Stephen T-B

If the money lenders had yelled "Bastard!" at Jesus after he threw his strop in the Temple, might they have been right - legally speaking?

bacht

As in born out of wedlock, an illegitimate child of Mary?

Stephen T-B

Yes

mountainman

Just like Constantine and Helena, only in th case of the boss he actually invented an alternative fraudulent lineage (as did most of the Roman emperors).

Elijah

I don't know if that's actually supposed to be about his momma but kind of relevant.

Stephen T-B

So I suppose if one wantd to be disparaging, one might refer to Jesus as a "bastard demi-god" rather than just a "demi-god" ?

Wedge

Can you think of a demi-god who wasn't a bastard? Seems to be the norm...

Doug Shaver

Probably, if you assume that everything in the gospels is factually correct except for the supernatural parts like the virgin birth. But I don't know any good reason to assume anything like that.

If Jesus really existed, then we know nothing about his parents or their legal relationship. But most people were born legitimately, and so the odds are that he was, too.

Chili

Yes it relevant to say that the child was not born at midnight, midwinter, midlife but was untimely ripped from the temple tramp by an evangelist in broad daylight.

Sheshbazzar

When Mary was "found with child of the Holy Ghost" (Matt 1:18, 20 & Luke 1:34-35)
These birth narratives seem to indicate that "Jesus" did not come into being by being conceived through normal sexual intercourse with any human and earthly father.
The idea of his "virgin" birth seems to be that Mary conceived her son without ever having engaged in sexual intercourse with any man, Joseph only becoming his earthly "father" by virtue his of marrying the as yet "virgin" Mary.
If this was the case, then the child would have no flesh and blood male progenitor, having been spontaneously generated within Mary's womb without any act of sexual intercourse ever involved.
Would such a child, so conceived, actually be illegitimate? or actually a "bastard", being that no "sex act" was involved, and there being no flesh and blood "father" whose "bastard son" that one being so conceived could rightly be?
And Mary, How could she be justly or rightly be accused, judged and deemed a "whore", if as the narratives relate, she had never "known" a man, and remained a virgin at the least until she had married Joseph and had given birth to her first born son?

Certainly this would be a "miraculous" birth, but then Christianity has never had much problem with the accepting of, and boasting of this miracle.

The pregnant question in all of these types of discussions is, does the text indicate that Mary played the whore, by getting knocked up out of wedlock, and then lying about the circumstances of her pregnancy?
No doubt, some would like to successfully put such a creative interpretation upon the story, but does the text at all support such allegations?