Many contemporary theologians consider Mother Mary to the first Christian, as “if she never believed it, she never would have conceived it.” Today we will explore the word “conception” and the ways in which Mary interacts with different types of conceptions, from the physical to the mental. Although there was no linguistic connection between types of “conceptions” that will be discussed today (in the original Greek or Hebrew texts), it will be of great value to explore how this Virgin conceived and how we conceive this Virgin.

As discussed in There is no Rose of Such Virtue and The Big “D” of Divinity, Mary’s physical conception of Jesus is thought to be both miraculous and perfect. Being a virgin, Mary’s genitalia is in pristine condition: yet to be broken by penetration, unpolluted by a stranger’s seed. Along with the physical purity of Mary’s body that resulted from her protected upbringing in the Temple, the divine insemination by the Holy Spirit allows the messianic conception to be “immaculate,” meaning literally “spotless,” as even a masculine human body carries elements of disorder and sin that resulted from Eve’s fatal choices in the Garden. Mary’s virginal conception is so valued among early Christian communities that the writers of the New Testament Apocrypha outlined the concept of Mary’s perpetual virginity, wherein she retains her virginity throughout and after the birth of Jesus. This is rather ambiguous in it’s meaning, but considering the constructions of virginity it would imply that Mary’s anatomy was never stretch or broken during childbirth, she never bled, and she never experienced pain, which were all characteristics of the transition from parthenos (virgin) to gyne (woman). Moreover, even as Mary fulfills her religious telos of motherhood (see Teleios), she is never converted to the physical status that considered the lowest of human potential (woman) and rather remains in the most perfected physical state for a female: a virgin. Even in the Protoevangelium of James, when Queen Salome seeks to disprove Mary’s virginal birth with a vaginal examination, her hand catches on fire, as if it reaffirm the impenetrability, and therefore masculinity, of Mary’s body.

Not only is Mary’s conception immaculate, but her gestation and delivery would therefore have been considered “spotless,” as she left the messianic birth without the characteristic signals of femininity: corrupted anatomy, blood, and pain. Putting Mary in the context of Pandora and Eve, Mary’s “jar” was never self-opened, nor did Mary ever step out of her place and fall into her innately female sexuality; Mary’s willingness to physically submit to her God allowed her to paradoxically “open her womb” without “opening her womb,” per se. Moreover, the immaculate conception implies that through the birth of Jesus, God kept Mary’s womb sealed (see The Purity Test), thereby keeping Mary’s insides, Mary’s soul protected from the encompassing, earthly sin. The perpetually closed nature of her genitalia, therefore, allows her masculinized body to remain in its pure and perfect stay until she is assumed up into Heaven, not requiring the bodily perfection that occurs through death and resurrection.

While Mary’s conception and delivery act as idealized models for female and male readers of the New Testament and its Apocrypha, an issue comes about when one attempts to understand the immaculate conception and the virginal birth. Medicine, as discussed in Physis, gives us a language with which we understand our bodily experiences: diagrams of fetus in the womb or imagery of semen finding an egg are helpful in our own psychological ownership of our bodies. This is why medicine is such a powerful tool, as we can irresponsibly use it to convince people that they, by virtue of their body, are of a lesser class or will be able to achieve less physically. When it came to developing a language for us to understand, and therefore possibly achieve, the bodily perfection of the Virgin Mary, in her pure life, immaculate conception, and virginal birth, writer of the New Testament and the NT Apocrypha often fell very short. In fact, for the obstetric grandeur that is Mary’s motherhood, it seems the NT writers were intentional on glazing over the details of her conception, keeping tucked away in its ambiguity. The writers of the NT Apocrypha seem highly aware of the intellectual complexity of Mary’s character, and drastically out of character for writers of midrashim, they too keep Mary in her mystery. Furthermore, the scientific mystery that is the virginal birth develops value in itself, in that understanding the immaculate conception is something reserved for those of the highest rationality. Our inability to conceive the way in which the virgin conceived and delivered creates a separation between the divine and the human, which again uses the gendered vehicle of rationality. Just as Joseph is masculinized through holy visions that give him logic, the exclusive understanding of the immaculate conception puts Mary among the masculine ranks of the Holy Trinity, all of whom have the superhuman logical require to understand such an obstetric phenomenon. The writers of the NT Apocrypha possibly left the immaculate conception and virginal birth unexplained to provide their readers with a reminder of their persistent human irrationality and misconception of the universe’s mysteries.

While Mary is physically impenetrable by the human body, the things that her body does are also intellectually impenetrable by the human mind. This points to a multidimensionality of the word conception, which the English language has developed to mean both the intellectual housing of an understood idea and the physical housing of a fertilized egg; Mary’s immaculate conception was not only a physically pristine conception of the Messiah, but also a pristine understanding of the divine mysteries of the cosmos. Continuing, Mary’s superhuman understanding of the universe’s mysteries was physically expressed in the messianic fetus, the human God who would answer our every cosmological ignorance and confusion. I believe this level of Mary’s character is incredibly empowering to readers of the NT Apocrypha, as it constructs a system wherein the physical is expressively connected to the mental – there is positive, physical fruit produced of positive mental thought. Moreover, Mary can teach her audiences that if they meditate and concentrate on something, they may be surprised by the superhuman ways their bodies will act on such focuses, be it through physical charity or positive construction. As much as Christianity may tell its followers to deny their bodies, I believe that Mary is telling us to embrace the body as a physical expression of the mind, which can sound quite progressive in contemporary contexts.

… as is the rose that bare Jesu.

Hold the phone, am I genuinely singing this song about Mary’s virtuous vagina on the steps of Alice Millar Chapel in front of a crowd of pious congregants? It is these moments, when you listen to the words or look up at the broken, bony body of Christ on his cross that you come to see the Christian faith’s obsession with the Body. Let’s unpack this.

Mary’s Infancy narratives, as discussed in the previous post, tell us of how Mary’s upbringing prepared her to be both physically and mentally pristine, without the anatomical or cultural corruptions of a ‘normal’ childhood. A virgin in both body and mind, Mary is presented at the temple as a sacrifice by her parents: her mind is sacrificed from all worldly thought and is thus devoted solely to God and the teachings of the Temple. Her body expresses this mental sacrifice, as she denies worldly occupations of the body, such as eating (“she was fed like a dove and received food form the hand of an angel.” – P. James 8:2) and sex. Joseph is subsequently selected as Mary’s guardian-husband as Mary comes to the age where she is medically considered on her descent toward womanhood through menarche and menstruation. Traditionally, therefore, a teenage girl would be paired with an older men that was able to counterbalance her emerging femininity with his established masculinity; however, the Infancy Gospels tend to characterize Joseph at the beginning of his relationship with Mary, as an old, frail, and thus feminine character. Such characterizations are accentuated by depictions of Joseph’s rod as “the shortest rod” out of all the men in the town, which suggests he diminished phallic character (GPM). Perhaps Joseph’s feminine characterizations function to reduce the potential threat to the masculine nature of the Holy Spirit that will later impregnate his “wife,” or to foreshadow a reciprocal masculine characterization of Mary in order to construct a stable gender balance within the couple.

​Adopting the philosophy that the body expresses the mind and spirit, God so sees a promise in Mary’s devout thought towards the Temple’s teachings and thereby informs her that she will undergo an immaculate conception of the word of the Lord. Moreover, the Infancy Gospels suggest that Mary’s incessant praise of God and incorruptible knowledge of the temple’s teachings led her to produce a physical fruit of thought: Jesus Christ. While many readings do emphasize the Holy Spirits’ primary role in this messianic conception, I do believe that the Infancy Gospels’ detailing of Mary’s role in the understanding of the word of God does empower her character. Although her lifestyle may not have been consented, her resilient work ethic, ascetic behavior, and (male-level) comprehension of God’s word seem to be at least somewhat responsible for the creation of the messiah. This explains Jesus’ nature as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, as every atom of Jesus’ being is gestated out of Mary’s understanding of the word of God. Mary’s immaculate conception, therefore, empowers Christian audiences by serving as a role model for spiritual devotion; it suggests that we all can produce our own soteriological fulfillment of the Old Testament – be it symbolic or physical in Mary’s extreme case.

While these Infancy Gospels do inspire their readers, especially their female audiences, to reach greater depths of spiritual devotion, there arises some problematic implications as the role of gender is considered. New Testament commentary of Mediterranean antiquity is obsessed with the fact that the mother of the Messiah is a “virgin.” In fact, the Protoevangelium of James and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew both indicate a Marian dogma, called the “perpetual virginity of Mary:” the Messianic Mother was a virgin in her youth, remained a virgin through Jesus’s birth, and persisted to be a virgin beyond giving birth to Christ. Considering the ancient constructions of virginity (See Purity Test) and commentaries on purity discussed in A Highway for our God, the virginal female was the most socially accepted form of the female body, as her body would be physically closest to a masculine body: dry, unpenetrated, and unpolluted. Because New Testament writers and commentators never allowed Mary to develop out of her virginity, she therefore remains in her most masculine, and therefore, perfect state. The detailing of the virginal birth in PJ conveys Mary’s masculine characterization, as she experiences this lowly and uniquely feminine moment of labor without its hallmark feminine attributes, such as blood and pain. Not exhibiting the outpouring of inner liquids that prevails in feminine medical imagery of the time or sickness and decay that was so often connoted with womanhood, Mary essentially becomes a man by the medical standards from which she emerges.

Using Mary’s process of masculinization as a role model, we can ascertain that the road to creating our own symbolic saviors not only involves the sacrificial devotion of the self, but the masculinization of our bodies. Spiritual fruit and the fulfillment of the word of God can only, therefore, be cultivated by men, which reaffirms the idea that salvation will only come through masculinization (See The Big “D” of Divinity). Mary is only deserving of her high veneration because she is a woman that circumvented all negative development towards femininity, and rather was given the gift of masculinization through her perpetual virginity and bloodless/painless birth. Just as Greek goddesses, Athena and Artemis, can only remain among the “divine” by having masculine characterizations of war and hunting, Mary becomes “blessed among women” for her implied destruction of femininity and embracing of masculinity, despite her innate feminine sex. With the “one-sex” model in mind, Mary functions as a mirror the medical understanding of gender at the time, in that she encourages her female and effeminate audiences to strive to be more physically masculine in order to overcome the feminine forces of death and disorder that were brought about by Eve.

VIRTUE: derived from the Latin virtus meaning “moral perfection,” which itself is derived from the Latin vir meaning “man.”

It is nonetheless hauntingly truthful to sing the words “There is no rose of such virtue, as is the rose that bare Jesu,” as Mary’s rose, Mary’s feminine genitalia are suggested to be superior because of their masculine nature. Again, this is not to say that Mary developed a phallus in her masculinization, but rather her ability to demonstrate phallic attributes while keeping a yonic physicality is what makes her so venerable and miraculous. Mary was able to work within the structure of the sexual spectrum constructed by the “one-sex” model, and God rewards her for being the seemingly only woman to have successfully avoided the dangerous fall to femininity. Perhaps it’s time we started to think before we sing.

If Adam and Eve have taught us anything, it’s that there exists an undeniable importance in the genesis. Genesis: the beginning, the coming into, the initial velocity, the big bang that set every particle in motion toward their exact position of this moment. To understand our suffering – the New Testament tells us – we must look at and analyze our genesis. While Jesus acts as the incarnated word of many Jewish prophets, Jesus also becomes as a mirror image to Adam (and Eve), as he saves the world from the death and disorder that this original duo created with their original sin. Moreover, in order to understand and control our current pain, we must look to its source. In the process of excavating the constructions of ancient Mediterranean female bodies, I have discovered a few sources of the sexism, gender expectations, and modes of subordination that prevail against women today. Perhaps we can take this lesson from the New Testament and begin at the beginnings on our conquest to understand. Therefore, today, we will embark on the conception, birth, and childhood of the Virgin Mary, as described predominantly in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (GPM) ​and the Protoevangelium of James (PJ), two important sections of the NT apocrypha.

Behold, a virgin was conceived of Anna and Joachim, an unsuspecting couple in the drier years of their lives. Having been married and without child for over 20 years, stress started weighing on the couple. Failing to perform his masculine duty of life-generation, Joachim flees far from his home (to the desolate desert in PJ and the abandon countryside in GPM) in a suggested masochistic state, hoping to offer himself to God through his self-inflicted alienation. Both parties, Anna and Joachim, suffer during this 40-day-40-night period (PJ), as widow Anna questions her now purposeless existence and Joachim fails to receive any affirmation of God’s presence. In a chilling moment of the third chapter of JP, Anna proclaims: “Oh me, who gave birth to me? What womb caused me to grow? For I was born cursed in from of the children of Israel. I am reviled and they treat me with contempt and cast me out of the temple of the Lord my God.” This raw and dramatic window into Anna’s soul affirms the previously discussed telos of the Ancient Mediterranean female to bear children (See Teleios). Subsequently, Anna experiences a violent identity crisis, showing her own sense of worthlessness, now that she no longer can cling to the possibility of gestating Joachim’s child. Seeing this quasi-suicidal conviction, God sends an angel to Anna to inform her that she will bear a child that will be “spoken of, everywhere people live.” Moreover, it was in her self-sacrifice that God deemed Anna worthy to bear the new holy servant of the temple: the child Mary. As Joachim is also told of Anna’s nonpenetrative conception, he is immediately relieved and returns home to his unwidowed wife; this plot line exposes an interesting performative element to the masculine role within the Christian faith, in that it isn’t necessarily the means of penetration, but the ends of life-generation that confirm the correct existence of the Christian man.

Mary’s youth is build on pure, sacrificial grounds, which reflects the previous raw and masochistic devotions of her parents. Understanding her as a holy and seemingly pure entity, Anna prevents Mary from ever walking on the earth. Anna, therefore, sacrifices much of Mary’s youth, potential social development, and physical growth, in the fear that pursuing a “normal” childhood will corrupt her innate purity. At the age of three, Mary is brought to the Temple to be essentially raised in the spotless holy ground and under the incorruptible supervision of the monks. Without the mental development necessary to allow for agency, Mary’s three-year-old body is effectively brought to the Temple as an offering to God for fulfilling the parental telos of Anna and Joachim, which not only objectifies Mary’s body, but characterizes Mary’s purpose as a servant of God. Herein lies a beautiful schism in Mary’s characterization, as she becomes both subhuman in her sacrificial objectification and superhuman in her “incorrupted” state that is reminiscent of the purity of Adam in paradise. For the apocalyptic audience that would have been the readers of JP and GPM, Anna and Joachim would have served as role models for all parents of newly born children, as the purity/virginity of the child becomes an archetype for praising God. Although Mary herself is not necessarily characterized as a human, her appearance as a girl nonetheless constructs an expectation of virginity for her audiences, which reflects the ancient medicine explored in Parthenogenesis – Creating Virginity.

​Mary’s infancy, as detailed by James and Pseudo-Matthew, points to ancient Mediterranean understandings of purity and virginity. While doing such analysis, we must remember that these Infancy Gospels emerged centuries after the New Testament introduced the virginal mother to our world, and therefore we must constantly be cognizant that these authors were careful when constructing Mary’s body, as the soon-to-be channel through which the incarnated God would come. In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. (Is. 40:3) Authors of the New Testament apocrypha made Mary into an incarnation of the Jewish prophecies of the Old Testament, by detailing her physical purity that is reached by sacrificing her youth. Continuing, though, these authors indicate that there is a cultural/social dimension to virginity that came with Mary’s upbringing in the temple. By denying her a “normal” childhood, full of social interactions, games, sexual awakenings, Mary is kept pure on the cultural plane of virginity; she is not penetrated by the corrupting forces of society that would have led her (and continue to lead us) to reenact the original sin of Eve. Finally, Mary is not only of the pristine physicality required for the incarnation of God’s word, but she is of the pristine mentality, emotionality, and sexuality that the pioneers of Christian philosophy would deem acceptable to gestate their Lord. May we all take a moment to note that to rationalize the NT’s messianic birth from a woman, the writers of the NTA felt it necessary to deny the Virginal Mother of the most human characteristics, childhood, emotional development, sexual exploration. (We will see Mary’s later denial of femininity, as she becomes ready to give birth to Jesus.)

Let us keep looking at our beginnings. Let us be critical of role models that urge us to reach unattainable, inhuman standards of existence. Let us continue the pursuit of humanizing these monumental characters in our mythologies, and pose questions: Mary, did you choose this life, did you consent to this self-sacrifice? Perhaps in meeting Mary at a human level, instead of the sub or superhuman level that she is constructed to be in the NT, we can alleviate our personal shame around forced, unconsented “purity” and congratulate ourselves for our progress in self-awareness and self-love. Everyday we are given the change to rewrite our own Geneses, just as James and Pseudo-Matthew did roughly five centuries after Mary’s birth. And maybe this time, we will depict ourselves being born on a ground, spotted and dirty enough to grow ambassadors of love, self-acceptance, and maculate humanity.

New Testament Joseph was having a masculinity crisis! How emasculating it must feel to have a pregnant fiancee with a child that isn’t yours? To not have been that one to assert your dominating masculinity over your submissive female partner through intercourse? How could the “genealogical” father of the new Messiah exist within the feminine structure that the New Testament constructs for him?

Say no more, various men of the 2nd to 5th centuries CE created what is considered the New Testament Apocrypha, or the collection of “lost gospels” that were excluded from publication in today’s New Testament. These narratives filled in many of the gaps that arise from the often inadequate detailing in the four gospels. As common in the Jewish practice of midrashim, or rabbinic interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, these major figures of the emerging Christian tradition, including St. James and St. Thomas, wrote background and tangential stories of primary biblical characters in order to make sense and influence interpretation of the bible, such as with the Infancy Gospels. While not all of these apocryphal stories are accepted as truth in today’s Christian practice, they nonetheless provide us with valuable insights into how people of the time were interpreting the New Testament and the ways in which pioneers of the Christian tradition were hoping to direct the faith, especially given contexts of gender, virginity, and bodies. By investigating characterizations of Joseph briefly in the Gospel of Matthew and largely in The History of Joseph the Carpenter, we can begin to see the constructed context of Virgin Mary, considering Joseph was her espoused guardian. Today, we will investigate the masculine characteristics given to Joseph, and whether these set up an empowering of suppressing environment into which Mary will emerge.

Joseph, like his Mary, appears rather infrequently in the New Testament; he is only prominent in the infancy and burial narratives of the Gospel of Matthew, for example. Matthew begins his gospel with a genealogy of Jesus, starting with Abraham, tracing through King David, and eventually to Joseph. Genealogical lines are of great importance in Jewish tradition, and such an introduction of the Messiah rhetorically gains credence by virtue of demonstrating the divine lineage that led to the creation of the Son of God; moreover, by highlighting Jesus’ genealogical connection to powerful men,m such as David and Abraham, Matthew plays into the masculinized notion of the regeneration of God’s image, thereby implying the genealogical masculinity, and therefore perfection from which the human God is born. However, there arises a break in the lineage, as Joseph is not actually the man to impregnate the mother of the Son of God, which challenges the true masculinity of Joseph. Without the New Testament’s explicit mention of Joseph’s other children and later implications of Mary’s perpetual virginity, Matthew could possibly be implying that Joseph never participated in the masculine process of life-generation through penetration and impregnation, thereby feminizing his character.

Continuing, Matthew works within the cultural construction of men, as rational beings to further create ambiguity to Joseph’s masculinity. Matthew details: “[Jesus’s] mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.” (Mt. 1:18-19) It is only after that Joseph is given a holy prophecy verifying the Holy conception of his spouse that Joseph understands the situation and agrees to stay with and protect Mary and their future, messianic child. Joseph is given other holy prophecies in his dreams later in the initial few chapters of Matthew, all which give him insight to dangers and direct him in ways to fulfill his “fatherly duty” of protecting his family. Despite Joseph being “just” and “faithful to the law” (dikaios), he seems to innately lack a rationality that is necessary for overcoming challenging concepts and understanding situations, a rationality that is characteristically masculine. Moreover, Matthew establishes a motif of salvation through masculinization, as Joseph secures his spot in the divine lineage by becoming more rational and choosing to stay as the genealogical father of the newborn Messiah. Similarly, Matthew develops this idea that masculinization is a process that cannot be performed by our human selves, but rather a divine, external entity must be the active creator of such masculinity. In ways we will explore in future posts, Joseph’s character manipulations serve to foreshadow the journey of salvation through masculization upon which Mary will embark in her virginal birth and apocryphal characterizations.

​The writer of The History of Joseph the Carpenter ‘s (HJC) aggressive attempt to depict Joseph as a quintessentially masculine character serves as a model for masculinization through faith, justice, and obedience. Firstly, the writer of HJC puts emphasis on the impressive, superhuman age that Joseph to which Joseph stays alive: “one hundred and eleven years his age being prolonged to its utmost limit;” (10) this obsession with Joseph’s late age gives Joseph an air of immortality and thus masculinity. Continuing, the speaker details how although he was able to perform the masculine expectation of labor, he never experiences “bodily weakness, nor had his sight failed, nor had any tooth perished from his mouth.” This falls perfectly within Hippocratic philosophy on the male’s ability to achieve a state of physical perfection (see Wet and Dry Dichotomy). (10) Even Joseph’s constructed job, as a carpenter, evokes imagery of generation and creation which are both masculine processes by ancient Mediterranean medicine. The writer of this section of the NT Apocrypha speaks in Jesus’ voice, and detailing of Jesus’ absolute obedience with Joseph is reminiscent of the submissive/dominant power dynamic of ancient medicine that aligns Joseph with the phallic masculine (I say “phallic” in the metaphoric sense here). Finally, in Joseph’s death, Jesus makes his genealogical father incorruptible, meaning that his body will not endure the feminizing process that his physical decay, thereby gifting him an eternal sense of masculinity.

One must remember that HJC is a memoir and the past-tense nature of the narrative outlines the masculinity that results from divine salvation. With this, it is difficult at times to see Joseph’s trend from feminine to masculine that the gospel of Matthew outlines. Nonetheless, in section 17, Joseph reflects on the (feminine) ignorance that he had before the divine prophecies fell upon him. Similarly, the speaker is quick to remind us of Joseph’s incomplete masculinity in his inability to penetrate the Virgin Mary: “[Mary] brought me forth on earth by a mystery which no creature can penetrate or understand, except myself and my Father and the Holy Spirit.” Moreover, Joseph’s human status prevents him from reaching the ultimate masculinity of the Holy Trinity, despite him reaching the suggested humanly limit of masculinity through his physicality, job, and relationship with Jesus. This pivotal passage as suggests a beautiful quality of the word “conception,” in that the most masculine will be able to break woman’s bodies in the way they would break an impossible mystery; in both the physical and mental penetrations, conception results. This is a rhetorically powerful moment, as it feminizes the entire audience in their inability to conceive the way in which Mary was impregnate, which thus encourages them to support Jesus, in the way that Joseph did, in order to gain their respective masculinizations.