COMPLICATED FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
The month of May is traditionally considered the month of the Virgin Mary.
This is what usual translations of the Bible call her, but it could be a false
translation, it could be read ‘a young woman’.
She would have been very young, probably in her early teens. We know that
she gave birth to her firstborn son at Christmas time. She may have had
more children, as the Bible talks of ‘brothers’ of Jesus, but that could mean
‘cousins’. The Church, especially the Catholic Church, maintained that she
remained a ‘Virgin’ and also depicted Joseph as an old man and a widower,
often holding a lily which meant ‘chastity’, and the ‘brothers’ could have been
sons of an earlier marriage. Nowhere in the Bible does it say anything about
Joseph being old or widowed, the church would try to explain by this why
Mary remained a virgin despite being married for many years. However,
‘virgin birth’ really doesn’t mean anything biologically, but something
spiritual. The Evangelists, who use the phrase ‘virgin birth’, are theologians,
not natural scientists. They do not speak about human reproduction, but of
an advance in humanity. The language of the Bible and of the Credo isn’t
scientific or historical but symbolic or mythical.
The phrase ‘Virgin Birth’ would mean that something entirely new comes into
the world, which does not come from male power. This new thing does come
without the contribution of male seed, but by the power of the Spirit. ‘Spirit’ in
Hebrew is feminine, a creative, Pentecostal power. It reforms, it is
revolutionary, it makes things new. That is, why the Magnificat, the praising
song of Mary, speaks of God bringing ‘down rulers from their thrones’.
It cannot be denied, that Luke brings us a genealogy of Joseph, saying that
Jesus ‘was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph (Luke 3). What is the
significance of those genealogies, which in Luke go back to Adam, in
Matthew to Abraham, if they end up in Joseph, ‘the husband of Mary, by
whom Jesus was born’ Those Greek story tellers don’t seem to know, that in
Israel there could be no greater insult to a man, to name him a foster parent
to his own children. It is said, that Mary bore Joseph five sons and three
daughters (Mark 6.3), would that not be prove that Joseph was in full
possession of his manhood? The legend of the ‘virgin birth’ wants to make
an end of that traditional thinking in patriarchal terms, of family trees and
structures of power. The history, by which all is predestined by genealogy,
call it ’genes’, is finished.
This meaning of the phrase ‘virgin birth’ must be quite a consolation for
many people today who live in complicated family situations, when even for
the child in the manger family relations were complicated.
Brigitte Williams
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