That is how it is in the world of the gospels, the books that literally mean "good news." And in the real world? In Maryam's violence-ridden first-century Palestine, rape was so common that it began to put the whole system of patrilinear descent and inheritance in doubt. When the Mishnaic rabbis decided two centuries later to change the patrilinear definition of Jewishness and to make Jewish descent matrilinear, they were probably making a practical accommodation to the realities of the time. In the face of uncertainty as to who the father was, at least the mother was known for sure.
Early anti-Christian diatribes contain persistent rumors that Maryam was raped. The most common candidate for the rapist is a Roman soldier named Panthera—a suitably predatory name. In fact it was not only a fairly common Greek name, but also the name of a Roman legion. This legion was indeed sent south out of Syria into Palestine in both 4 B.C. and 6 A.D., the two years scholars now consider the earliest and latest possibilities for the year in which Maryam gave birth. And where the Roman legions went, they raped.
Seventeen centuries before the Enlightenment and nineteen centuries before the first Geneva Convention, war was a matter of all-out predation. Rape and pillage were as standard procedure as hand-to-hand combat. What could be taken was taken, whether life, food, loot, or sex. Soldiers didn't fight so much as rampage, instituting a reign of terror whose goal was total subjugation of the civilian population. And indeed rape as a means of warfare still continues, most infamously in recent history in the former Yugoslavia, where it was used not just as a sadistic exercise of power, but also as a means of collective punishment and terrorization.
The mind revolts, yes. Most of us can accept that Maryam was not a physical virgin. But raped? "Anyone else, perhaps, but not her," we say to ourselves. Just to consider the idea forces us to abandon the construct of a desexualized figurehead built up over the centuries, and to see her as a real woman. Too real. It breaks through the idealized image to a horribly vivid reality, and however ready we may think we are for that, some remnant of traditional piety reaches out to hold us back.
But to think of Maryam raped is not completely negative; it forces us to re-examine our attitudes toward rape itself. If it offends and violates our traditional image of her, this is exactly what rape is about: the deepest kind of psychological as well as physical violation, not only of a woman's body, but also of the terms of her existence in this world. All sense of safety—gone. All sense of her body as her own—gone. All sense of herself as anything other than the possible object of someone else's violence—gone.
Susan Brownmiller's pioneering Against Our Will revealed rape for what it is: not an act of sexual desire, but one of violent aggression. The very fact that there can be deep offense in the idea of Maryam raped reveals how little our attitudes have really changed since Brownmiller wrote that book in 1975. Some part of us still conceives of rape as a shameful kind of sexuality on the woman's part: some part of us still sees it as dirtying, dishonoring, and degrading the woman.
This may be why we find rape so much more offensive for Maryam than for the western woman who makes her way to the nearest rape crisis center, or even for the political prisoner who is tortured by rape. The last way we want to think of her is as dirtied, dishonored, and degraded. Nor should we. For our sense of offense may be the means by which we can finally reach out of our moral numbness about rape. Just as there is no good reason to collude with rapists by thinking of any raped woman as dirtied and degraded, so too with Maryam. To think of her as such is the real dishonor, not only to her but to the millions of women throughout the world who have been, are being, and will be raped.
In fact, Maryam raped could be a far more powerful symbol than the conventional one of her as inviolate, because one thing is clear: if she was indeed raped, she refused to be victimized by it. She refused to feel shame. When she found herself pregnant, she had the power to terminate the pregnancy—as a healer, she knew how—but decided instead to carry the child to term, to give birth to him, and to raise him as her own: "the son of Mary."
She would grace him with the name Yeshua: Iesu in Greek, and thus Jesus in English. In Hebrew, the name uses the abbreviated form of Yahweh—Yah—and means "Yah saves." And it would be an extraordinarily appropriate name for the child of a raped woman. In Deuteronomy, if a man rapes a betrothed girl in open country, he is held guilty but she is not, because even though she cried for help, en moshia la—"there was nobody to save her." What an amazing gesture, in that case, to defy the victim model of the raped woman by naming the child as a salvation. The act that was intended to shame is transformed into pride, violence into tenderness. Grace is created out of disgrace.
This is surely the essence of Christianity as Jesus preached it. The transmutation of opposites is the basis not only of the Sermon on the Mount—shame into pride, violence into tenderness, disgrace into grace, distrust into trust—but of much of his teaching. The poor shall be rich in spirit, the rich cursed by their wealth. Sinners shall be blessed, and the despised shall be honored. Those who weep shall laugh, while those who laugh now shall weep. It is a new world where everything that seemed immutable about peasant life under occupation—hunger, powerlessness, shame, suffering—is transformed.
Of course there is no way to say for certain if Maryam was indeed raped. The rumors themselves were predictable, not just because rape was common in that time and place, but because by the time the rumors surfaced in the late second century, Maryam's elevation into the Virgin Mary was already under way. As the image of the holy virgin and the insistence on physical virginity became increasingly central to emerging Christianity, its opponents seized on the opportunity for defamation. And their charges still feel depressingly familiar. Sexual rumors surround famous women—especially politicians—even in the twenty-first century. Their opponents resort to the ancient tactic of trying to disparage their sexuality as a cover for the real agenda: attacking their presumption in aspiring to power and attempting to exercise it.
What can be said with surety, however, is that the idea of rape does no dishonor either to Maryam or to her son. On the contrary, it would make her a far greater role model than the Vatican image. Maryam raped is not less deserving of respect in any way, but more. She is a woman who not merely survived adversity, but transformed it into good. Who refused to accede to the image of herself as a victim. And who turned an act of deliberate disgrace into the ultimate grace.
Anonymous soldiers are not the only ones who can rape. In fact a soldier—whether a Herodian one stationed in Sepphoris or a mercenary from one of the Roman legions based in Syria—is almost too convenient, the perfect fictional device for early anti-Christian propagandists. Which is not necessarily to say that there was no rapist at all. It could as well have been anyone else on the hillside tracks leading to Nazareth: a trader, a shepherd boy from another village, even someone from Maryam's own village. This last, in fact, is much likelier. To catch a shepherd girl unawares on an open hillside would be difficult, whereas someone she knew could approach her easily. As we know today, despite the horrifying headline cases of brutal attacks by strangers and the persistent use of rape as a means of subjugation in war, the vast majority of rapes do not occur as random opportunism. Rapists usually know the women they attack. And sometimes, they take advantage of positions of trust. Even priestly ones.
A story of Maryam growing up surrounded by priests appears in several apocryphal "infancy gospels" or "nativity gospels." These were immensely popular from the third century on, and for good reason: they were an early equivalent of supermarket bodice-rippers, their stories filled with graphic detail under the guise of piety. The father of them all, as it were, was the late-second-century Book of James, also known rather more impressively as the Protevangelium of James. An extraordinarily vivid account of Maryam's birth, childhood, and delivery, it was the basis for much of her legend as it developed over the next few centuries.
This gospel has Maryam "presented as a gift" and as a "minis
tering servant" by her parents when she is three years old. A ward of the temple, in short. On her arrival, the high priest kisses her and places her on the third step of the altar, and there "she danced with her feet, and all the house of Israel loved her." She stays in the temple "like a dove being fed" until she is twelve, when her service there has to come to an end since, under Jewish law, no menstruation is allowed inside the temple precincts. The high priest is instructed by the angel Gabriel to call "all the widowers of the people" to the temple, "each of them bringing his rod." When a dove emerges from the tip of Joseph's rod, it is the sign that he is to be the chosen husband.
At first it seems a charming fable, even down to the Freudian symbolism of the dove emerging from the rod. Never mind for now the disturbing image of a three-year-old dancing for her supper, or the idea of her as a caged dove, being fed and fattened. The story appeals to the desire for Maryam to be special, singled out, and what could be more special than to be the favorite of the temple?
But what did it really mean to be a ward of the temple? The practice was indeed an integral part of organized religious life in Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Young girls were given to a temple by their families either in payment of financial debts or in fulfillment of religious vows. Most such families considered it honorable to offer up a daughter this way, much as many traditional Catholic families used to regard having a daughter enter a convent.
These girls were not "temple virgins" like the Vestals in Rome, however. They were simply menials. They hauled, cleaned, sewed, fetched, cooked, swept—any and all of the host of everyday tasks that we barely notice being done until they are left undone. Their reality was nothing at all like the fairy-tale one of the Book of James. Far from being adored playthings, they were at best ignored, at worst abused.
There is no record of such temple wards in Jerusalem—all records were destroyed when the complex was burned down by the Romans in 70 A.D.—but it seems quite likely that Herod's deeply Hellenized temple adopted this practice from the rest of the Hellenic world. Fathers did sell their daughters in the Palestine of the time; they pledged them away in repayment of debt, much as still happens in many impoverished parts of central Asia. The daughters became bond servants—debt slaves—working out the fathers' debts in services rendered. And since the Jerusalem temple was a major source of debt for peasant Palestinian families, many daughters were undoubtedly given up this way.
If Maryam was one of them, however, she would not have worked inside the temple itself. That was considered an honor, not work for a virtual slave. But the huge mansions of the high-priest enclave on the hillside across from the temple relied heavily on slave labor. There, Maryam would have worked in the women's quarters, for the rich could afford such luxuries as separate quarters for men and women. She'd have bathed and dried and perfumed her mistresses, spoon-fed them when they were ill, laundered their clothes, their underclothes, even their menstrual rags. And as she reached adolescence, as part of the property of the head of the household, she would quite likely have become part of his sexual property too. Sexual abuse of servants and slaves, both girls and boys, was common practice among wealthy families throughout the Hellenistic world, as indeed it always has been when wealth and power give one group of people absolute control over another.
A member of the high priesthood might seduce such a girl in a way we now know as all too familiar. A lecherous guru with an obedient young adept, a philandering televangelist with an adoring congregant, a pedophile priest with a shy and embarrassed altar boy—no matter what religion they profess or represent, they operate the same way, whispering of the sacred while acting out the profane. More likely, however, a first-century priest would dispense with such niceties as seductive whispers; the girl was the property of the temple, after all, and en moshia la—there was nobody to save her.
And if, as a result of such abuse, she became pregnant, the temple would cover for him. Someone would be found to marry her. Someone had to be found, for the law stated that anyone who raped a virgin had either to marry her himself or find an alternative in the form of another husband, a man persuaded either by authority or by money, and probably both, to take the place of the father. A Joseph, that is.
Much is temptingly explained, at least in psychoanalytic terms, by such a scenario. Where should Jesus be at age twelve but literally "about my father's business" in the temple? How could he not later bitterly criticize the religious establishment that abused his mother and then cast her out, pregnant? How not become a crusading rebel rocking the uneasy status quo between the Roman occupation and the politico-religious establishment of which his biological father was a part?
But the desire to explain can skew our grasp of probability. As with all successful fictions, there is indeed a seed of the possible in the Book of James. But only a seed. To actually believe that Maryam was a ward of the Jerusalem temple is a stretch, and a very long one at that. The gospel writers were a century closer to Maryam than the Book of James, and they certainly would not have overlooked a temple connection if one had existed. It would have been just too good a story, as it still is—too good to be true.
The question is why so many people were eager to believe it, and why some still are. And the answer seems to lie in the strange kind of snobbery that haunts legend and fantasy. Those who believe they led past lives were never ordinary peasants, but inevitably of high-born blood. Old fairy tales and modern fantasy stories often revolve around a noble birth concealed and then revealed. Even the best writers fall prey to the syndrome. In his novel King Jesus, Robert Graves ignored first-century politics altogether for the idea that Jesus was the secret grandson of Herod, and thus the hidden "king of the Jews."
We are not nearly as democratic as we like to think we are—or as Christian, for that matter. Our imaginary heroes tend to be elite figures of high birth, not sons of impoverished peasant girls. Like the Matthew author so eager to establish Jesus' descent from King David that he spent most of his first chapter tracing a line from Joseph all the way back to Abraham, some part of us still believes in lineage, even though the most basic point of Jesus' teaching is that he came from and spoke for peasant people.
The image of Maryam being fed tidbits from the priestly table instead of doing the back-breaking work of coaxing wheat from the stony soil of the Galilee is an insult not just to her own reality, but to Christianity itself—at least insofar as Christianity may be said to represent Jesus' preaching. The transformation of the hard-working Maryam into the cosseted Mary is at best a blind eye to "Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven." At worst, it is an outright rejection.
And so we come back to Joseph, ever present even as he is ever absent. It is the absent part of him that makes it so much easier to conceive of paternal possibilities bordering on the sensationalist than what should surely be the most obvious one of all: that Joseph was a quiet, constant presence in Maryam's life, and that Jesus was born nine months after he and Maryam married.
This is the simplest answer, and according to the law of William of Ockham's razor, its simplicity should work in its favor. Matthew's tracing of Joseph's descent (and Luke's repeat of it, all the way back to "Adam the son of God") would seem to be stunningly irrelevant unless Jesus were indeed the biological son of Joseph. In fact Luke has him known as such in Nazareth. "Is not this Joseph's son?" say the villagers. Later, in John, they twice call him "Jesus, the son of Joseph."
Still more important is an indirect piece of evidence from Paul, since he wrote a generation earlier than any of the gospel authors, just twenty years after Jesus' crucifixion. Though Paul never mentions either parent by name, he does imply Joseph's paternity with his reference to "God's son Jesus Christ our lord, made of the seed of David according to the flesh." The seed of David, that is, being the sperm of Joseph. Early church writers like Ignatius, the second-century bishop of Antioch, took their lead from Paul. Jesus "was sprung both of the sperm of David and from the Holy Spirit." That makes him a perf
ect example of dual paternity, with human royalty on one side, divine inheritance on the other.
Everything else—the ambivalence about Joseph in the gospels and the ambiguity of Maryam's marital and physical status—is the result of the gospel writers trying to make the story of Jesus' birth conform to Hebrew biblical prophecy. In fact they were quite open about this. The gospels abound with phrases such as "this is what the prophet wrote" or "to fulfill what the Lord has spoken through the prophet." The writers needed Maryam to be virginally pregnant before marriage in order to create not just a miraculous birth, but a prophesied one. Joseph's real-life role had to be played down in favor of divine paternity. He was handed his brown robe, and made to fade into the background.
That was easy enough to do, since the gospel writers did not really care much about where Jesus came from. His physical reality was not the point, which is why he is never even described. What did such trivial details as appearance or family relationships or village politics mater when the kingdom of heaven was at hand? They were writing theology, not biography. What was important for them was the message. The messenger would die, but the message would live on.
No wonder the gospel portrayal of relations between Jesus, Mary, and Joseph is so oddly uneasy, even antagonistic. Jesus speaks as a divinely inspired preacher of a new social order, not as a son of human parents. On the two occasions he is shown talking directly to Maryam, he calls her "woman," not "Mother." And he never addresses Joseph at all. In fact he seems to disdain the very idea of family. "If anyone does not hate his father and his mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and himself too, he cannot be my disciple," he says in Luke. And in Matthew, "Call no man father on earth, for you have one father who is in heaven." It is as though he considered his biological birth a meaningless accident. Only rebirth could engender meaning: "Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."
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