I started blogging so I would have somebody to talk to. When I began—May 30, 2010—I was married to a wife I liked to talk to; I was teaching at PSU and had access to quite a few students to talk at (and even a few to talk to); I was part of a long-running book group, a very promising coffee group, and I taught adult ed classes at church. You wouldn’t think there would be a difficulty of any sort.

But what I really wanted was some place to say things like these. Did you see that? There they go again! You’d think they would have noticed by now that that doesn’t work. Did you ever notice the “cowed,” the verb and “coward” the noun, are not related to each other etymologically?

The book group only allows me three such “observations” a meeting and we meet only monthly. My wife had her own observations to take care of. The kinds of observations I am talking about will always be diversions from what we are doing in class at PSU—the occasional course in political psychology excepted.

So a blog seemed like a good idea. It was light-hearted and quippy at the beginning, like the sample observations above. But then national politics began to go dark and I didn’t feel so quippy so I didn’t write so often. I did notice, however, that when I encouraged myself to make in the blog the snarky little comments that ran through my mind, I kept on wanting to make them.

So let’s see how it goes.

Several years in, I decided to start the blogging year at the beginning of December. I always write a few essays about whichever account of the birth of Jesus is “the right one” for that year, so starting in December is more a convenience than anything else.

This year, for instance, I have begun to be intrigued by the observation that although Matthew and Luke have the only birth narratives worthy of the name, Mark and John have clear allegations of illegitimate birth, which I would have to say is a birth narrative of some kind. And if that is true, it opens the way for some observations that seem obvious to me now, but that I have always passed by before.

Here are two versions of Matthew 1:24-25. First the King James, which is the version I grew up on.

“24Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: 25And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.”

Then the NIV

“
24When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. 25But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.”

In the light of the snarky allegations in Mark and John, my attention falls on the first part of v. 25. Why did Matthew feel that he needed to add “but he did not consummate their marriage”—“he knew her not,” in the KJV—to the text? He already had God’s assurance, received in a dream in 1:20b “because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit” With that much assurance, Matthew changes his mind about divorcing Mary. It was a life-changing dream. So why does Matthew put a little reminder of Mary’s virginity back in v. 25, just five verses later?

There may be a good literary or apologetic reason for that, but my interest this morning is that with the charge of bastardy fresh in my mind (from Mark and John’s accounts) it strikes me as too much. It seems urgent. It seems, “Oh by the way, did I tell you that Mary was still a virgin when she conceived?” By my current reading, it is TMI.

It can be argued, of course that it is or that it isn’t, but I feel richer for seeing the passage that way and asking the question. At the moment, it seems overwhelmingly likely that Matthew is, by this addition to the text, (that’s a guess) responding to allegations he has heard made. But I also know that “overwhelmingly likely” is, at least in part, a function of being excited that I just now saw the discrepancy for the first time. I know that the excitement makes it seem truer right now.

The “third birth narrative”

So what traces are there of this “third birth narrative in Mark and John? I’ve referred to it, but I have not yet presented the texts.

In Mark 6, Jesus goes to Nazareth and begins teaching in the synagogue. His teaching is astounding to his neighbors. They know him; they know his family. Where did all this religious “wisdom” come from? It is as if Jesus were putting on airs, when they know for a fact that he is a local boy.

And in the process of mulling over that discrepancy, they ask a really telling question. Is this not Mary’s son? Not, notice, “Joseph’s son.” Joel Marcus observes in his commentary on Mark’s gospel, “In Jewish sources the father’s name is normally used to identify the son even when the father is dead.”

Why then does Mark choose to identify Jesus by a matronymic rather than a patronymic? Joel Marcus, in his commentary, answers this question this way: ‘it is likely that the use of Jesus’ mother’s name is a slur against his legitimacy… This aspersion would correspond to the tendency in later Jewish traditions to portray Jesus as a bastard…” [2]

Marcus says that: “…Mark 6:3 comes closer to being a genealogical formula than the parallels cited because of the extensive list of other male family members. McArthur’s theory, moreover, does not explain the apparent embarrassment of Matthew and Luke at Mark’s term or reckon with the hostile context of our passage and the evidence for a trajectory of Jewish aspersions against Jesus’ birth.

Both Matthew and Luke revert to the usual pattern in their accounts of this event. Luke 4:22 reads “the son of Joseph” (cf. John 6:42) and Matt 13:55 “the son of the carpenter.”

The example in John is better in some ways and worse in some ways. It is better in that the charge of illegitimacy is clearer. In 8:41, Jesus says to his antagonists “You are doing your father’s work.” What he means by that is a little complicated, but it is the response I am interested in here. They respond, “WE (unlike you) were not born illegitimate. The only father WE have is God.”

The only thing I added to that exchange is the parenthetical part and, in fact the use of what I call “exclusionary phrasing” is common in John. He says things like “only the Son,” meaning not Moses; and “earthly,” meaning not heavenly. It is that style of John’s that makes me confident that the WE, above, is intended to mean “unlike you.”

That clear use is how it is better. It is worse, of course, because this clip is taken from the middle of a heated argument and there is no way to know whether cooler heads prevailed in the morning. And if you are inclined to pass this exchange off as the Pharisees being snarky, let me remind you that this particular exchange is between Jesus and fellow Jews who believed in him (John 8:31).

So I may use these two passages as “the third birth narrative”—Jesus was a bastard—or not. Let’s see how the year goes.

[1] According to Marcus: “This aspersion would correspond to the tendency in later Jewish traditions to portray Jesus as a bastard, a pattern that may already be reflected in John 8:41.”
[2] There is additional fun to be had in that the English word bastard probably derives from the French fils de bast (packsaddle child) and therefore does actually mean “born in a barn.” And that is true is Luke’s account, but not in Matthew’s.