She feels like climbing high above the village to the top of the ridge and ululating so that the whole world can hear. Imagines the piercing trill echoing through the hills, proclaiming her pregnancy. But she knows it would be bad luck to do that; she needs to be patient. First, the child must be born, alive and healthy, and then it must survive the first dangerous weeks of life. Forty days must pass before a celebration can be held. Yet Maryam has no doubt. In her heart, she is already celebrating.
"You are carrying a boy," Salome says firmly. "Hands across the belly mean a boy."
Maryam is surprised; she'd assumed it would be a girl, and that she would do for this child what Salome had done for her—bring into being another in the long line of wise women. Salome laughs. "This is how wise men are born," she says. "The sons of wise women can take the knowledge of women into the world of men, and change it. You will teach him as I have taught you. Teach him well, and he will teach others." Soon Maryam is too heavy to go out on the hillsides with the flocks. Salome takes charge of her, setting her to work in the courtyard pounding wheat and beans and herbs, cooking, weaving. When the old woman sits back on her heels to rest, it seems to her that she can see her granddaughter change by the day from girl to woman, heavy-breasted and large with life. Once a week, she spreads virgin olive oil on the girl's belly to ease the expanding skin. She strokes the cloudy green lotion in small circles, each leading on to the next in spirals all around the belly, encircling the child within. Salome talks silently to the child through her touch, sure that her words reach through his mother's flesh, into the womb. She can feel him move beneath her hands, already eager for the knowledge in them. Maryam feels it too. And she knows that when his time comes, he will slip quietly and quickly into the world with ten fingers and ten toes, perfectly formed, protected by the great goddess of childbirth.
Their kinfolk have already set about finding a husband for Maryam, a father to adopt her child and give him his name. Meanwhile, as Salome says, "A father there has been, and another father there will be. Between the two is God the father."
The absence of the first father is no cause for concern. His work is done. They say there are three partners in the creation of life: the father, the mother, and God, whom they call "the Name" to avoid the forbidden act of saying "Yahweh" out loud. The father provides the white stuff, the sperm, and out of this are built the bones and the sinews, the nails, the white matter of the brain, and the white of the eye. The mother provides the red, the menstrual blood and the blood of birth, and this builds the skin and the flesh and the hair and the black of the eye. But it is Yahweh who makes the infant truly live, who gives the spirit and the soul and the use of all five senses: the sight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears, the scent in the nostrils, the taste in the mouth, the touch of skin on skin, hand on hand, mouth on breast. It is Yahweh who knits all these together and gives understanding and thought. And when the time comes for a person to die, it is Yahweh who takes his portion back.
"The man lies with the woman, and the Name creates," says Salome, smiling, for who knows when a child will be conceived? A man and a woman can lie together for years and nothing will happen; others can lie together just once, and the woman is pregnant. Sometimes Yahweh plays his part, sometimes not, and there is no knowing why one time he does, and another he doesn't.
They say too that a woman conceives when the angel Gabriel kneads soil into a small ball and plants it in her when her husband comes to her at night; but when the soil is infertile, so dry it's mere dust, then there is nothing into which Yahweh can breathe spirit. Salome just smiles. Let them believe what they will; one explanation is as good as another. She knows that the peasant life is hard on a woman's body, and that malnutrition and disease work against fertility as surely as the whims of the divine. Her herbs can help make a woman's body more receptive to conception, but even the wisest of midwives must acknowledge how much remains unknown. For what is wisdom without humility? No longer wisdom, but delusion, a closing of the mind to the unknown.
A father there will indeed be. So many women die in childbirth that there are always widowers needing young able-bodied girls for wives, whether from Nazareth itself or from a larger village like the Galilee Bethlehem to the west. This is how marriage is done—the wife just out of adolescence, with many years of childbearing ahead of her, and the man older, twice her age, able to set up his own household within the hamula, the family clan. It is a good arrangement for children, and a bad one for the women who survive childbirth and live on to become widows, their husbands and children dead long before them, like Salome.
It will be arranged, as all marriages are arranged. Kinsmen from either side will meet, drink wine mixed with water, talk amiably until they come to an agreement. Of course the father they find will not be the one who lay with Maryam when she became pregnant. Her child will inherit nothing, even if he is a boy, and even though her firstborn. That is understood. But there will be a pallet to sleep on, a reed canopy to sleep under, food to eat, other children to call brother and sister.
This is how Maryam will be looked after, because she is not only a daughter of Israel and a daughter of Yahweh, but also a daughter of Nazareth, and the villagers look after their own. And like every child born here, her son will be bar-Natzrat, a son of Nazareth. And bar enash, son of man, a human being. And bar-ebhin, a son of god, as they all are children of god.
Maryam is pregnant, this we know. But how exactly she became pregnant is another story—or more accurately, several possible stories.
"A biography may be considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand," Virginia Woolf once wrote. She exaggerated, of course, but we get the point: to limit any person to a single neatly explainable package is to create a fiction. We are all far too complex for that, and it is precisely that complexity—the unexplainable contradictions in our lives—that makes us interesting. And human.
The same applies to events. In what has become the paradigm of multiple points of view, the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa contented himself with "merely" four conflicting accounts in his classic Rashomon, which can be seen as the biography of an event.
The first line of the film, repeated three times, is "I don't understand." Under the huge Rashomon gate, during a violent rainstorm, those taking shelter hear four radically different accounts of a rape and murder: a bandit's confession to the crime, the raped woman's testimony, the story of the murdered man (via a medium), and the account of a woodsman who, by chance, has witnessed it all. Each successive version is utterly convincing. Each seems that it can only be the truth. And so each raises ever increasing doubts as to the reliability of human testimony. What is true and what do we merely convince ourselves is true, or represent as true because it's how we want it to have been?
Crime investigators know just how fallible memory can be, whether due to eagerness to produce facts, to mistaken impressions, to self-aggrandizement, or to self-interest. This, Kurosawa implies, is the nature of humanity. It is what makes our stories so complex, so compelling, and so inherently unreliable. Yet if this seems a dark take on human nature, he provides redemption at the end of his film. As the storm eases off, the sheltering men hear the cry of an abandoned newborn. The woodsman decides to adopt the infant—what's one more mouth to feed, he says—and walks off into the faint post-storm sunshine, the child cradled in his arms.
The ambiguity of the Rashomon story is precisely what makes it so powerful. It resonates in the same way that classic myths do. "No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens out into a fan of a thousand segments," says classicist Roberto Calasso. "Everything that happens, happens this way, or that way, or this other way. And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of the same cloth."
And if only one version of a mythical event survives? Then, says Calasso, "it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to
trace out that invisible shadow in our minds."
Over the centuries, Maryam's conception of Jesus has been made into such a single-version event. Though it is often called a mystery, it is in fact quite the opposite, for to advocate a definitive "this is how it happened, this way and no other" is to deny mystery altogether—not only Maryam's, but the mystery of any life, the imponderables that make us human.
Mystery is not in what we know, or even in what we believe, but in what we think may be so. Mystery is wonder, literally, in the sense that we can say, "I wonder . . ." If we can keep our minds open, rejecting the security of conviction and forgoing certainty for possibility, we may then—perhaps—approach what could be called truth.
Truth is always an evolving idea, wrote William James in his essay on pragmatism. It is always temporary, and always constructed from our own experience. "The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no further experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing point towards which we imagine all our temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with the completely wise man, and with absolutely complete experience. Meanwhile we have to live by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood."
And yet there does exist another way of approaching the matter of the conception of Jesus, one far closer to that of Maryam's time. As in Calasso's description of the Greek myths, there may be more than one truth, even several truths, each equally valid in a very different way and on a very different level of reality. And each one may perhaps point us toward a greater, perfect, impossible truth such as James talked about.
True believers and true skeptics alike will have a hard time with such an approach. But to quote James again, "so far as man stands for anything, and is productive and originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe."
Who was the father of Maryam's child? The largest "maybe" of all is both the most widely held theory and, at least on the face of it, the most impossible: that the father was God.
To believe this would seem to be a matter of faith, way beyond the bounds of historical inquiry. But the need to retain an open mind works both ways—not just on the part of the faithful toward the evidence of reason, but also on the part of the rational toward the evidence of faith. Unless a reader is so deeply committed to atheism that it has itself become an article of religious belief, there may be more in the idea of divine paternity than many of us suspect.
Conception, despite all our scientific knowledge, still has a certain element of divine mystery. Television nature programs refer to "the miracle of birth," and even in the age of genetic engineering, every woman pregnant for the first time feels the same tender amazement Maryam felt as she stared down at her swollen belly. When the baby kicks inside the womb, the first-time father-to-be smiles in bashful pride, as though he can't quite believe what he has done. The word for what the parents feel at that moment is still awe. In this most physical of moments, they touch the metaphysical.
"Blessed be the Name," said Salome, and this is the ritual phrase still used in modern Hebrew: baruch ha-shem, God be blessed. Among religious and Sephardic Jews in particular, it is almost a verbal tic, like saying "Bless you" when someone sneezes. In Arabic it is used the same way, to indicate that everything's fine, or to express relief or joy at good news. "Allah be blessed, she is pregnant," they still say in Palestinian Arab villages, echoing the gospel "Blessed art thou among women."
Now as two thousand years ago, the divine haunts both language and thought in the Middle East. The Hebrew be-ezrat ha-shem, "with the help of God," gets tacked onto any hope for the future, large or small, as does the Arabic insh-Allah, "by the will of Allah." Both are gestures of humility, acknowledgements of the limits of human purpose.
But God's help is one thing; God's sperm another. An act of intercourse between the human and the divine, resulting in the birth of a child both human and divine? To take the idea literally borders on obscenity. The question is, who does indeed take it literally?
Anthropologist Edmund Leach tackled exactly this question when he discussed the belief in virginal conception among the Trobriand islanders. Earlier anthropologists had interpreted this belief as simple ignorance of physiology. Leach had a sharp reply. "What seems to me interesting," he said, "is not so much the ignorance of the aborigines as the naivete of the anthropologists." The only way an anthropologist could take such stories at face value was if they matched "his own private fantasy of the natural ignorance of childish savages."
Indeed, when asked, the islanders freely acknowledged the role of sexual intercourse in conception. The women, who were less involved in religious ritual, said that conception was the result of sex with a man; the men said it was both sex and the intervention of the divine. So far as they were concerned, said Leach, "a child is of the same legal lineage as the holy spirit which magically enters the mother's body by an unnatural route at the moment of conception, while the child's human substance and appearance derives from the mother's husband."
Doctrines about conception without male insemination do not stem from innocence and ignorance, Leach pointed out. "On the contrary, they are consistent with theological argument of the greatest subtlety. If we put so-called primitive beliefs alongside sophisticated ones and treat the whole lot with equal philosophical respect, we shall see that they constitute a set of variations around a common structural theme: the metaphysical topography of the relationship between gods and men."
As in the twentieth-century Trobriand Islands, so too in first-century Palestine. Maryam lived in a place and time when the metaphysical element in human conception was publicly acknowledged. All human birth was divinely empowered, and every child was thus a son or daughter of God.
The idea of God the father was so intrinsic a part of the culture that it was fused into the names of the Hebrew bible: Yoav ("Yo/Yahweh is my father"), Eliav ("my god is my father"), Aviel ("my father is god Abram ("exalted father"), Abraham ("merciful father"), Aviram ("my father is exalted").
The paternal metaphor continues in well-known Jewish prayers such as the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead: "May the prayers and supplications of all Israel be acceptable before their father who is in heaven." The Lord's Prayer, beginning with "Our father who art in heaven," is thus solidly in the Jewish tradition, as is Jesus himself, who consistently refers to God not as his own personal father but as the father of all: "your father" and "our father."
Nobody who heard Jesus use these phrases would have been so naive as to imagine that he meant that everyone was conceived through divine insemination. Paternity was understood as a matter of identity. And it came in many different forms, not just biology. In Rome, for instance, adoption was as accepted a method of creating an heir as procreation. The voluntary father-son bond was as strong as the biological one, if not even stronger because actively chosen on the part of the father. Throughout the peasant cultures of the Mediterranean meanwhile, the patriarch of an extended family was considered the father of everyone in it.
In both Hebrew and Aramaic, "son of" was regularly used in the same way as "citizen of" or "member of," much as it is used today in such disparate American organizations as Bnei Brith—"sons of the covenant"—and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Similarly, when the prophet Malachi called a heathen woman "the daughter of a strange god," he meant that she was from a people who worshipped another god. And when the Essenes talked of an apocalyptic battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, they weren't envisioning a sci-fi/fantasy battle, but a war between the enlightened and the benighted.
All this would have been clear to anyone living in the Middle East, where family relationships—not only father, but also mother, brother, sister, and cousin—were and still are used to refer to close ties other than blood ones. Ties as close as blood, that is. And it would have been equally clear to anyone living in the Hellenistic world, wher
e dual paternity—divine and human—had long been established as part of the legend of great men and heroes.
Perhaps the most famous instance of divine paternity in Greek myth is Helen of Troy, apparently conceived when Leda was raped by Zeus in the guise of a swan. That is the premise of the W. B. Yeats poem "Leda and the Swan," known above all for its voyeuristic quality:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
And that's just the beginning. Yeats goes on to describe "her loosening thighs" and "a shudder in the loins" before the swan finally lets go. It is as explicit a sexual act between human and divine as there could be, more so even than the renowned ecstasies of Teresa of Avila. But in fact it's doubtful if Homer or any other Greek ever intended such a lascivious vision, for the full version of the legend makes it clear that Leda had sex with her husband the same night she was raped by Zeus. Helen of Troy was the result of dual paternity: her physical father, and the spirit of Zeus.
In nearly every instance of gods siring legendary humans, they worked with men, not instead of them. Theseus was indeed the son of Poseidon, but he was conceived when both Poseidon and a human lover lay with his mother on the same night. Asculepius, the human who would become the god of healing, was the son of Apollo, but he was conceived when his mother lay with both her husband and the god at the same time. And many human offspring of Zeus, the master of disguise, were conceived when he took on the simplest and most deceptive guise of all: that of a man. Hercules was born after Zeus lay with his mother in the form of her husband, for instance, and Dionysus was conceived when Zeus took the form of a man to rape the maiden Semele.
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