Maksutov wrote:Mary cheated. Mary lied.
But let's invent a religion, a full blown theology to some how rationalize this.
I used to know a bit about New Testament scholarship a few decades ago. Without looking everything up again, and then going through the updating process, I'll just try to say what I find in my memory banks.
And that is that the 'infancy narratives' - that is, the parts of the gospel narratives that talk about the birth of Jesus- are a completely different kind of document from those parts that talk about his activity between the ages of about 30 to 33. In those later parts we are told that he had a mother, Mary, who may have been near him at the end, and also that some people in Nazareth thought he was 'the carpenter's son'. There may be some real historical content in all that.
But all the rest - contemporaneously claimed virgin birth, stories of angelic visitations, visits of shepherds and Magi - are very unlikely to resemble the actual circumstances of his birth. That stuff was narrated by people who felt that they needed some kind of background to this person who was, they had concluded, the promised Messiah. It was created because people had already made Jesus the centre of what was at least an active Jewish heresy. Christianity certainly did not originate FROM any claim made by the young Mary about the paternity of the child she was carrying, which we have no real reason to suppose people did not at the time think had been conceived with her husband quite normally. It was more the other way round.
Those more up to date in the field are welcome to correct me.
