Vive Charlie Issue 1 | Page 18

DISCLAIMER: As this is my first piece for Charlie, I thought I’d better not give people the impression that I am some undercover Anglican priest, out to throw stones at children born out of wedlock, for if I did cast such stones, they would invariably find their way back to me.

Now, feel free to be offended by my rather forward question, but don’t pretend as if you’ve never wondered whether or not Jesus was the bastard-son of a lying adulteress. So, given your internal admission, how do we attempt to answer this seemingly salacious yet sensible question? The short answer is, we can’t. Aside from the irrational and unhistorical religious tales contained in both the official and unofficial corpus of early Christian texts, we have virtually nothing to help us answer any question about the alleged historicity of Jesus.

In the words of the atheist bible scholar who believes in a historical human Jesus, Bart Ehrman:

What do Greek and Roman sources have to say about Jesus? Or to make the question more pointed: if Jesus lived and died in the first century (death around 30 CE), what do the Greek and Roman sources from his own day through the end of the century (say, the year 100) have to say about him? The answer is breathtaking. They have absolutely nothing to say about him. He is never discussed, challenged, attacked, maligned, or talked about in any way in any surviving pagan source of the period. There are no birth records, accounts of his trial and death, reflections on his significance, or disputes about his teachings. In fact, his name is never mentioned once in any pagan source. And we have a lot of Greek and Roman sources from the period: religious scholars, historians, philosophers, poets, natural scientists; we have thousands of private letters; we have inscriptions placed on buildings in public places. In no first-century Greek or Roman (pagan) source is Jesus mentioned. [1]

So then, if such is the case, let us give both the rational historicists (people who believe Jesus was a legendary mortal) and Christian apologists (people who believe that phantoms fornicate with Jewish virgins) the benefit of the doubt, but not so much

benefit that we wander down the yellow brick road of faith-induced insanity. Let us, as rationally minded investigators, retain a modicum of common sense and concede from the outset that tribal deities don’t impregnate virgins, as was believed to be the case with Zeus and Alcmene, as well as many others from our dark and superstitious past. But in the spirit of fairness, let us employ a more tempered yet similar style of circumstantial speculation to attempt an answer to this ultimately vacuous question. For if such speculation can form the sandy foundations of a worldwide faith, it should certainly be capable of accommodating our somewhat facetious investigation.

When Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ first hit cinemas in 1979, and in the years to follow, it caused an almost unprecedented uproar amongst Christians of all stripes. The movie was banned, picketed, derided, death threats were made, and by crowds of credulous cretins who believed that the Pythons had simply plucked these brilliant blasphemies out of the blue; but if one is to watch this film with an ounce of knowledge about the controversial issues it parodied, one will see that painstaking historical research went into the making of this masterpiece.

In the film, the Pythons cast the “virgin” Mary in a somewhat humiliating light – as a Jewish woman who had casually conceived Brian (Jesus, but not Jesus) out of wedlock with a Roman soldier, thus explaining Brian’s Roman-looking nose. Absent any knowledge of the issue being parodied, this is still a very clever and funny concept, but with a little historical knowledge, this scene is transformed into an enlightening parody on a controversy that spans nearly the entire breadth of Christian history.

According to Jewish traditions contained within numerous rabbinical works, namely, the ‘Tosefta,’ (third - fourth centuries CE) [2] the ‘Jerusalem/Palestinian Talmud,’ (fourth - fifth centuries CE) [3] the ‘Babylonian Talmud,’ (third – seventh centuries CE) [4] and later reiterated in the Jewish polemic, the ‘Toledoth Yeshu’ (Biography of Jesus) (tenth century), [5] Jesus (Sometimes, ‘son of Pandera’), was a shameful character, and in numerous traditions his mother was said to have conceived him in adultery, and in some versions of

Was Jesus the Bastard-Son of a Lying Adulteress? by Michael Sherlock

Which is more likely: That the whole natural order is suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie? ~David Hume