Miraculous conception accrued to real people too, if they were famous enough. Alexander the Great was said to be conceived when Zeus took the form of a snake to couple with Olympias. The emperor Augustus was born after his mother fell asleep in the temple of Apollo and was impregnated by the god. Pythagoras and Plato too were sons of Apollo. And as with "the daughters of strange gods," the "great man" legend also applied to great women. In the Egyptian temple of Deir elBahri at Karnak, a relief in praise of Queen Hatshepsut shows her mother seated on a couch alongside the god Amon, who proclaims: "Hatshepsut shall be the name of this my daughter whom I have placed in thy body."
Divine paternity was, in a way, an act of conceptual art: a creative act that took place on the level of mind, not body. This is how sorcerers and seers could believably declare, "I am the son of the living god," a formulation that appeared frequently in Greek magical papyruses. As historian Morton Smith has pointed out, it was not to be taken literally. It was a way of calling down the power of the divine, of saying, "At this moment, I am inspired by, and act and speak for, the god."
But there was one vital difference between the concept of dual paternity in Middle Eastern cultures and in Hellenistic culture. As the idea spread north and west to Athens and then to Rome, it lost its democratic quality. In Israelite culture, as in the Trobriand Islands, everyone was a child of God; in Hellenistic culture, only the great, the powerful, and the high-born. This meant that early Christians outside Palestine had no difficulty with the idea of Jesus being both the son of Joseph and the son of God. Since they lived within the Hellenistic cultural tradition of divinely born great men, they expected it. It was a confirmation of his greatness, a rationalization of their faith.
Which was the biological father was not a question. Nobody imagined, like Yeats, literal sexual intercourse between human and divine. Just as we still use the words "ghost" and "spirit" interchangeably, so the Holy Ghost "coming upon" Maryam in Luke was the spirit of God, not God personified. It was a union of the spirit, not of the flesh. If she had heard the story, Maryam would certainly have understood it this way. She never did hear it, of course: the gospel account wasn't written until decades after her death. But then, she didn't need to hear it. She already knew.
No midwife or healer could possibly work without an understanding of the biology of reproduction. Nor, if she was good at her work, could she ignore the mystery of it. Maryam knew there was no explaining why conception occurred at one time and not another, or why one delivery might be easy and another difficult. And she knew that beyond these was a greater mystery: the sense of awe and wonder she felt anew each time a child emerged into the light of day with all ten of its fingers and all ten of its toes, and the surge of joy inside her each time she heard that first intake of air into newborn lungs and then, on the exhalation, the first loud cry of life.
For all her skill—indeed, because of her skill—she had a strong sense of the mystery inherent in every conception and every birth, of the influence of something more than the rough, urgent couplings of men and women under cover of night. Was the spirit literally there? Did swan's or eagle's or dove's wings beat in frantic accompaniment? Of course not. The spirit was in the idea, in the acknowledgement that every act of conception was an act of both human sexuality and what could be called chance or fate, though as people have throughout the centuries, Maryam preferred to think of it as divine intervention. Conception, birth, survival—all took place be-ezrat ha-shem, with the help of God.
God was the father as God was always the father. But the sole father? Maryam would have laughed at the idea, hiding her laughter in her sleeve, perhaps, so as not to offend, but unable to keep it out of her eyes. No, there was a human father too, and anyone looking for him two thousand years later has to start with the one we are given in the gospels: Joseph.
Joseph is a comforting presence in our imaginations. He is there for Maryam when she needs him—someone to look after her, like a good shepherd. A father to her, it seems, more than to Jesus.
In classic patriarchal fashion, he is always shown bearded. True, all but the most Hellenized men had beards in the Palestine of the time. To be clean-shaven was a Hellenistic affectation, a sign of the urban elite. But beards are comforting; they soften a face, make it seem kinder and wiser. Or perhaps we are biased in this by the fact that God is always personified as bearded, as is Jesus, or that orthodox rabbis and imams are usually bearded, and luxuriantly so—no spiffy little goatees or carefully trimmed three-day fuzz, but luxuriant manes that make a young man seem older and experienced, and an old man seem venerable and infinitely wise.
But above all, a beard hides a face. It is harder to tell who the person is, to read the cues we normally read from facial features such as the set of the lips, the jut of the chin, the angle of the jaw. A beard confers mystery. It is the male equivalent of a veil.
And Joseph is a veiled presence in the New Testament gospels. He never even speaks. He appears hardly at all, though his first appear ance, in Matthew, is surely significant: the Annunciation is to him, not to Mary. Yet the only thing we hear of him throughout Jesus' childhood is as one of "his parents" fetching him from the temple at age twelve. And after that—nothing. He fades into the background, and without us even noticing it, disappears. He is almost the archetype of the absentee father.
Yet knowing practically nothing about him, we like him nonetheless. He's what we want for Maryam. He has the reassuring solidity and stability of the caretaking husband, one who doesn't judge but—with a little prodding from an annunciating angel—accepts her as she is, pregnant.
Yes, definitely a father figure. A perfect human stand-in for the divine father. You would think he would get more appreciation for this, but even in the convent school I went to, the one named after him, he made barely any impression. While Mary was a bright, colorful presence in the school corridors, a flash of radiant blue at practically every turn, there were just a couple of Joseph statues, and they were dull by comparison. He was clothed in monklike brown, the antithesis of his namesake in the coat of many colors.
There was only one hymn devoted to him among the dozens we sang in morning prayers. "Hail, holy Joseph, hail," it went, "husband of Mary, hail. / Chaste as the lily flower in Eden's peaceful vale. / Hail, holy Joseph, hail! Father of Christ esteemed, / Father be thou to those thy foster Son redeemed."
The hymn writer clearly suffered some confusion as to Joseph's precise role, settling in the end on "foster father." This odd phrase makes it sound as though Joseph had never even met his son's mother, but was a stranger brought in to raise the child. Yet it does provide an extra level of remove, forestalling any possibility of broaching the taboo subject of sex. In the convent setting, Joseph had to be as de-sexed as Mary.
Who was he? A carpenter, everybody knows that. Except there would have been little work for a carpenter in a place like Nazareth.
In the west, whole houses are still made of wood, but not around the Mediterranean, and certainly not in the Palestine of two thousand years ago. Peasant houses are always built of what's readily available, and as anyone knows who reads or watches current news reports from the Middle East, what is readily available in Palestine, now as then, is stone. Stones are the one thing besides thorns that Palestine has in abundance. No matter how hard you work at clearing the soil, at moving stones into terraces, walls, and houses, more always get forced up to the surface by the next winter's cold. A field you thought you'd cleared one year is stony again the next.
There were trees, to be sure, but not in the quantity and quality that would support a carpenter, and besides, there was no demand. Few peasants had tables or chairs in their houses. A bed was a reed pallet on the dirt floor; containers were made of clay, storage boxes of stone. And families built their own houses, as they still do in the villages of the West Bank.
Could Joseph have been a wheelwright or cartwright, then, as some scholars have speculated? If he had lived more than a hundred years later, per
haps. But there were no carts in Palestine in his time; the Romans would only begin building roads there in the second century, under the emperor Hadrian. Until then, wheels were not feasible; they would have broken on the stony dirt tracks. Donkeys and mules still held sway, and the camels of the long-distance caravans.
Maybe he made plows? They were wooden, certainly, but again, each family made their own. As in most rural communities still today, farmers were multiply skilled; no farmer who was not could survive. Only when you left the village—when you were forced off the land and had to hire yourself out in the city—did you begin to be determined not by your family and kin, but by a particular skill.
The whole image of Joseph as a carpenter is based on no more than a passing reference in Matthew, when the villagers of Nazareth refer to Jesus as "the carpenter's son." The Aramaic word used for carpenter, nagar, actually meant a craftsman, anything from a mason to a black smith, while its Greek equivalent, tekton, meant a builder, as in the word architect, or arch builder. All these professions would have been in demand not in a small peasant village in the Galilee, but in a city with large building projects such as Jerusalem or Antioch or Athens. A city, that is, such as those where the gospel writers lived.
We do not know the names of the individual men who wrote the New Testament gospels; like most such writing of the time, these books were pseudo-epigraphical—written under the name of a well-known figure from the recent or even the distant past, like the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, or the Book of Enoch. But we do know that their authors were part of the Hellenic world of Antioch, Ephesus, and Athens, as was their audience. They wrote in Greek for Greek speakers, which is how Matthew could create an arch builder in a small Middle Eastern village where no buildings were so grand as to have arches. His Joseph is essentially a city man transplanted by authorial fiat to a Galilee village. And, as it were, abandoned there.
Joseph's main function, in Luke as well as in Matthew, seems to be to establish Jesus' lineage not merely as "the carpenter's son," but as a descendant of King David—a descent that would make Jesus' birth accord with Hebrew biblical prophecy. Yet the angelic annunciation in Matthew ensures that Joseph will be a husband in name, but not in biological fact: that he will, in essence, be an escort for Mary, not a real husband. Stranger still, in Mark, now recognized as the earliest gospel, Joseph's existence is not even implied, let alone named. Instead, Jesus is referred to as "the son of Mary." This is a phrase that may seem natural enough today, but in first-century Palestine, where children carried the names of their male ancestors, it would have been highly unnatural.
Then there is the way Jesus refers to himself: not as the "son of Joseph," nor, for that matter, "son of Mary" or even "son of God," but "son of man." This is a direct translation of the Aramaic bar-enash, which could be used to indicate simply any man, or an anonymous man—son of all men and no man in particular—or, as with the modern Hebrew ben-adam (literally "son of Adam" or "son of the earth"), a good man or "a mensch." The one thing that is for sure is that it does not refer to Joseph; Jesus never refers to him at all, let alone speaks to him directly.
Joseph begins to sound suspiciously like a fiction. It is probably not surprising, then, that the most intriguing explanation for his near absence in the New Testament is a fictional one. In The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Nobel-winning novelist Jose Saramago has Mary conventionally married to Joseph, and Jesus conventionally born. The boy is just twelve when a friend of Joseph's goes from Nazareth to Sepphoris to sell a mule, and gets caught up in a riot. Fearing that his friend may be in danger, Joseph gathers up his courage and goes to Sepphoris himself to look for him. His fears are well-founded: the friend is dead. Worse, the authorities are rounding up anyone they find in the streets. Joseph is arrested, and in short order, without benefit of trial or appeal, is crucified along with hundreds of others in the classic Roman method of collective punishment. This becomes not merely an omen of what will happen to his son, but an essential motivating factor. Where the father is crucified by chance, for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the son will choose his crucifixion, thus giving meaning to his father's death.
Yet despite even Saramago's best efforts, Joseph remains a shadow character. He is a mechanical story device more than a person. Surely then we must ask if he ever did really exist. Could this good, bearded man in fact have been a metaphorical beard—an escort who exists to divert public attention from someone who for one reason or another needs to remain secret? Could his presence hide that of another? Or the absence of another?
VII
One moment, she is free—a shepherd girl on the hillside. The next. . There is no next. It is as though she has suddenly been taken into another world, another state of being. One that has nothing to do with her existence in this world.
It feels like a blow, a hard blow at the nape of her neck. And then comes the sensation of falling, tumbling and twisting as she goes until it seems that she will fall forever, down into a deep night of being, a dark night of the soul. She knows what is happening, but it takes place so fast that she has no time to react. Not even to protest, let alone struggle.
The weight is the worst of it. It bears down on her. It pins her to the ground and smothers her like a huge dark cloud until she can't speak, can't cry out, has no voice at all. A giant hand seems to cover her face—her eyes, her nose, her mouth. She is suffocating. No sight, no voice, no breath in her for so long that she is sure she will never see, speak, breathe again.
And then, as quickly as it began, it is over. The weight lifts. Light floods her eyes, so bright she has to close them. If there is the sound of someone scrambling quickly away over the hillside, she doesn't hear; she is too busy breathing. Her lungs surge in relief as she gulps air in deep, painful gasps.
Gradually, her heart stops thumping so hard inside her chest, and pieces of the world come back into being. The rustle of the breeze in the scrub oaks. The jagged edges of rough pebbles between her shoulder blades. Aflybuzzing. She lies quietly, thinking that if she can sense these familiar things, all will be well.
Something rustles nearby. She hears a muted murmuring, then a soft bleat. A wet snout nuzzles into her shoulder. A rough tongue licks at her face. She opens her eyes to see the liquid eyes of a lamb staring down into her own, as though willing her back into this world.
She sits up, looks around. Nobody in sight. If it weren't for the pain in her head and between her thighs, she could almost have imagined it all. Just a moment, after all. One long, dark moment in this brilliant sunlit day. And yet she knows that this one moment has irrevocably changed everything. That nothing in her life will ever be the same. Nothing in the world. The seed of something utterly new has taken root deep within her, and it is hers now, hers alone, to care for, to tend, to release into the world.
We don't want to think it happened this way. If Joseph was not the father, then better by far to let the romantic imagination run wild and see the innocence of youthful love, even a kind of Romeo and Juliet scenario: a boy from a family in a feud with Maryam's own, perhaps, or worse, from the garrison town of Sepphoris, just a few miles away yet enemy territory. The Hollywood-soaked imagination conjures up two teenagers under the olive trees, under the stars, under the full moon . . .
But there was almost certainly no romance. The concept did not exist—would not come into being, in fact, until the Middle Ages. People didn't marry for love; they married for advantage and inheritance. Whether high-born Roman elite or low-born Palestinian peasants, marriage was arranged by others, and became an arrangement between husband and wife. If you were fortunate, love might develop, but it would be the love of fondness and respect, not of romance. That was an unimaginable luxury.
Instead, we are forced to consider a far greater likelihood—the complete antithesis of the romantic fantasy, and one far harder for the modern mind to deal with—and that is that Maryam became pregnant as a result of rape.
The initial reaction to t
he very idea is horror. The mind revolts. To even think in such terms seems an insult. But given the place and the time, we do need to consider the possibility, however unwillingly. And we may find that on closer examination, it is anything but insulting.
The gospel account of the Annunciation to Mary can itself be seen as raising the issue. "The Holy Spirit will come upon you," says the angel Gabriel, "and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow." The image of Mary being overshadowed is disturbing enough. But in a Hellenistic setting, a ghostly presence bearing down on her like a dark cloud would immediately bring to mind images of Zeus swooping down on human maidens in the guise of wind or rain, swan or eagle. Or in this case, dove.
Because the Greek myths are "classical," we tend to blur the basic fact that what Zeus was doing was rape. The human virgins were mere objects of his desire with no will of their own, no voice in the matter, no ability to repel his attack. They were essentially terrorized by a god, yet would be honored rather than dishonored for it. And their children, products of rape, would become the semi-divine heroes of legend.
Many biblical scholars have seen Mary's response to the Annunciation as a radical act of affirmation. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord," she says to Gabriel. "Be it done unto me according to thy word." Without Mary's assent, they argue, the very existence of Jesus, let alone of Christianity and the last two thousand years of western culture, would have been impossible. They interpret her words as a queenly "Let it be." But that is indeed an interpretation. What she says can as easily be read as a cowed "Yes, sir."
This is why Catholic feminists like Mary Daly see the conventional image of Mary as setting her up as the model rape victim. Meek and mild, Mary assents to the inevitable. She has no will of her own to exert, and no active role; what will happen will be done to her, not by her. She lacks even a voice of her own, for the Magnificat, her hymn of praise following the Annunciation, is a direct adaptation of the hymn of Hannah in the first book of Samuel, much of it almost word for word.
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