To return to the particular question of the impregnation of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost, we are referred to the gospels for testimony to the fact. The only two evangelists who speak of it, Matthew and Luke, relate in harmony that the Jewish maiden Mary was betrothed to the carpenter Joseph, but became pregnant without his co-operation, and, indeed, “by the Holy Ghost.” As we have already related, the four canonical gospels which are regarded as the only genuine ones by the Christian Church, and adopted as the foundation of faith, were deliberately chosen from a much larger number of gospels, the details of which contradict each other sometimes just as freely as the assertions of the four. The fathers of the Church enumerate from forty to fifty of these spurious or apocryphal gospels; some of them are written both in Greek and Latin—for instance, the gospel of James, of Thomas, of Nicodemus, and so forth. The details which these apocryphal gospels give of the life of Christ, especially with regard to his birth and childhood, have just as much (or, on the whole, just as little) claim to historical validity as the four canonical gospels.
Now we find in one of these documents an historical statement, confirmed, moreover, in the Sepher Toldoth Jeschua, which probably furnishes the simple and natural solution of the “world-riddle” of the supernatural conception and birth of Christ. The author curtly gives us in one sentence the remarkable statement which contains this solution: “Josephus Pandera, the Roman officer of a Calabrian legion which was in Judæa, seduced Miriam of Bethlehem, and was the father of Jesus.” Other details given about Miriam (the Hebrew name for Mary) are far from being to the credit of the “Queen of Heaven.”
Naturally, these historical details are carefully avoided by the official theologian, but they assort badly with the traditional myth, and lift the veil from its mystery in a very simple and natural fashion. That makes it the more incumbent on impartial research and pure reason to make a critical examination of these statements. It must be admitted that they have much more title to credence than all the other statements about the birth of Christ. When, on familiar principles of science, we put aside the notion of supernatural conception through an “overshadowing of the Most High” as a pure myth, there only remains the widely accepted version of modern rational theology—that Joseph, the Jewish carpenter, was the true father of Christ. But this assumption is explicitly contradicted by many texts of the gospels; Christ himself was convinced that he was a “Son of God,” and he never recognized his foster-father, Joseph, as his real parent. Joseph, indeed, wanted to leave his betrothed when he found her pregnant without his interference. He gave up this idea when an angel appeared to him in a dream and pacified him. As it is expressly stated in the first chapter of Matthew (vv. 24, 25), there was no sexual intercourse between Joseph and Mary until after Jesus was born.
The statement of the apocryphal gospels, that the Roman officer, Pandera, was the true father of Christ, seems all the more credible when we make a careful anthropological study of the personality of Christ. He is generally regarded as purely Jewish. Yet the characteristics which distinguish his high and noble personality, and which give a distinct impress to his religion, are certainly not Semitical; they are rather features of the higher Arian race, and especially of its noblest branch, the Hellenes. Now, the name of Christ’s real father, “Pandera,” points unequivocally to a Greek origin; in one manuscript, in fact, it is written “Pandora.” Pandora was, according to the Greek mythology, the first woman, born of the earth by Vulcan and adorned with every charm by the gods, who was espoused by Epimetheus, and sent by Zeus to men with the dread “Pandora-box,” containing every evil, in punishment for the stealing of divine fire from heaven by Prometheus.
And it is interesting to see the different reception that the love-story of Miriam has met with at the hands of the four great Christian nations of civilized Europe. The stern morality of the Teutonic races entirely repudiates it; the righteous German and the prudish Briton prefer to believe blindly in the impossible thesis of a conception “by the Holy Ghost.” It is well known that this strenuous and carefully paraded prudery of the higher classes (especially in England) is by no means reflected in the true condition of sexual morality in high quarters. The revelations which the Pall Mall Gazette, for instance, made on the subject twelve years ago vividly recalled the condition of Babylon.
The Romantic races, which ridicule this prudery and take sexual relations less seriously, find Mary’s Romance attractive enough; the special cult which “Our Lady” enjoys in France and Italy is often associated with this love-story with curious naïveté. Thus, for example, Paul de Regla (Dr. Desjardin), author of Jesus of Nazareth considered from a Scientific, Historical, and Social Standpoint (1894), finds precisely in the illegitimate birth of Christ a special “title to the halo that irradiates his noble form.”
It seemed to me necessary to enter fully into this important question of the origin of Christ in the sense of impartial historical science, because the Church militant itself lays great emphasis on it, and because it regards the miraculous structure which has been founded on it as one of its strongest weapons against modern thought. The highest ethical value of pure primitive Christianity and the ennobling influence of this “religion of love” on the history of civilization are quite independent of those mythical dogmas. The so-called “revelations” on which these myths are based are incompatible with the firmest results of modern science.