And it came to pass that the weirdest religious quote of 2017 occurred when Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore was accused of sexual assault upon girls who were ages 14 and 16 when he was in his early 30s.<\/p>\n
Moore denied this. But State Auditor Jim Ziegler leapt to his fellow Republican\u2019s defense by offering the Washington Examiner\u00a0this head-scratcher: \u201cTake Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus. There\u2019s just nothing immoral or illegal here, maybe just a bit unusual.<\/p>\n
That \u201ctook my breath away,\u201d says Michigan State University\u2019s Christopher Frilingos. Sexual morality aside, Ziegler scuttled a prime tenet of biblical orthodoxy by indicating that the holy couple sired Jesus through normal sexual relations. The Bible\u2019s two separate Nativity accounts specify that Mary was a virgin who conceived miraculously so that Jesus had no mortal father and Joseph was a stepfather or legally adoptive parent.<\/p>\n
That brings to mind another attempted Bible rewrite by the late Jane Schaberg, an ex-nun and feminist \u201cGoddess\u201d devotee teaching at Catholicism\u2019s University of Detroit. Her 1987 book \u201cThe Illegitimacy of Jesus\u201d saw a New Testament cover-up in which Jesus\u2019 biological father raped or seduced Mary while she was engaged to Joseph.<\/p>\n
That harked back to an ancient Jewish tale, included in the Talmud, that Jesus was the \u201cson of Panthera,\u201d supposedly a Roman soldier. It\u2019s possible Jesus\u2019 opponents were leveling such an accusation when they told him \u201cwe are not illegitimate children\u201d (John 8:41) as though Jesus was. Today\u2019s skeptics post such stuff all across the Internet, hoping readers will ignore that the New Testament Gospels are our earliest, thus most reliable, sources.<\/p>\n
Well, then, what about Ziegler\u2019s claim that the pregnant Mary was \u201ca teenager\u201d and Joseph an older \u201cadult\u201d? Frilingos examines this among other questions in \u201cJesus, Mary, and Joseph: Family Trouble in the Infancy Gospels\u201d (University of Pennsylvania Press). He summarized matters in a November 14 article for theconversation.com, where scholars\u00a0rewrite research to make it understandable for general readers.<\/p>\n
The infancy narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke say nothing about the ages of Mary and Joseph. The Ziegler-esque scenario traces back to the \u201cProtoevangelium of James,\u201d one of several apocryphal texts that were devised to fill in the gaps left by the Gospels\u2019 relatively brief Christmas passages. The \u201cJames\u201d legend is dubious since, as Frilingos notes, it was written a century after Matthew and Luke, from which it borrowed some phrases.<\/p>\n
According to \u201cJames,\u201d (the full text is available on the Internet), Mary\u2019s parents, Joachim and Anna, dedicated their daughter to lifelong holy service before she was even born. Therefore, at age three they transferred custody and she was raised by priests at the Jerusalem Temple. When Mary was 12 and becoming marrigeable, the priests were given miraculous signs that designated Joseph to be her future husband.<\/p>\n
Joseph resisted this arranged marriage because \u201cI am an old man<\/span> and she is a young girl<\/span>\u201d so he would face ridicule. Afterward, he shunned all contact with Mary, then reappeared when she was age 16 to discover she was pregnant. After an angel reassured Joseph that Mary miraculously was a virgin, he defended her purity before the priests.<\/p>\n Whatever Joseph\u2019s age might have been, historians say it\u2019s quite plausible Mary was a teen because early marriages were the general rule for maidens in Jewish and other ancient cultures. This made it more likely a couple would benefit by having more children. A Bible encyclopedia reports that shortly after New Testament times, Judaism fixed the minimum ages for marriage at 12 for girls and 13 for boys.<\/p>\n The contention in \u201cJames\u201d that Joseph was \u201can old man\u201d\u00a0related to\u00a0the\u00a0post-biblical but ancient \u201cperpetual virginity\u201d tenet in Catholicism and Orthodoxy. It holds that Mary remained a virgin after giving birth through the rest of her life and never had sexual relations. If husband Joseph was aged that becomes more plausible.<\/p>\n Protestants\u2019 \u201cScripture alone\u201d principle means they are not bound by such non-biblical teachings. In addition, Protestants take literally Matthew 13:55, which speaks of Jesus\u2019 \u201cbrothers\u201d and \u201csisters.\u201d \u2018The common Catholic and Orthodox explanation is that the verse refers to \u201ccousins\u201d or other close relatives, not Mary\u2019s own offspring. Another approach says Joseph was a widower when he married Mary so the siblings were her stepchildren from Joseph\u2019s first marriage.<\/p>\n Protestants also cite Matthew 1:25, which in the U.S. Catholic Bible says Joseph \u201chad no relations with her until<\/span> she bore a son.\u201d The official footnote with this verse states that \u201cthe Greek word translated \u2018until\u2019 does not imply normal marital conduct after Jesus\u2019 birth, nor does it exclude it.\u201d<\/p>\n Further on Mary\u2019s miraculous virginal conception of Jesus (as opposed to her perpetual virginity afterward): The biblical teaching is defended in \u201cWhat Christians Ought to Believe\u201d (2016) by Australian\u00a0evangelical Michael Bird. The latest liberal Protestant reassessment is \u201cA Complicated Pregnancy: Whether Mary Was a Virgin and Why It Matters\u201d (2017) by Kyle Roberts, who teaches at a United Church of Christ seminary in Minnesota.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And it came to pass that the weirdest religious quote of 2017 occurred when Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore was accused of sexual assault upon girls who were ages 14 and 16 when he was in his early 30s. Moore denied this. But State Auditor Jim Ziegler leapt to his fellow Republican\u2019s defense by offering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1275,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n