The earliest polemic against Christianity focused on the circumstances of Jesus’s birth. “We have not been born of fornication,” says a hostile gathering to Jesus in John’s gospel. The implication being: we weren’t, but you were. In the second century, the Greek writer Celsus wrote a book about how Jesus was the illegitimate low-birth offspring of a spinner called Mary and a Roman soldier called Panthera.
What rubbish!
In Christianity, purity is abolished. Indeed, the core idea that the all-perfect God almighty might actually steep so low as to be born as a bleeding, defecating human being would have been regarded by all previously orthodox believers – both Greek and Jew – as disgusting. But this is the central insight of Christianity: that in the person of Jesus, there is no contradiction between being fully human and fully divine. Or, in other words, God is perfectly at home in a human life, with all its ritualistic mess, from blood to semen. There is no shame in the constituent elements of our humanity, including the manner in which we are made. Which is why the “pure virgin” tradition runs totally against the grain. The problem is not just basic biology: it doesn’t add up theologically.
What rubbish!
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