Toto

The real storyThe press and the bloggers focus on the claim that Mary was raped by a Roman Soldier during the Jesus uprising, and that Verhoeven produced "Basic Instinct."

Bill Donohue has some choice comments at that link.

AP wire

More on that Roman soldier

There is a description of Verhoeven and the first version of his proposed movie in Charlotte Allen's sardonic take on the Jesus Seminar Away With the Manger.

Zeichman

Uh... nice. I always wondered how THIS guy got in the Jesus Seminar. He seems to be fodder for the evangelical claim that the JS is made up of self-proclaimed scholars. Ah well.

brianrein

If this whole story is based on Celsus' account (from the second century I think), how can this guy justify trusting Celsus (one source) to that degree? Especially when all we have is Origen's quote?

Petergdi

Suppose that Matthew had no idea that "parthenos" would be taken to mean "virgin" in his quote of Isaiah 7:14. There is no reason to suppose that a Jew reading LXX Isaiah would be likely to think that "parthenos" meant anything other than "young woman." If you do so, you might be surprised to find that nativity story in Matthew looks a lot like an answer to the slander recorded in Book 1, Chapter 28 of Against Celsus.

The substance of the slander was this: Jesus's mother was a country girl from an insignificant Jewish village who worked as a spinner. She committed adultery with a soldier named Panthera and became pregnant. Her husband, a carpenter, divorced her and made a real scene of it. Jesus later went to Egypt where he learnt magic.

Matthew answers the slander in a very interesting and surprising way. (Remember that we are working on the supposition that Matthew did not intend to imply a virgin birth.) Mary did get pregnant from a man not her husband during the period of her betrothal. Matthew is silent on the details. Joseph intended to divorce her, but being a just man was going to be very quiet about it. An angel appeared to him in a dream and told him to go ahead with the marriage because the child was holy. After the marriage, Joseph did not sleep with Mary until after Jesus was born.

I think that this means that by the rules that Matthew understands, Joseph does count as the father even if he is not Jesus's biological father. Matthew mentions Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and (Bathsheba) the wife of Uriah in the genealogy to remind the reader that any possible Davidic messiah will have scandalous things in his ancestry.

To the charge that Jesus was from an insignificant village, Matthew replies that Jesus, like David, was born in Bethlehem, which may have been a very small place indeed, but he can remind them of the prophecy from Micah. In case they meant Nazareth, Matthew jokes that Nazareth is a city, and he comes up with an outrageous prophecy to top it off.

Matthew does allow that Jesus went to Egypt, but for political reasons and certainly not to learn magic. Interestingly, he takes his prophecy for the flight into Egypt from the Hebrew of Hosea instead of the LXX. Matthew certainly regards Jesus's miracles as a result of faith in God and not magic at all, but he points out that magoi from the east (certainly not Egypt) paid him homage as an infant so that Jesus could be in no need of learning the arts of magoi.

I don't think it is at all safe to assume that there is any truth to the Panthera story, but if this interpretation is correct: it would appear to show that the Panthera story as it appears in Against Celsus predates the Gospel of Matthew and was understood at the time as being about the Jesus described in Matthew. Later versions of the anti-Jesus story allow that Joseph really could trace his ancestry all the way to back to David; so it may be a feature of this type of argument that you admit any of the other side's account that you can render harmless.

John 8:41 might also be taken to support the idea that the story (or something similar) was current in the first century.

Peter.

Joan of Bark

Good post, Peter. Welcome to the forum.

Joan of Bark

BTW, the idea of a Mary raped by a Roman soldier also appears in Nino Ricci's novel Testament.

Jeffrey Gibson

It also figures prominently in Jane Shaberg's Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives (or via: amazon.co.uk) (Biblical Seminar Series, No 28).

Jeffrey

brianrein

Wow, thank you very much for that post, Peter.

Doug Shaver

I find the rape story only slightly more credible than the virgin birth story, but just because it doesn't presume any miracle. The evidence for either one is worthless.

mens_sana

Yellow journalism was not new, even in the 1st century, and there have been "adepts" in every generation.