **She's** the one with the "slutty personality". The poor guy - so taken advantage of.

Yes, as exampled by blaming everything on Eve.

They always find witches to burn. Women are conditioned to accept it.

Bottom line.

If god was the father of Jesus, then Jesus was not of the Davidic line and hence not eligible to be king of Israel.

Therefore he couldn't be the Messiah.

Really hard to keep all the loose ends tied up, isn't it! Unless of course you want it to be true desperately. Lucky for them there was no DNA testing back then.

Bwahahahahahahaha! DNA testing would have been awesome back then. We'd know, and everyone else would be in denial. The genealogies are done pretty badly. With endless genealogies for each person proving that entire families were of the same tree, and all.

The whole thing about a woman not being "immaculate" enough if she had already had sex has been damaging enough through the ages for women.
Purity = absence of sex when (most) religion judges women. Having God pick an "unlicked cupcake" justifies and mirrors the behavior of men running the religion. It's disgusting.

"Purity = absence of sex when (most) religion judges women"

Oh. So that's why ugly people are so pure? :)

You're bad!
Just say sweet spirit.

Bingo. Honestly, how many RM's would choose a average looking, totally proper, chaste mormon girl over a smokin' hot blonde with a semi questionable reputation?