‘What can I do for you? . . . Why didn’t you guard your virginity?’
Joseph loses patience with Mary,
Liber Requiei Mariae, c. 3rd century AD
The problem, as St Augustine knew well, was the vagina of the Virgin Mary. This is rarely considered in the modern world. Yet, for a time, Mary’s vagina – or to be more precise, her hymen – was an issue of profound theological importance to Christianity, and that hymen’s presence (or absence) was debated in the highest circles of the Church and written about by everyone from the most loathed of heretics to Augustine himself.1
The debate arose because this topic was not only one of great import, it was also one on which most gospels offered little help. The Christmas story is a story of a birth, but it is commonly told with biblical, rather than biological, simplicity. Of the four gospels found in modern Bibles, only two mention the actual birth of Jesus – and both do so briskly. The Gospel of Luke spends longer explaining the tax and travel arrangements of Mary and Joseph than it does on the moment of the birth itself, which is briefly dispatched in a single sentence.2 The Gospel of Matthew is more laconic yet, merely recording with workmanlike brevity that Mary ‘had given birth to a son.’3
But, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a gospel that lingered long and lovingly over every aspect of the birth of Christ. This gospel, known today as the Infancy Gospel of James, tells the story of the birth of Jesus with a physical and psychological detail lacking in the better-known versions.* It offers detailed descriptions of how Joseph felt when he discovered that his supposedly virginal Mary was already quite far gone (in short: not good) and considerable detail on the lead-up to the birth. It even contains an intimate account of the birth itself, which begins with Mary’s contractions, involves the unexpected intervention of a midwife, and ends with a vaginal examination that is, in every sense, unorthodox.
Yet, while it is almost forgotten today, the Infancy Gospel of James was, for a time, one of the most popular and influential Christian gospels of all. It was read in churches in the East, for centuries, at important feasts – and even at Christmas.4 Its sacred words have been woven into the liturgy, art and calendar of Christianity for centuries. At least 140 manuscripts survive in Greek alone, and the spread of languages into which it was translated includes Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgian, Sahidic and Armenian.5 As one modern scholar put it, the ‘sheer number . . . attests to the value placed on this text in the Christian tradition’.6
This book tilted the theology, the calendar and even the character of Christianity: the cult of the Virgin Mary, still evident today in the Catholic Church, is unthinkable without it. Together with later gospels in which it was absorbed, it even shaped the way the Nativity was represented. The famous image of Mary riding on a donkey is not present in any of the gospels contained within modern Bibles. This image, however, does appear, dramatically, in the Infancy Gospel of James. Similarly, if you have ever seen a Nativity scene in which the baby Jesus is watched over by an ox and an ass, or in which he is born in a cave, you are looking at its influence, for these appear not in the Bible but in the gospel into which the Infancy Gospel of James was later absorbed. These scenes infused the works of Giotto and were held in the blue and beaten gold of Byzantine mosaics.7 It is, in the words of one modern theologian: ‘hardly possible to overestimate the influence of [this text] on subsequent church history.’8 And it contains, at its heart, the story of how the Virgin Mary’s vagina was capable of burning human flesh.
As the scene of the birth opens, Mary and Joseph are travelling towards Bethlehem, Mary sitting on a donkey. They have not travelled far when Mary tells Joseph to take her down from the animal because her contractions are beginning. Or, as she puts it, in a brief and dignified phrase, ‘the child within me presses me to come forth.’9 Joseph manages to find a cave in which Mary can give birth, and – an even greater stroke of luck – a Hebrew midwife to assist. While he is outside the cave and Mary is labouring within, he suddenly notices that the entire world has quite literally stopped. The birds of the heavens are held motionless in the sky; a nearby shepherd, who had been lifting his hand to smite his sheep with his staff, has frozen with his hand in mid-air; the river has stopped flowing; the stars have stopped moving. Jesus has been born.
The moment of stillness ends. The birth over, the world starts up again – and, as it does, controversy begins to churn. It is at this moment that the gospel takes an unexpected turn. Because, for reasons that are not entirely clear, another woman, named Salome (no relation to the better-known Salome in the Bible, though she shares with her a certain insubordinate air), turns up at the mouth of the cave. The midwife, running outside after the birth, tells Salome, in great excitement, ‘I have a new sight to tell you about; a virgin has brought forth.’10 Salome, not unreasonably, expresses a certain scepticism at this idea. ‘As the Lord my God lives,’ she says, ‘unless I thrust in my finger, and search for the parts, I will not believe that a virgin has brought forth.’11
The midwife, not entirely to her credit, rises to the challenge. Get ready, she briskly tells Mary, ‘for there is no small contention concerning you.’12 Salome enters the cave, and then, without a moment’s pause – or, indeed, permission – puts her finger into Mary’s vagina. Quite what Mary’s feelings are on this unexpected move are unrecorded, but the response of her vagina is unambiguous, for Salome’s hand is suddenly burned off. Salome is appalled. ‘Woe unto my iniquity and mine unbelief,’ she laments, ‘because I have tempted the living God, and lo, my hand falleth away from me in fire.’13
‘In the beginning was the Word’. These words – the first words, of the first verse, of the first chapter of the Gospel of John – are an intimidating opening to a book. They confine eternity to a clause, complex philosophy to a word, and they are also, in truth, pretty confusing. That their English translation is not very good doesn’t help matters. ‘Word’ is at best an unusual and at worst a very bad translation of the original Greek, logos, a richly dense word that does indeed mean ‘word’, but which also means everything from ‘inward thought’ to ‘reason’ itself. But, for all the confusion, one thing is clear: this line is singular. Singular in the sense of being unusual and singular in the sense of being very firmly not plural. This religion, this line seems to imply, will offer its believers the singular, lapidary word of the single, all-powerful God.
Almost two millennia later, the sense that the Bible offers the single, immovable word of a single deity remains. Step into any church – matting, seats and stone – and you will find the Bible up at the front – sometimes chained, as if for extra immobility, to its pulpit.14 Bound in Bible black, it is itself binding: to swear an oath upon the Bible means swearing not only that your words are true, but also that they will not change. Its very language feels fixed: the words of the King James Version stud the English language still – magnificent and sometimes curious linguistic fossils.
Like fossils, these phrases were shaped by another world, an ancient world, in which milk and honey were paradise and a lost sheep a disaster; a world of dust and ashes, of serpents and scorpions, and of famine and sorrows – a world whose phrases taste, today, strange and foreign on the tongue. But then, these words felt old even when they were new. Time and time again, when the translators of King James wrestled Hebrew and Greek into English, they chose not to translate into easy modern prose, but to cling as close to the original text as possible. This was the word of God, and it was not to be meddled with for mere ease of understanding. English must change before this text, rather than vice versa. So the King James Version, with its heavy tread, was born.
But this apparent immobility is an illusion. The Bible is ancient, but it is not immovable. There was not, in the beginning, ‘the Word’, singular. There was not, in the earliest days, a single story, resonant and unchallenged. There were many words, many stories. There were, in the first three centuries of Christianity, Christianities that said there was one almighty God, as modern Christians would expect. There were also Christianities that said there were two divine powers – an evil one and a good one – and others who believed in hundreds of divine beings.15 There were Christians who believed in bodily resurrection – and there were Christians who believed this was laughable claptrap. And, in the earliest centuries of Christianity, it was far from clear which of these beliefs was the ‘right’ one – or even that there was such a thing as a ‘right’ one.
Consider the virginity of the Virgin Mary. Today, this is one of the most familiar aspects of the entire Christian story. Those who have been brought up in a Christian society will know (or, at any rate, will have been told) that Mary was a virgin and that she was told by the Angel Gabriel that she was with child. They will know that Mary and Joseph travelled to Bethlehem, that Jesus was swaddled in cloths and placed in a manger, for there was no room in the inn.
But, in its early days, when Christianity smelt of revolution and dissent rather than authority and old stone, opinions on how Jesus had been conceived and born differed wildly. Some Christians, it is true, argued for the virgin birth. Others argued that Jesus hadn’t been born in any human sense at all: he merely put on and took off the appearance of mortality whenever he fancied, like a piece of clothing. He had previously, they argued, appeared on this earth as Adam – and occasionally he still did, turning up ‘clothed with Adam’s body’.16 Other Christians argued that Jesus hadn’t been pre-assembled in heaven, nor grown in Mary’s womb, but had instead put himself together: ‘On his way from heaven he came to earth,’ argued one, ‘and assembled his own body from the four elements.’17
Still other Christians offered wholly different accounts of the birth itself. In an unnerving text known as the Latin Infancy Gospel, the account of Jesus’ birth is given in the first person, by the midwife. She records how, at the moment of his birth, Jesus ‘shone brightly round about like the sun’ and the whole cave became bright with his light. The midwife is shocked, and ‘stood there stupefied and amazed, and fear seized me.’ But, as she watched, ‘the light itself, gradually withdrawing, became like a child, and in a moment became a child as children are customarily born. And I took courage and bent down and touched him, and took him up in my hands with great fear, and was seized with terror because he had no weight like other children who are born.’ It becomes even more frightening, for, the next moment, Jesus ‘smiled at me with the most sweet smile, and opened his eyes and looked sharply on me. And suddenly there came forth from his eyes a great light like a brilliant flash of lightning.’18
Perhaps most dangerously of all, there were large numbers of Christians who said Mary was no virgin, Joseph was no saint and there was nothing at all miraculous about this birth. Jesus, they argued, was simply a man: he was Joseph’s son and Joseph had fathered him, ‘just as all men were generated from a man’s seed and a woman.’19 Jesus ‘is like all men’ in his birth, but, as one Christian group argued, he was merely ‘different in his life – in prudence, virtue and a life of righteousness.’20 Or so it was said. Here, as always, it is worth being suspicious of ancient accounts of unorthodox Christians. Heretical and even merely erring Christian sects were so successfully stamped out that almost all the evidence that survives on them is in mere literary scraps: either quotations or descriptions in accounts by hostile Christians. And those accounts are not disinterested sociological observation but texts in a ferocious propaganda war. They should therefore be treated with considerable caution. But they are nonetheless useful – and their veracity can frequently be tested against other sources. Take the view that Joseph was the true father of Jesus: clearly it was widespread, since other Christians later stepped in to deal with such nonsense. As one later ruling explained, if anyone declared that Jesus came from the father, ‘just as corporeal sons do according to emission and passion, let him be anathema.’21
The virgin birth was not only one of the most contested ideas within early Christianity, it was also one of the most roundly mocked outside it. Non-Christians treated the idea of a virgin birth not with reverence, but instead with much mirth and what one injured believer described as a ‘scoffing spirit’.22 The cynical Celsus suggested that Mary had been made pregnant by a soldier called Panthera (a name that, in Greek, sounds similar to the Greek word for ‘virgin’, which is parthenos). Jesus, embarrassed by his lowly background, had later ‘fabricated the story of his birth from a virgin’ to cover the shame of his uncertain paternity.23 The Christian writer Tertullian admitted that people accused Jesus of being the ‘son of a carpenter or a whore.’24
This particular story also recurs in Jewish literature. In the Talmud, there are tantalizing references to a man who some think is probably Jesus.* Here, Jesus’ father is not Mary’s husband, and he is certainly not God. Instead, Jesus is the child of Mary’s lover, Pandera – a name that clearly sounds similar to Celsus’ Panthera. As the Princeton professor of religion Peter Schäfer has written, the idea that the ‘Holy Spirit’ made Mary pregnant is here treated as ‘nothing but a cover-up of the truth’.25 Instead, this text argues that Mary ‘had a secret lover and that her child was just a bastard like any other bastard. Joseph’s suspicion . . . was absolutely warranted: Mary had indeed been unfaithful to him.’26 This alternative ancient narrative goes further: Jesus is described not as a messiah, but instead as a ‘fool’ who brought forth ‘witchcraft from Egypt.’27 The idea that Jesus was the son of a Pantera, or Pandera, or Panthera hung about for centuries – in one case, a Christian author entirely misunderstood and added Panthera into the Holy Family, explaining that he was the paternal grandfather of Jesus.28
If some Jews and non-Christians found it hard to believe the story of the virgin birth, so too did many Christians. The idea that Mary was a virgin is mentioned in only two of the four gospels in the Bible, while the idea that she remained a virgin throughout her life is, to put it mildly, harder still to find within the pages of the New Testament. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, notes that Joseph knew Mary not ‘until she had given birth to a son.’29 It takes a certain sort of creative textual analysis to read that sentence as meaning ‘never’. Yet more creativity is required to overcome the fact that all four gospel accounts of Jesus’ life refer to him having brothers (and, in some places, refer to sisters, too). This was the kind of creativity theologians were well able to supply, and the perpetual virginity of Mary is held as dogma in the modern Catholic Church.30
The problem of whether or not Mary was a virgin was even more complex in the early centuries of Christianity than is often realized. Today, when people discuss the possibility of a ‘virgin birth’, what they tend to be discussing is merely a ‘virgin conception’. But, for ancient writers, both conception and birth presented difficulties. This is because what it means to be a virgin has changed, subtly. To describe someone as a virgin in the modern era has, typically, been a simple statement of personal history: it has meant that that person has never had penetrative sex. Two thousand years ago, virginity was not merely a historical state, but a physical one: it meant that a woman had a hymen. Crudely speaking, in the early days, the problem was not just what went into Mary, but what came out – and what happened to her body when it did.
And that, for ancient Christian authors, meant no end of trouble. Read the writings of the early Church Fathers and you can see them twist and turn, considering and reconsidering every aspect of the virgin birth, trying to solve this problem. If it was difficult to imagine how a woman could be impregnated by the Holy Spirit and retain her hymen, then it was harder still – and for many ancient writers entirely impossible – to see how she could have given birth without breaking it. This sort of discussion can make a modern reader feel uncomfortable; it was also – to judge by the writings of St Augustine, St Ambrose and others – the sort of discussion that made ancient Christians a touch uncomfortable too. You can sense the unease in their endless search for euphemism: these writers do not use anatomical terms, but opt instead for an oddly architectural approach, talking about Mary’s ‘closed doors’ and the ‘fence’ of her chastity.31
To modern eyes, it is the virgin conception of Jesus that seems the far more marvellous feat – the virgin birth tends to be treated as a mere mechanical afterthought. But, in ancient times, a virgin conception was the easier of the two to imagine. Ancient authors had, in many ways, a sophisticated understanding of the human body – but this blended with a certain vagueness about reproduction: even an otherwise level-headed Roman medical author could write that, if a woman wanted to prevent conception, she should ‘wear the liver of a cat in a tube on the left foot . . . This is very effective.’32 So, it is perhaps unsurprising that Christian authors demonstrated a certain liberty with biology in explaining how Mary’s virginity had been preserved while impregnation took place.
The moment of impregnation was generally agreed upon: this was understood to have taken place when the angel of the Lord appeared to Mary; the method, however, varied. Some early Christians suggested that impregnation had happened through her face, as the angel spoke to her, and this belief persisted: a twelfth-century enamel in the monastery of Klosterneuburg, in Austria, shows an angel pointing his right hand at Mary, while forks of lightning spring from his fingers and enter her eyes. Meanwhile, another anatomically ambitious ancient text explained that, ‘Perfectly God / He entered the womb through her ear’.33 The idea of aural impregnation remained popular and can be seen visualized in the remarkable frieze on the outside of the Marienkapelle, in Würzburg, Germany, in which a long trumpet-like tube comes from the mouth of God, with the foetal Jesus sliding along it, on his way to entering Mary’s ear.34
It is clear, however, that many other ancient writers remained unconvinced by the virgin birth, whatever orifice was involved. And, in some ancient texts, one of those who expresses the bluntest scepticism is Joseph himself. In the gospels contained within the Bible, Joseph is understandably a little peevish when he finds that Mary is pregnant – but that is nothing compared to the reactions recounted in other gospels. In the Infancy Gospel of James, when Joseph returns from a long period away for work to find Mary six months pregnant, he is absolutely appalled, and ‘struck his face, threw himself down on the ground on sackcloth and wept bitterly’, before starting on a series of reproaches. ‘Who has deceived me?’ he asks. ‘Who has done this evil in my house and defiled the virgin?’35 Why, he asks Mary, have you done this? Mary, equally distraught, defends herself: ‘I am pure,’ she replies, ‘and know not a man.’36 Joseph, not unreasonably, is unconvinced. ‘Whence then’, he asks, ‘is that which is in thy womb?’37
In one early Christian book, whose core text probably dates to the third century, Joseph is even more distraught. The Liber Requiei Mariae was another enormously popular text, read everywhere from Ireland to Ethiopia and Georgia – and is to this day a riveting read. In most ancient accounts of the birth, although Joseph is suspicious of Mary’s pregnancy at first, he tends to warm to his wife and new son as the birth approaches. In this version, however, Joseph remains sourly sceptical of the paternity of his child long after Jesus has been born. As the Holy Family travels through Egypt after the birth, Joseph grumbles on, his foul mood only aggravated now that he has to flee to the Egyptian desert to escape Herod. When Mary asks Joseph what they have to eat, this is, for him, the final straw.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asks testily. ‘Is it not enough for you that I became a stranger to my family on your account?’ Angry, he starts to find fault with Mary: ‘Why didn’t you guard your virginity?’ he asks, querulously. Sounding like a tourist who has found himself in a country where he doesn’t like the food, he then complains that there is ‘no fruit that you could eat in the trees.’ Or, rather, there is, but it is useless, since, ‘This date-palm is tall, and I cannot climb it . . . there is nothing that a person will find in this desert.’38 St Joseph, who is in this account rather less saintly, hasn’t finished yet. ‘I have been afflicted from all sides because of you, because I have left my country. And I am afflicted because I did not know the child that you have; I only know that he is not from me.’ As if that speech were not extraordinary enough, Joseph then delivers a final, lethal line. For, he says, ‘I have thought in my heart, perhaps I had intercourse with you while drunk.’39
Eventually, one form of Christianity would dominate. It produced a Bible, and it claimed that this book was authoritative. Eventually, other texts and all other sects – those that said Mary was not a virgin, or that Joseph was Jesus’ father – would start to fade away in the West. Eventually, each Christmas, the story of the virgin birth would be hymned across the world as one pure note: ‘the Christian story’ – in the singular. In the end, if not in the beginning, there would be ‘the Word’. But it was not always so. Look in the right places – peer at the right painting by Giotto, or at a Christmas card that shows an ox and an ass, or a Nativity scene that pictures Mary in a cave – and you are seeing the descendants of these tales. To hear these notes, with their discordant ideas and ancient harmonies, is today an eerie experience. For they are the sound of a world that has been lost, and of a world that – had history tilted slightly differently – might have been.