It’s safe to say that the ultimate paternal figure in Christianity is St. Joseph. He is frequently depicted as carrying the boy Jesus. He is also regarded as the Great Protector of the Virgin Mary. And like his Universally Famous Wife, the image of St. Joseph has been written and re-written and re-re-written so that the standardized image has no real historical basis or, in many instances, anything even remotely like that which can be reconstructed within a historical milieu. Now don’t get me wrong! I’m not saying to throw out your St. Joseph prayer cards and novenas…I have these too…and I use them emphatically in my devotions. There is a giant wall between The Historical and The Religious. And what is true on one side of the wall is often not true on the other side of the wall. Many will find this…

…wall-jumping just as impossible to bear as Romulus did when his brother Remus jumped over the wall he built. Not a particularly tall wall…apparently. And in case you are a modern-day American Wallophile, this wall was also intended to keep unwanted people out…

Yes! Hadrian’s wall. And it didn’t work any more than…

…ultimately. You can climb over a wall…you can dig under a wall. All walls must have gates somewhere, points of ingress and egress. Your enemy can smash through the gates or, even better, they can bribe the defenders, thereby ensuring that someone will simply let them in. I wonder just what amazing sums of cash drug-smugglers and coyotes are willing to give border guards to…let them in. But if they were clever and you were not, then…

…don’t laugh! It has worked before. Medieval castles all had walls to keep undesirables out. And I suppose they didn’t work so well, or else we would still be in the Dark Ages. Well…some of us still are. Wait! I’ll be right back…my sentries have spotted undesirables trying to cross my moat! Just a second.

Sorry about that. They got across the moat but couldn’t scale my castle walls. I have to say that I really dig Christian iconography. Well, I should be more specific…Catholic iconography, seeing how truly boring Protestant iconography, what little there is of it, is. Hostility to the saints?

 Credo in…sanctorum communionem

I believe in the communion of saints! I know I do…and seeing how Protestants also revere the Apostle’s Creed, I would think they too would have a modicum of respect for the saints. That said, much of the iconography I enjoy so much has little-to-no historical value. And at some point in time, various features of various saints were “cleaned up” if I may coin some jargon. With yet others, their image was changed to make them a bit more sedate. I was researching something most people would find rather unpleasant. But since leaving my job of…Vomitologist, I was inevitably in the market for something that might challenge the stomach. In the course of doing so, I came across an excellent example of how Rome “cleaned up” elements of the official iconography. And in doing so, they sought to control your perception of things. He who controls perception controls everything. I will also add that in what follows, I have endeavored to NOT simply be gross about this, having made an ardent effort to avoid showing icky real life pictures, opting, when necessary, to use illustrations and drawings. It’s like using asterisks in obscene words…many who find such words offensive in the extreme are more comfortable reading something containing them…in moderation…if they don’t have to see the full-on words. Now, as you know, it is common to dwell upon the horrible things that were inflicted on saints and martyrs. But it is also the case that special manifestations, such as stigmata or marks left by a crown of thorns, among other things, are incorporated into the official iconography. But the ultimate examples are cephalophores…saints whose heads were cut off…something that is usually fatal. But not with cephalophores! They pick up their heads and keep on going. That is a wound obvious to all. But, the Greatest Cephalophore Of All Time was someone I have featured elsewhere on this website. And so I have asked her to appear again…

…Saint Winifred of Wales. She began her cephalophoric career with, and this a job requirement, being beheaded. But! Her uncle arrived and sewed her head back on! She then founded a convent and things took their normal course, as it were. However, she walked around the rest of her life with a scar on the back of her neck. In my meanderings, I found a guy whose Magic Mark was something that was, or so I think…covered up and replaced with something else. Who?

St. Roch, born around 1295 AD, a date that is disputed, was the son of the governor of Montpellier in France and a once-barren-woman who prayed to the Virgin Mary, who got her pregnant. Perhaps that came out wrong. The story of the miraculous birth of a child by a barren woman has nothing to do with Mary, seeing how she is never described as barren. But the theme of barren women…

…is too common in Scripture to be anything more than a literary device. The picture on the left is an angel explaining, with notable hand gesticulations, that Abraham’s wife Sarah would give birth to a son and heir. “Your wife better not laugh.” She was a fairly old woman by this time, and had been barren all her life. In the center is Rebecca, the wife of Abraham’s son…Isaac. She too was barren until she bore Jacob, who just so happens to be wooing Rachel in the picture on the right. Same thing.

On the left is a picture of the mother of the great judge, warrior, and thorn in the side of the Philistines. Her name isn’t recorded in Scripture, but I’ll bet everyone knows of her son…Sampson. In the center is Saintly Mother Hannah…mother of the Great Prophet Samuel. She too had been barren, but she took a vow promising that should she bear a son, he would serve God. So when she finally had Samuel, she took the boy to the High Priest Eli to serve in the Great Tent of Yahweh. What would have happened without Hannah? We certainly wouldn’t have one of the coolest quotes in the Bible…

Then Yahweh came and stood there, calling to Samuel as He did before. “Samuel! Samuel!” Then Samuel spoke…Speak, Lord! For I am listening.

I think many people know that is a very difficult thing to say…and mean it. On the right is Mother Elizabeth…whose story is told only in Luke. She was old, but God promised that she would have a son. And she did…John the Baptist, the man whom Jesus called the Greatest Man Whoever Lived. You are doing very well when the Son of God says that about you. Here, Elizabeth is speaking to the Greatest Motherly Figure Of All Time….

 Ave Marie, gratia plena…Dominus tecum! Benedicta tu in mulieribus!

 I chose the former picture of Mary with Elizabeth because it avoids a mistake that is often made. What is that? Making Elizabeth approximately the same age as Mary of Nazareth. Elizabeth and her husband Zacharias were…old. Mary was not. Luke claims that the two mothers are related, though he doesn’t further qualify the familial relationship. Many have assumed that they were cousins. That is not correct…Elizabeth was probably close to the age of Mary’s own mother…said to be Saint Anne in non-canonical works. The age difference would be more conducive to Elizabeth being Mary’s aunt. Was there a real Saint Anne? It doesn’t matter one whit! We are on The Religious Side of the Wall…and the symbolism speaks for itself. So the literary device of barren women suddenly giving birth is found throughout the Bible, and actually represents an over-worn and tiring element. Roch decided against inheriting his father’s position, and opted to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land instead. He was closely associated with the Plague, helping and tending to the sick. Returning from the Holy Land, his uncle imprisoned him for five years until Roch finally died. He became, as it is, intimately connected with the Bubonic Plague…

Good-Ole Black Death himself! Roch’s iconography typically has him drawing attention to a mark on his leg…

There it is…right there. However, it can also appear as a cut or gash…

And as Perceptive Readers have noticed all by themselves, there would seem to be disagreement as to whether the mark is on the right leg, or the left leg.

This image shows St. Roch’s Distinctive Mark as little bit angrier…

Now that’s an ouchie! Maybe his dog bit him! Sorry…that’s not the answer to the mystery. But there can be no doubt that the boil or gash on his leg is one of the key defining attributes of a man who became a very popular saint. Silly you! Thinking that he simply believed that he had really nice legs and wanted to show them off a little like…

Don’t get me wrong! I think he’s really cool. And as Betty Grable can tell you, a great set of legs is worth…

… a million dollars. But it wasn’t exactly clear, for a long time, what was actually wrong with St. Roch’s leg, although it was deemed very important that we know something was. A common assertion is that it symbolizes a Plague Boil…

Here a man and his wife are suffering from the Plague, and are covered in boils.

I’m no medical expert, but it seems odd that others got so many boils while St. Roch got just one. But! Someone appears to have noticed how odd it was that of all the millions who suffered from Plague, they got lots of boils, whereas Roch only got one. So..time to cheat…

Yes! Let’s deviate from the Accepted Iconography in order to divert people’s attention away from Single-Boil-Roch. Now, as shown in the above image, he has more. And just how misguided this convenient re-drawing of St. Roch is will become clear very shortly. Now I will admit that the official iconography did, in fact, look to the Plague to control perception of Roch’s health complaint. The way that it appears in the standard iconography is clearly that of an inguinal bubo that appears on the thigh of someone suffering from Plague…

…and with that we know what St. Roch was so proudly displaying on his thigh…an inguinal bubo associated with the Plague. And so everything made sense, and the iconography was dead-on…sorry. Except it wasn’t. One of the most important things about St. Roch is that he was a pilgrim. And that meant being in Palestine which, in turn, meant being in the Middle East. But the ancient Israelites were also in the Middle East. Numbers 21: 1-9 contains a story that is mind-boggling, non-sensical, and, in my opinion, completely goes off the rails like a…

…a Crazy Train... This may, of course, be due to the later redactors of the Old Testament not understanding the genuine historical elements in the narrative. During the days of King Hezekiah, as recorded in the Book of 2 Kings, an effort was made to establish a cult in Jerusalem purged of what were regarded as heathen influences, and this happened…

…and he broke into pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made; because up to Hezekiah’s days the children of Israel gave offerings to it. It was called…Nehushtan.

Nehushtan was just one of many pagan things that Hezekiah devoted a considerable amount of time smashing to bits. But why would Moses make a bronze, serpent-idol? That doesn’t sound like something he would do, seeing how angry he was when his brother Aaron made a…

…golden calf for the Israelites to worship. Now it gets stranger…

They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around the territory of Edom. But the people grew impatient along the way; so they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”

Then Yahweh sent fiery serpents among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against Yahweh and against you. Pray that Yahweh will take the serpents away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.

Yahweh said to Moses, “Make a serpent and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” So Moses made a bronze serpent and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a serpent and looked at the bronze serpent, they lived.

Now that is a fascinating story. Fascinating, but non-sensical in the extreme. It is also worth noting that nothing is said about Nehushtan being on a wooden pole, suggesting that the two things were not the same, though the Old Testament redactors wanted us to think they were. In Numbers, we learn that the followers of Moses were in the area of the Red Sea. Not pleased with the local scenery or the local menu, they began grumbling about how Moses and God were simply leading them around to die. God got angry, and sent “fiery serpents” to punish the Israelites. Once this became apparent, the grumblers went back to Moses to apologize. Moses, in turn, went to God on their behalf. So what did God do? Well, he listened to Moses and came up with a solution…but it was one that no one could have foreseen. At least not me. God could have simply made the fiery serpents disappear and been done with it. But he didn’t. Instead, he told Moses to make an idol…a bronze serpent, which he placed on a pole. And then, if you were bitten by a fiery serpent, you prayed to God for forgiveness…after confessing your sin? No! You had to drag yourself to Moses’s Giant Snake Idol. Assuming you weren’t too sick and near death and you could actually make it to the one spot where this thing stood, you merely needed to gaze upon it, and thus be healed. So these fiery serpents…did they have a Grumbler Radar Detector? Surely not all of the people were guilty of being grumblers. When these serpents made their way into an encampment..could they tell who the grumblers were…and not bite them, then home in on a Terrible Grumbler and bite him? And once bitten, what if you very sick…or very old…or very young…what would happen if you couldn’t make your way to the Strange Mosaic Serpent Statue so you could look at it? You died, I imagine. And all of this rigmarole supposedly happened when all a sinner need do, or so I believe, is to confess his sins before God, ask for His forgiveness, and change his sinful ways. If a grumbler were rightly bitten, but that person wasn’t repentant, and he made his way to the statue and stared at it…would he be healed when he didn’t deserve it? So this strange bronze Nehushtan makes no sense whatsoever, and has the hallmarks of a conflated story to which elements were added to explain the Weird Snake Idol Hezekiah found in the Temple. Time to meet…

…Nehushtan! Sometimes he has wings, and sometimes not. The wings suggest a creature more like a dragon. This illustration, showing…

…King Hezekiah ordering a guy having an apparent wardrobe malfunction to break down Nehushtan…who is never described as being on a pole, and clearly the artist has completely changed Nehushtan by discarding his snake-like nature, and choosing a medieval, European dragon-like…actually, what this is not a serpent…and it’s not a dragon…which you will learn if you consult a good, medieval bestiary. The creature in question is what was known as a cockatrice or basilisk. It was a hybrid between a rooster and a serpent, and was a mainstay in the strange world of the Bestiary…

And…

And…

Foghorn Leghorn? How’d he get in there? It’s odd that a mythological, medieval, European creature would show up in Judah in the 7th Century BC. Once in a while, you might see a rather doofy looking cockatrice…

Some can be, if you will forgive me, a tad bit unattractive…

 And be forewarned! They don’t make the best pets…

And…

Mind you, even a cockatrice basilisk needs a little lovin’ once in a while…

…give us a kiss, Sweetie! Now it is possible that Nehushtan was part of some weird snake cult. Alexander the Great’s mother, Olympias, was said to have been an ardent participant in some weird snake cult. Yes! She slept in her chamber with snakes crawling all around. If she lived in early medieval Europe, Olympias would give up mere serpents as lovers! She would get smootchie with a…

…dog-faced cockatrice…while her husband, Philip II, looks on…green with envy. After all…he’s not getting laid. Everyone has heard the old saying…two heads are better than one. The cockatrice-like amphisbaena…

…couldn’t agree more. And this basilisk…

…is mixing it up with the Three Controllers of the Universe? Perhaps…but maybe they are symbolic of something far more earthy. I will return to that in due time.

So now we know why some Keepers of the Medieval Bestiary are so keen to give Nehushtan wings! They wanted to turn him into a Cockatrice-Basilisk-One Headed Amphisbaena. Still, sometimes Nehushtan is…

…fairly small, while at other times he’s…

…pretty big. Sometimes he’s…

…on a very tall pole. And that’s ok, since you only have to look at him to be healed. But sometimes he’s on a much shorter pole in case you wish to…

…reach up and touch him…though it is optional. It would seem that looking is just enough. And as you can see, he may be a regular serpent, or have wings, or even transform himself into a small, green basilisk. But surely we can do better than that…

…dog-faced Nehushtan. Surely the strangest is…

…Nehushtan with a human face.

And one can see that there is also disagreement about the pole…is just a pole, or is it a cross?

Actually, there is nothing whatsoever to suggest that the pole was, in fact, a cross. There is a simple explanation for the tendency to represent the pole as a cross…

 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

That is John 3: 14-15. It is a clumsy parallelism. The Mosaic Serpent was simply a means of surviving the bite of a fiery serpent, which does not do real justice to what Christ would achieve. Not to mention the fact, if one keeps with the Nehushtan part of the equation, the Mosaic Serpent became a heathen idol that King Hezekiah smashed to bits. The use of the Mosaic Serpent by the Johnnites is probably a simple case of the raising of a pole. But this passage is no doubt the cause of the tendency to present the pole upon which Moses’s bronze serpent stood…sat…coiled around…no one real knows…as a cross.

But the differences between Nehushtan in Hezekiah’s day and the bronze serpent in Moses day are manifest. Nothing is said about Nehushtan sitting on a pole. And in Hezekiah’s day, the statue he found in the Jerusalem temple had no health-restoring properties. One might also ask a question…if Moses really made it…should you really destroy it? You smash something that Moses made with his own two hands? All Hezekiah had to do was forbid making any offerings to this Most Valuable Mosaic Artifact…it belongs in a museum! Hezekiah would not have smashed something that Moses had made. And Moses never referred to his Bronze Serpent as Nehushtan. What has happened is clear…there was a pagan idol in the temple that Hezekiah found. It was a bronze snake…and was called Nehushtan. And knowing that this thing had nothing to do with Moses and the accursed fiery serpents hanging out around the Red Sea so long ago, he recognized it as a heathen idol and consequently got rid of it. It was later redactors who made the connection between Nehushtan and Moses’s Bronze Serpent, and then made them equivalents in their re-telling of the story. But they couldn’t have been more wrong.

Staring at a metal snake on a pole is simply an idea that is a down-right insane way for people to be forgiven for their sins. What would happen if someone who was not repentant received a bite, but was able to gaze upon Proto-Nehushtan? Was he saved…but the repentant old man who couldn’t walk and therefore couldn’t get to Pseudo-Nehushtan in time…died? This is so bizarre that one gets the distinct impression that the story in Numbers is a tale constructed from older narrative elements. The redactors knew about fiery serpents in the territory around the Red Sea, a region they associated with Moses, that these fiery serpents were a particularly severe affliction experienced by the people at that time, and that a wooden pole…or stick…when combined with the fiery serpents, brought relief to anyone who trusted in a strange cure involving a stick and the effects of a fiery serpent. They naturally associated the fiery serpents with God being angry about people bitching, and bringing in Moses, they found a way of making the nonsensical story that resulted in Moses being the maker of a Silly Snake Idol. They failed. But one is certainly tempted to think of a similar image. In Greece, this symbol was used by physicians…

…the Rod of Asclepius. The snake-figure coiling around a stick is fascinating, given the existence of one of those things that make you ask…God, why did you make those?

Dracunculus medinensis…commonly called…the Guinea worm. But the picture above features a small one.

That one’s more realistic. When water inhabited by…

…copepods, also called…water fleas, is drunk by humans with no filtering or purification, i.e. it comes from a stagnant pond full of horrid water, the water fleas who have eaten the larvae of the Guinea worm are swallowed too. The water fleas pose no health risk in and of themselves. But water fleas like to feed on the larvae of the Guinea worm. Stage 2 larvae of the Guinea worm are not broken down in the human gut or intestines, and they proceed to enter the unfortunate person’s body cavity. The person doesn’t know there’s a problem for about 1 year, until a female worm, anywhere from 1 – 3 feet in length, will begin leaving the host’s body via an intensely painful, burning sore. Usually this happens somewhere on the leg or foot. There is no way to know that you have one until it appears, and even if you did know you had one, there’s no medication or vaccine to do anything about it. All you could do is wait 12-14 months until the worm finally decided to burrow out of your body. So I suppose it’s better not to know than to know, which is something I never would have agreed with until I found out about these revolting things. But bad news will now become worse! If you have one, you probably have more than one. And now to go from worse to worst! Multiple worms can begin to emerge at roughly the same time. The record is fourteen. The only way to remove the worm, once it appears, is by…

…winding it around an incredibly advanced medical instrument called…a stick, which is really nothing more than a small pole. Or, a pole is a very large stick. How ever you choose to look at it. To remove the worm, you have to wrap the fiery serpent around the stick very slowly until it is completely out. Here’s another illustration, and I should point out that I am only showing illustrations because I don’t want you to see real pictures…for videos you can go to Youtube. This drawing is set in Europe…

The procedure for removal of a Guinea worm is the same today as it was in ancient times. Extraction can take several days to weeks of wrapping the worm around the stick a little at a time. The appearance of the worm causes a severe burning sensation, hence…fiery serpents. So the following graphic is interesting…

On the right is one of a whole host of depictions of Moses’s Bronze Serpent. In the middle is the Greek Rod of Asclepius...the symbol used by ancient Greek doctors. On the left is a Guinea worm that has been removed from a poor sufferer by winding it around a stick. Dracunculus means…little dragon… which is meant to emphasize the severe burning pain that the exit, and removal, of a 3 foot worm from a hole in the leg or foot causes to the Unlucky Host. Well, he was unlucky because he had one of these things, then lucky to finally have it removed after a long painful procedure, but then unlucky again since if you have one…you probably have more. And…it was known that during ancient times, the Guinea worm was to be found throughout the East on a sickening scale, including India, Africa, the Middle East, Egypt, and…yes…the area around the Red Sea. Now I don’t want to alarm you…the only place you can get Guinea worms anymore is in a couple of African nations…Chad and South Sudan in particular. Or, they may just be the only nations being honest in reporting genuine cases. Since 1986, when Guinea worm was believed to infect more than 3.5 million people, there are now only a handful of cases in Chad and South Sudan, and it is probably no more than a couple more years before it is totally eradicated. Good-bye. Or…not. It isn’t contagious, unlike Bubonic Plague. The only way to get a Guinea worm is to drink infected water, which is also the most rancid and putrid water you could possibly find, and just the smell of such water would have you retching and unable to drink it anyway. And it is perhaps one of the most bizarre adaptations of a parasite to human behavior…and foolish behavior at that. In fact, the only way for this Icky Species to reproduce and continue to exist is by taking advantage of human stupidity. When the female emerges from the person’s body, she’s full of larvae ready to begin their disgusting lives. But for that to happen, humans must consume them. But! They must start their life inside the copepod. And so how does Mrs. Fiery Serpent get her larvae to the copepod? Yes! Human beings must carry them there for her. If that doesn’t happen, the larvae will die. Needless to say, humans don’t simply agree to haul Mrs. Dracunculus to the water where her copepod friends live. Truth is stranger than fiction! Or is fiction stranger than truth? The means by which the female worm gets to the water where one finds Copepodville, which must also be the water that local humans drink…i.e. the local watering-hole, is to create a sore that burns so much that the Unwitting Co-Conspirator will walk to the local watering-hole and, to get relief from the bite of the Fiery Serpent…actually walk out into the village’s drinking water to cool the burning. The female senses the water, and expels the larvae. Copepods eat them…on and on. Since I don’t want to worry you, I will point out that no one ever got a Guinea warm in the United States…

So, Janet, we have breaking news of a somewhat distressing nature?

 Indeed we do, Chuck. A strange parasite has appeared in the U.S.

 That sounds serious…what is it?

 It’s called Fireyensis serpentetis…also known as the Dracunculus. The host is unaware of its presence until it starts to burrow out of the body of the poor soul who has one.

That’s dreadful, Janet! Tell our viewers how you get one.

Well, it comes from drinking water with infected copepods. After 12-14 months, the adult female worm exists the body through a painful, burning sore.

What’s the cure, Janet?

 Ah…

…and the few cases that…

Can I finish please? Thank you! The only cases diagnosed in the U.S. involved people who emigrated from Sudan, and they became infected before they left that country.

It has proven difficult to convince people not to soak their limbs with the emerging Dracunculus in other people’s drinking water, so in Africa, signs have been put up…

So here, a picture from a little kid’s coloring book is affixed to a tree at the local watering-hole which attempts to make the point that all villagers should guard the rancid drinking water and prevent people with Guinea worms hanging from their legs from going into the water. Notice that the woman lecturing Guinea Worm Kid has had one too…she still has the bandage on her foot. How fortunate we are that they finally invented…the bucket.

Not your typical childrens’ book, but whatever it takes to get the problem solved.

But there is one final element related to these dreadful things that seems strangely at place on this website. Before modern people explained to Guinea Worm Drinkers that these things came from the water they drank, they were sure they knew the cause. Indeed! You got Guinea worm as a result of a curse by a…witch-doctor.

I’m sure that everyone is wondering what could Guinea worms, aka fiery serpents, which are removed by the slow winding of a stick, have to do with Saintly Iconography? Did I mean to…

…put you off your lunch just to put you off your lunch? No. Being a Beyond the Paler…I will make a short comment here, without attempting to make a statement of fact. The story seems a little far-fetched…like a canonical story. Why? Well the continued existence of Dracunculus is dependent on something that seems so very implausible…

Everywhere that the Guinea worm inhabited, which at earlier times in history was all over the place, the only way for the worm to replenish its numbers is for everybody serving as a host to walk out into everybody else’s drinking water…

Hey kids! Stop that lady from…oh…never mind. Apparently, nobody gave this woman a Dracunculus Coloring Book! This scene played out over and over again…millions…tens of millions…of times. They did it in Africa…India…Asia…the Middle East…the people in a large part of the known world all decided that the boil will burn less if they stand in people’s drinking water. It is hard to believe that an entire species could survive for thousands of years on the basis of Sheer Stupidity. Of course, if you were raising money to eradicate Guinea worm, and you will need a lot of money and assistance from governments that, like Sudan, are far more interested in fighting civil wars than wrapping Guinea worms around sticks, people might ask… can you really eradicate it? Should I really give my money for this? Apparently. But this canonical story has the function of creating the appearance of easy eradication. Ultimately, people need to simply stop doing something that is stupid beyond words. And they will convince everybody that this parasite can be completely eliminated with the right amount of money; ultimately, it is simply a matter of education. If I were writing a fictional novel about the Guinea worm, I would have its means of reproduction a bit easier to quantify. My parasite would be spread by the bite of an infected insect. This is how African Sleeping Sickness is spread. How? It is the result of the bite of the…

…Tsetse Fly. Tsetse fly populations can be controlled, and their means of reproduction…birth of a single larvae at a time as opposed to laying piles of eggs like other flies, means that the size of the population can be reduced far easier and far quicker than other fly species. Of course, the bite of the tsetse fly is very painful, and leaves a chancre… a small ulcer. But I wonder if those who have been bitten by a Tsetse fly dash to the local people’s drinking water to soothe the Tsetse Fly bite on their leg.

All of this, as weird as it is already, gets even weirder. How does this relate to Saintly Iconography? I return to St. Roch, and a St. Roch collage I made…

One of the defining characteristics of the iconography of St. Roch, besides the dog, is the boil, or in some instances..the gash or cut…on his leg. But, these images are all stylized, meaning that they all have Rome’s seal of approval, more or less. Now it seems to me that all of these images, and a zillion others, have been cleaned up. By that I mean…they are all more-than-palatable-enough to be in an oil painting, on a prayer-card, in a Book of Hours, and even…as the basis for a statue. I did find an image of St. Roch that does not follow the Stylized Iconographic Religious Rules, as it were. And it is no doubt the only realistic presentation of St. Roch as far as the main element goes. In fact, it is a 15th century painting, and therefore considerably pre-dates the Highly Stylized Images of the saint…

It is readily apparent that the wound on Roch’s leg is very different than usually portrayed. The interpretation has been suggested that a Plague Boil has burst open, and discharge from it is running down the saint’s leg.

So much for the Plague boil. What St. Roch is suffering from is painfully clear…

…there is no doubt that what is on St. Roch’s leg is an emerging, adult female Guinea worm. They most commonly emerge somewhere on the foot, but they frequently emerge from some point on the leg as well. Now I will say that Roch is far better off with that situation than a Plague boil. Why? Guinea worm infection is almost never fatal by itself, unless a serious and untreated secondary infection develops….which may have been the case around the Red Sea thousands of years ago. There were no Mosaic Antibiotics or Anti-inflammatory Medications. As disgusting as it is, the Guinea worm will always leave, and although it can be debilitating in the short-term, the Bubonic Plague, on the other hand, given the point in history we’re talking about, was fatal every time. But there can be no doubt that the truth about St. Roch’s temporary affliction, contracted as a result of drinking contaminated water while on pilgrimage in the Holy Land, was something that Official Iconographists simply could not bear…you can’t put the realistic portrayal on a prayer card, and it is certain that no one would hang a picture of St. Roch Suffering From Dracunculiasis…suffering because of the fiery serpent, on their living room wall. And! His odds of survival are rather good, and without having to go to stare at the Nehushtan statue. Oh, by the way…Hey St. Roch! Try to resist the otherwise irresistible urge to wade out into your neighbor’s drinking water! Of course, it’s a lot easier if it exits the body through…

 …the more typical location of somewhere on the foot.

Thankfully, Guinea worms have nothing to do with St. Joseph. But! The accepted iconography has an element that I would be so bold as to question. What is that?

The standard image of St. Joseph is that of a carpenter. Jesus was a carpenter, and that is precisely what the Gospel of Mark says, although he is never portrayed as actually working as a carpenter. The only problem is that Joseph is never directly called a carpenter in canonical scripture. What has happened is that people have assumed that Joseph was a carpenter, because Jesus is referred to as a carpenter, and Joseph is regarded as Jesus’s father…and all of this in spite of the fact that most of the Catholic world and much of the Protestant world believes in the Virgin Birth Myth that effectively makes Joseph…in no way Jesus’s father.  However, the Gospel of Mark never refers to Joseph at all, and makes no reference to Jesus even having a father that anyone knew. And this involves a most important passage that caused a monumental problem for Christianity and a consequent shift in one of its most important tenants. The setting is as follows…Jesus attempted to teach from the scriptures in his hometown of Nazareth…not a particularly big place. The locals were offended by this, seeing how Jesus wasn’t a priest, a Levite, a Pharisee, an officially-recognized Rabbi, or in any way being the kind of man who would be regarded as having religious authority. In Mark 6:3, they say this…

Is this not the carpenter, the Son of Mary and brother of James, Joseph, Judah, and Simeon? And do not his sisters live here among us?

Now as it stands, I think this passage was instrumental in setting off the controversy surrounding the father of Jesus of Nazareth that would eventually produce multiple, conflicting and bizarre Virgin Birth Myths, one canonical Virgin Birth Myth, alternative genealogical considerations, and salacious rumors about the circumstances by which Mary of Nazareth became pregnant. The Ben Pandera (Son of the Panther) rumor about Jesus’s father, used by some Jewish critics of Christianity (most Jews couldn’t have cared less), and then by the writer named Celsus who, or so I will argue in yet another installment in my Search For The Panther serial essay, did not really exist, but was merely a pretense used by Christians to…wait! I’m getting ahead of myself. Why is the statement made by the people of Nazareth so important? Because they had no idea who Jesus’s father was…they made no attempt to contextualize this, and what makes this so weighty is the fact as a Jewish man living where and when he did, Jesus’s father, not his mother, brothers, or sisters… was the most important familial consideration. Why don’t they know who Jesus’s father is? Why not simply refer to Joseph? Well…Joseph was really Jesus’s step-father, assuming of course that there wasn’t an earlier step-father as well. I would also point out that the people of Nazareth do not seem to be impressed by Mary…nor by Jesus…so it is difficult to believe for two seconds that they ever heard about a Supposed Virgin Birth…something that would have impressed them…something impossible to keep under wraps in a little town like Nazareth, especially if you take into account what the gospels of Matthew and Luke say about how everyone in the known world heard about it! That’s a funny thing. Mary’s neighbors knew her and her family and they were just as plain and ordinary as everyone else…perhaps someone should tell Gabriel that. I maintain that the reason why the people of Nazareth made no reference at all to Jesus’s father is because he had died so long ago that they did not remember his name anymore.

The redactors of Matthew sought to correct this problem. Actually, earlier redactors of Matthew sought to fix the problem in an interesting way. Later redactors of Matthew, those who added what I have called elsewhere on this website…The Gospel of the Young Jesus…as a prologue to an earlier version of Matthew, provided a solution deemed by them superior to the solution offered by the redactors of the earlier version of Matthew…Primitive Matthew. The Jewish-Christian sect of the Ebionites used an early version of Matthew that began with what is now Matthew Chapter 3. And that means that Primitive Matthew began exactly where Mark still begins…John the Baptist as the Great Forerunner, Jesus being baptized by John, and Jesus retreating into the wilderness. Mark knows nothing about Jesus’s life before the Jordan, and seeing how Mark originates from Peter, the guy who knew Jesus better than anyone, it’s clear that even he didn’t know anything about Jesus’s life before his baptism other than that he had been a carpenter in Nazareth. Peter knew absolutely nothing about who Jesus’s father was, which only illustrates how unimportant that subject was to the both of them. The addition of The Gospel of the Young Jesus was meant to fill in the gap that Jesus and Peter would never have anticipated anyone would have given two seconds thought about…his biography. The redactors of what would become the Prologue to an Expanded Gospel of Matthew had collected stories about Jesus’s life before the Jordan…stories that circulated among different Christian groups, chose those they liked, and rejected those they didn’t like but the Infancy Gospel of Thomas did like…such as a confrontation between Little Boy Jesus and his teacher…

But when Joseph saw that the child was smart, and that he was getting older, Joseph decided that Jesus should go to school. The teacher told Joseph that he would teach Jesus the Greek alphabet…and then the Hebrew alphabet. But the teacher was afraid of him.

Actually, the teacher had good reason to be afraid…

The teacher wrote out the alphabet, and Jesus thought about it for a long time…though he said nothing. Then Jesus spoke and said, “So! You’re a teacher…huh? You know the alphabet well, do you? Tell me about the power of the Letter A, and I will tell you about the power of the Letter B!” This angered the teacher, and he hit Jesus on the head. Jesus was hurt, so he cursed the teacher…who fell on his face on the ground. Then Jesus went back to Joseph’s house. Joseph was rather upset, and said to Jesus’s mother…Don’t let him out of the house! Anyone who angers him…dies!

 Further…

 After that happened,  Jesus went through the village yet again, and a child who was running bumped into Jesus’s shoulder.  And Jesus became angry and said to the boy: You will not finish your race! And immediately, the boy fell down and died. 

Of course, Jesus proceeds to prove he had nothing to do with Zeno’s plunge from on high in a rather amazing way…

Then Jesus jumped down from the roof and stood by the body of the child and yelled out in a loud voice and said: Zeno! Arise and tell me, did I shove you off the roof? And Zeno jumped up and said: No, Lord, you didn’t push me off the roof! But you did raise me from the dead! And when the people saw it, they were amazed: and the parents of the child glorified God for the sign which had come to pass, and they worshipped Jesus.

Oh! There goes Burke…I mean…Zeno! That’s a Hellava Apocryphal Gospel Fall! The Gospel of Thomas shows a surprising commonalty with The Gospel of the Young Jesus in Matthew…the parent who is at the center of most of the action, including bearing the brunt of the anger of the locals who object to Jesus’s murderous rampage is…Joseph. There are references to Jesus’s mother, but she is named only once. Poor Joseph! His neighbors felt it necessary to complain…

You have a kid that does such things! He may no longer live in this village with us! At least teach him to do good things…not bad things! He is killing our children!

 The Gospel of Thomas is only one source that contains stories about Jesus’s childhood. The redactors of The Gospel of the Young Jesus passed on such stories. The Gospel of Thomas actually shows a fair amount of similarities with The Gospel of the Young Jesus in Matthew, as well as the Gospel of Luke…both collections end with Jesus’s parents finding him in the temple, going about his Father’s business.

Why do I say that one shouldn’t make too much out of the fact that the redactors of The Gospel of the Young Jesus passed over stories in the Gospel of Thomas? Because Luke passed over almost everything in The Prologue to the Gospel of Matthew…most noticeably punishing Joseph for thinking that the Mother of God was pregnant because…you get the picture. In fact, the beginning of the current version of Matthew and the current version of Luke are very different. Luke didn’t like what is in Matthew, and neither liked what is found in Thomas. But all three of these gospels made use of stories about Jesus that were in circulation at the time and provided what Mark did not...biography. Of course, there is one notable agreement between Mark and Thomas…though it is to be heard within the silence…the Gospel of Thomas starts its narrative when Jesus was five years old. So neither Mark, nor Thomas, attests to a belief in the Virgin Birth Myth. In the case of The Gospel of the Young Jesus, the little vignettes were put together in a format that linked each story to a prophecy, a methodology so important that in one instance, in the prophecy concerning Nazareth, they made up a prophecy that never existed. That prologue is now Matthew Chapters 1 and 2. By beginning with the Virgin Birth Myth…well…one particular Virgin Birth Myth, and wrongly linking it to the Septuagint Greek version of Isaiah 7:14, they provided their way out of the confusion swirling around the total lack of any knowledge as to the identity of Jesus’s father. But the redactors of the earlier version of Matthew, i.e. Matthew that began with Chapter 3 and completely lacked The Gospel of the Young Jesus, were therefore not Virgin Birthers…something which goes well with the amazing situation that, the Virgin Birth Myth so critical to later Christians, never gets mentioned again at any point in Jesus’s life…and not only did Peter not know about it…Jesus’s own brother James and the Apostle Paul knew nothing about it either; you can’t make mention of something again when you’ve never made mention of it before or even heard of it. The early redactors of Matthew wrote this:

Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother named Mary? And aren’t James, Joseph, Simeon, and Judah his brothers?

Mark says Jesus was a carpenter, but no references whatsoever are made to Jesus’s father. Matthew has changed this in such a way as to make reference to Jesus’s father, positing, probably quite rightly, that because Jesus was a carpenter…his father must have been a carpenter. That is sound, seeing how most Jewish boys learned their father’s trade. But what the redactors of Primitive Matthew have done is to make a direct reference to Jesus’s father, identify him as a carpenter, and finally, by making the change that they made, done something very important…they have made it appear that the people of Nazareth knew Jesus’s father. That countered other explanations and rumors about Jesus’s parentage by attempting to establish that Jesus’s father was a Jewish carpenter who had originally been married to Mary and was personally known to the folks in Nazareth. But! And this is most important! The redactors of Primitive Matthew did not know Jesus’s father’s name any more than did the redactors of Mark. But! Their change to the passage in Mark also shows that they didn’t know the name…Joseph! So while they do paint a picture of Jesus’s father…they do not name him. Joseph first enters the picture in The Gospel of the Young Jesus, which was added later. I see in Matthew 13:55 an attempt to counter contrary claims being made about who Jesus’s father may, or may not, have been…something that Mark 6:3 facilitated, although not intentionally. Matthew 13:55 was actually an ingenious way of going about it. When subsequent redactors added The Gospel of the Young Jesus, they forgot to make a change. The redactors of Primitive Matthew didn’t know the name of Jesus’s father, and didn’t know anything about Joseph…hence the way 13:55 reads. But when later redactors added Matthew Chapters 1-2, now we begin the book of Matthew knowing exactly who Joseph was. Had they been consistent, they should have added Joseph’s name to 13:55, seeing how the Prologue now clearly identifies Joseph as living with his family in Nazareth. Add Joseph’s name?  

Add his name? Yes! Add his name! The authors of Luke were clear buyers of Matthew’s Virgin Birth Myth, they just didn’t like Joseph, seeing how Luke, along with the Protoevangelium of James, continued the movement of Christianity toward the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Since you brought up the Protoevangelium of James, it is fitting to note another misrepresentation of Joseph of Nazareth…

This is an image of the saint well-liked in Rome. I have stated elsewhere that I believe that Joseph was, indeed, older than Mary. But now runs up against key tenants in the Cult of the Virgin Mary. The only way for Mary to be an Ever-Virgin Virgin, she must remain eternally a virgin. This is not a problem for Protestants, who cling to the Virgin Birth Myth, but allow for Mary and Joseph to have a normal marriage thereafter…which means…sex. There, I said it. This is not tolerable for Catholics. The Gospel of James forwards the notion of Joseph the Protector of the Virgin Mary on Behalf of God Himself. Thus Mary remains a virgin throughout her life. This is so important, that two elements were added. The first is the image of a very old man, and since there was no Viagra in the ancient world, we get the basic idea that Joseph was passed his prime, as it were, and the only interest he had in Mary was protecting her and Jesus. There is no attestation for Joseph being very old, and we know that Jesus had at least three brothers and an unstated number of sisters, suggesting a normal, Jewish marriage…though Joseph probably had children by a previous marriage. James adds something else, and it will knock your socks off. Mary gives birth in a cave, and then suddenly becomes a virgin again as soon as she has given birth…

And the midwife departed from the cave and met Salome and said to her, "Salome, Salome, I have to describe this new miracle for you! A virgin has given birth, although her body does not allow it." And Salome said, "As the Lord my God lives, unless I insert my finger and investigate her, I will not believe that a virgin has given birth." So the midwife went in and said, "Mary, position yourself, for not a small test concerning you is about to take place." When Mary heard these things, she positioned herself. And Salome inserted her finger into her body. And Salome cried out and said, "Woe for my lawlessness and the unbelief that made me test the living God. Look, my hand is falling away from me and being consumed in fire."

It is strange to go to such lengths to establish the concept of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, to the point that concocting a ridiculous bit of fiction that claims that her hymen sealed up after the birth, that you describe something that sends shudders down the spines of Catholics and Protestants alike. Salome the Gynecologist! Actually, students of the New Testament will quickly realize that Salome’s Finger is a bizarre adaption of Thomas’s Finger…he would not believe that Christ was resurrected from the dead unless he put his finger in one of the nail-holes in Christ’s hand. The Gospel of James is also the source, not only of Joseph’s old age, but also the birth of…

…Mary herself.

Actually, I think Luke would have written Joseph out altogether. Why? According to Matthew…a Gospel that the Lukists were not happy with, Joseph was going to get rid of Mary when he found out that she was pregnant…assuming that she had been messing around. The same thing is found in the Gospel of James. For Luke…well, Joseph, thanks to the redactors of The Gospel of the Young Jesus, was a now permanent fixture in the Christmas Pageant. In Matthew, it is Joseph who is the key person…he communicates with God through angels and dreams about what things mean and what to do. Luke, on the other hand, robs Joseph to pay Mary…Joseph is there as an almost cardboard-cut-out…Mary is the Prime Mover…Joseph is just…there. And God deals directly with her…not her husband What’s-His-Name. But! The confusion surrounding the identity of Jesus’s father had not ended with Matthew 13:55, or even the Prologue to Matthew. Why? Well, if anyone in a different Christian, or non-Christian, context paid any attention to the serious problem presented by the clever fix of Mark 6:3 by Primitive Matthew 13:55 that was then made almost impossible to understand once Joseph was added via Matthew Chapters 1 - 2 by not adding Joseph’s name to 13:55…they just might have noticed the same thing that I have noticed…and concluded that somebody is covering up something about someone. Luke will fix the fix broken by another fix by… fixing it…

So all bore witness to Him, and marveled at the gracious things he just said. And they said, Is this not Joseph’s son? (Luke 4:22).

See! It’s that simple…add his name! That will shut up everyone else and fix Primitive Matthew’s fix of Mark 6:3 after the fix offered by the later redactors of Matthew had broken it. And! Luke has done this very deliberately, which is made all the more clear by the fact the Lukists removed the reference to Mary, Jesus’s brothers, as well as his sisters, all of whom are present in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55. Why? Because they are making a very clear statement by adding Joseph’s name, without including Mary’s name, which will draw attention specifically to her husband’s name…the Lukists brought this about by their treatment of Joseph in their version of Jesus’s life before the Jordan. There were to be no other names and no other persons to distract one from knowing that it doesn’t matter what is in Mark or Matthew…everyone in Nazareth knew full well that Jesus had a Jewish father who lived in Nazareth and his name was…Joseph. That should be the end. But it wasn’t. Why? Two things. First…Luke liked to drop names into the story of Jesus which aren’t there in Mark or Matthew…regardless of what stage of redaction we’re talking about. And the Lukists became the Gold Medal Name Droppers in a passage naming the people who were present at Jesus’s tomb at his resurrection. Still, the Johnnites…the guys who gave us the Not-Gospel-Of-John took a close second when they suddenly, and unexpectantly, claimed that Joseph of Arimathea was not the only one responsible for taking Christ down from the Cross. Suddenly a guy named Nicodemus, who appears in only one other passage in John, but who isn’t named in the Three Real Gospels, helps Joseph of Arimathea to anoint Jesus’s body in preparation for burial. And then! It wasn’t until I read John 19: 41-42…after staring at it for almost an hour trying to decide if it really said what it really says, that I had to admit that there was a question I had never asked. When Jesus was put in the tomb…who built that tomb? Private tombs weren’t cheap. Who bought that tomb? Jesus? Not likely…he never seemed to have a lot of money…something made all the more interesting by the fact that the one job he had…that of carpenter…we never see him actually performing. I think the Johnnites also asked the question about what was now for me a Most Mysterious Tomb, and came up with a strange answer…

Now in the place where Jesus was crucified there was a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid. So there they laid Jesus, because of the Jews Preparation day, for the tomb was nearby.

Apparently Joseph of Arimathea and the Shadow Known as Nicodemus were in a hurry and put Jesus in someone else’s tomb. Jesus didn’t own a tomb…and there was no Family Plot…no! They simply stole…I mean…acquired a tomb that not only did Jesus not own…neither did Joseph or Nicodemus. Actually, I take Mark to indicate that the tomb in question belonged to Joseph of Arimathea, and he decided to inter Christ there. I must say that the Johnnites never disappoint. But dropping Nicodemus into the story…Mark makes it clear that it was only women who went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s body…was not nearly as audacious as this…

Now there stood by the cross of Jesus His mother, and his aunt, Mary wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing by, he said to his mother…woman, behold your son! Then he said to the disciple…behold your mother! And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

This is one of the sneakiest tricks in the game. Mark, Matthew, and Luke, despite detailed descriptions of the scene at the cross and then at the tomb, were so stupid they forgot to mention that Mary Mother of God was at the crucifixion? Actually, the only people present at the crucifixion were women. The Johnnites have a rather lame literary device whereby whenever they are inserting the disciple named John into a story where he absolutely never was, they suddenly stop calling him by his name, and call him something like…the disciple Jesus loved. I think the reason is clear. They knew that all the other Christian literature, not to mention communities of Christians all over the place, knew that John was never in any of those contexts, and were, as I will note shortly, willing to say so not just verbally, but also by emending other gospels to make the point. If the Johnnites were confronted with…baloney! We know John wasn’t there! They could say…chill! We didn’t say John was there! We said…the Mysterious Anonymous Disciple That Jesus Loved More Than Everybody In The Whole World Put Together was there! So there. Ok, what was that dude’s name? Well, John of course. The main point is that there were Roman soldiers at the crucifixion. Why? What! Why did all the disciples run like cowards when Jesus was arrested? Because there were arrest warrants out for them as well. So why were Roman soldiers present at the crucifixion? Pilate knew that Jesus’s followers might very well attempt to rescue him. If they did…the Romans could arrest them. Mark, Matthew, and Luke all resist the urge to claim that any of the men were present not just for the sake of being honest, but also because they didn’t figure that anyone wouldn’t know that any of these guys would be arrested if they had been there, and so to assert otherwise would simply be embarrassing. The Johnnites always sought to elevate John above all the followers of Christ…particularly Peter. So according to them, John was the only one who had the guts to be at the cross while all the other cowards were hiding…which is not possible. And Mary? Look at what they did. By making Mary adopt John, John now became an adopted son of the Ever-Virgin Mary Mother of God…and he thus became the brother of Jesus. And now being part of the Holiest of Holy Families, John was more important than all the disciples put together. Mary needed John to take care of her? As I recall, her other son James became the leader of the Christians in Jerusalem…I’ll bet he’d let mom stay with him. And it is worth noting that Mary has not appeared in the gospel story since a very angry Jesus, incensed at the fact that his mother believed was he crazy, disavowed Mary and claimed that she wasn’t really his mother…those that hear his words and believe…they are his mother. Mary, simply, didn’t believe Jesus’s claims…something impossible on the part of the woman who appears in the pageant at the beginning of Luke. Did she forget about the Virgin Birth? Or is it the case that, with the other historically reliable equivalents, she never heard of it either? I would suggest that she was deceased by the time of the crucifixion anyway. The last redactors of Matthew, or so I think, made changes following the appearance of the Johnnite Document. Why? Well, I think they took offense at the way that John was placed at the cross when none of the disciples were there, realizing what the Johnnites were doing with the bending and breaking of the real story, they did something fascinating. I noted that Mary didn’t need a bodyguard seeing how she had James. But…look at what the Matthewites did…

And many women who followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to Him, were there looking on from afar. Among them were Mary Magadalene, Mary mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee’s sons.

Wait…Mary Mother of God wasn’t there? Really. Of course, Mary mother of Jesus also had sons named James and Joseph, but I find it impossible that the mother of Jesus would be described, not as the mother of Jesus, but as the mother of two other sons instead. But who is the mother of Zebedee’s sons? Right! She was the mother of James and John…the Johnnites’ John…although his brother always gets named before him. How fascinating it is that the Gospel of John manages to remember that Jesus’s mother was there, not to mention, and this is a surprise…John, and that Jesus instructed Mary to turn John into his very own adopted brother, yet the Johnnites manage, in spite of the Most Amazing Memories In History, to nonetheless forget that John’s own mother was there! Of course, I don’t believe for a minute that she was there…Jesus’s mother or Mrs. Zebedee…but, for the Matthewites…if we can’t remember who was at the cross so we managed to not know that your guy was there to be present for the adoption proceedings involving the Queen of the Universe…it would seem that we can make it look like you guys forgot your own guy’s mother! But, there is something sublime here that, assuming I am managing not to be wrong, is one of the cleverest tricks imaginable. John and his brother James managed to piss off the other disciples when this happened…

Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

“What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.

They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”

 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?”

“We can,” they answered.

Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.”

When the ten heard about this, they became indignant with James and John.

That is Mark 10: 35-45. Matthew gives the same gist, but changes an important detail…

The mother of Zebedee’s children (James and John) came to Jesus with her sons. She got down on her knees before Jesus to ask something of Him. He said to her, “What do you want?” She said, “Say that my two sons may sit, one at Your right side and one at Your left side, when You are King.” Jesus said to her, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to take the suffering that I am about to take? Are you able to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They said, “Yes, we are able.” He said to them, “You will suffer as I will suffer. But the places at My right side and at My left side are not Mine to give. Whoever My Father says will have those places.”

The other ten followers heard this. They were angry with the two brothers.

Yes! According to Mark…James and John asked the question. According to Matthew…their mother asked the question! I think that the original reading in Matthew mirrored the reading in Mark…James and John asked the question, and no…Mrs. Zebedee wasn’t there. But that reading changed…although they forgot to change…they were angry with the two brothers, who in the changed version, weren’t the ones who asked the question. Why the change? If Mrs. Zebedee tracked the group down, and appeared before Jesus to ask the question in question…I might ask…why did she ask it? Answer…she loved her sons, and wanted the best for them. So why change a detail? Why make John’s mother suddenly appear out of nowhere to show how much she loved James and John? This change looks forward to the claim made that John’s mother was at the crucifixion. Picture the scene…present at the crucifixion are three principle people: Mary Mother of Christ, James’s Little Brother John, and John’s mother. Suddenly, Jesus looks down at John and Mary and tells Mary to adopt John. Based on the altered reading of the passage in Matthew, it seems to me likely that John’s mother would respond rather angrily to this…

Hold on! I tried to get my two boys into the second and third most powerful positions in the universe. John’s my boy…and he’ll stay my boy! He doesn’t need an adoptive mother…I’m his mother…and it will stay that way. After all…you have James. Speaking of James…Johnny, where’s your brother?

As it is, the followers of John disappeared, whereas the followers of Peter and Paul will be those Christians at the forefront of a Universal Religious Revolution that changed everything. But dropping names can have other motives! There is disagreement as to just who was at the tomb. Only the Gospel of John states that Peter was there and someone else…the other disciple whom Jesus loved…ah yes…how to say…John…without saying…John. No men were at the tomb because there were Roman soldiers at the tomb hoping Peter and the Other Mysterious Disciple and Now Adopted Son of Mary and Natural Son of a Rather Angry Woman would have been arrested. That said, the claim in John appears to be a response to Luke 24:12…

But Peter arose and ran to the tomb and stooping down, he saw the linen cloths lying by themselves; and he departed marveling to himself at what had happened.

Ah! Guess who wasn’t there? Right! Don’t worry…read the Johnnites version of it…he’ll be there. I would step back and point out that my criticism of what is wrongly called the Gospel of John, something I call the Johannite Document, is not a criticism of the real apostle John. Why? Because he had nothing whatsoever to do with the making of the book in its current form. His followers took their elevation of John beyond anything even remotely like the real John, son of Mrs. Zebedee, and to a mind-boggling degree. Despite the continual attempts to exalt John over Peter, which included even childish claims that John could run faster than Peter, the key position of the followers of Peter could not be denied, and they described the reconciliation between Christ and Peter in the last chapter of the book. Now that was a particularly galling thing for them, so they then preceeded to make a claim so crazy that it leaves one speechless…

Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, “Lord, who is going to betray you?” When Peter saw him, he asked, “Lord, what about him?”

Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.” Because of this, the rumor spread among the believers that this disciple would not die. But Jesus did not say that he would not die; he only said, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?”

 This is amazing! According to the Johnnites, there were people in the Christian world who believed that John would live forever. Really? Who are the people who believed that? They wouldn’t be…Johnnites by any chance? I suspect that they spread that rumor since not only did John become the brother of Christ and the son of the Virgin Mary, now he was afforded something that no other human being could ever claim…he would not die. However, the Johnnites felt that they had to walk that back…probably because no one would believe it. And in robbing John to pay themselves, the redactors now assert that John would not die until Christ returned. And that makes John the Beloved more than 2,020 years old! Yes! The Johnnites are the great Slayers of Evangelical and Fundamentalist Nonsense! I wonder where he is? Where does he live? How does he support himself…is he working on a fishing trawler? Does he have his own website? WWW.IAMACTUALLYTHEAPOSTLEJOHN.COM. How in the world will we get 2,021 candles on his next birthday cake? This claim about John is just as ridiculous as the claim that John would never die…which many might object to on the basis that…even Jesus died. When the Johnnites made their more humble claim about John, they had no idea that 2,000 years later Christ would not have returned yet. It was a common belief among Christians in the time after Jesus’s death that the Lord would be returning fairly soon. I think the Johnnites would be rather embarrassed had they known that 2,000 years later Christ was no closer to returning than he had been in their own time.

According to Mark and Matthew…neither Peter nor the Now 2,020 Year Old Disciple Whom Jesus Loved was present…only the women. And that is the historical truth. But among the three real gospels, there is disagreement as to who was there, although all four place Mary Magdalene there. Luke says this…

It was Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother James, other women, and Joanna who told these things to the apostles.

Who? Joanna? Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Joanna! That’s what I thought. She appears only in Luke…twice. The first occurrence is the valid one and answers a question I never thought to ask…seeing that Jesus was a retired carpenter, and although Peter, Andrew, James, and John were fishermen…and one guy was a tax collector…still! None of these men are ever depicted making any money. Food costs money…as does everything. So where did it come from…they didn’t pick it off money-trees growing around the Sea of Galilee you know. The answer is so very realistic…Jesus found 3 wealthy backers to fund his ministry. Not surprisingly…three wealthy women. Who?

It is gruesome, I know…but that is the head of John the Baptist. According to tradition, his head was buried in one spot, and his body in another. But one woman knew where to find John’s head, and she found it, then gave it a proper burial. She knew where it was because she was the wife of Chuza, an official who worked at the court of King Herod’s son. And…

Now it came to pass, afterward, that Jesus went through every city and village, preaching and bringing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God. And his twelve disciples were with him. And certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities- Mary called Magdalene, out of whom had come seven demons, and Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others who provided for Jesus from their wealth.

Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna were the three most important financial backers of Christ and his ministry. I don’t believe for one moment the claims about Mary having had seven demons…she was targeted for slander because a Christian community had grown up around her and used the Gospel of Mary Magdalene as their scripture. It contains very specific claims that Mary was the most important of all the apostles…something I believe is the truth.  A religion that was not originally male-dominated soon became that way and all the important women had to be discredited…Mary Magdalene more than any of them. So Luke answers a very important question with an answer I have no doubt is true. But Joanna was not present at the tomb, and even though the other 2 gospels and the Johnnite Document disagree as to who was there…no one agrees with Luke. Why drop her name in? In antiquity, books were very expensive to make. You needed guys who could read and write. Such guys were rare…and expensive to hire. Everything was written out by hand, and the materials needed to produce the book were expensive. You needed at least one proof-reader. That’s the only other guy in the region who could read and write. And he’s not cheap either. You will have to pay them for their work, and it will be slow-going…if you want a proper book. In the Roman world, it was ideal if you could find a patron…a wealthy guy who was willing to provide the funding for the making of the book. Only one book in the bible both has, and names, the wealthy backer…Luke…

Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order a narrative of those things which are most surely believed among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the certainty of those things in which you were instructed.

Theophilus? The Ultimate Mystery Man in Scripture! Actually…the second. But a close second! The book of Luke is dedicated to its patron. And who is this Theophilus?

That is an ossuary…which is a fancy name for a bone-box. After burial, once the body had decayed, the bones were eventually removed and placed in an ossuary. This ossuary is a very special one. The owner of the bones inside is inscribed on the outside…

Joanna, daughter of Jonathan, son of the High Priest…Theophilus.

Those are two names I now know quite well. Theophilus was a member of the most powerful and wealthiest families in First Century Judea, and Theophilus served as high priest, as did 4 of his brothers. He was also the grandfather of Joanna…our Joanna who, as belonging to a very rich family, married a Herodian official named Chuza, and used her wealth to support the ministry of the Man From Nazareth. I suspect that very few people know just how important Joanna was…how important she…is. We know the names of the buffoonish and self-absorbed male followers of Jesus…and we all know the name of Jesus’s most loyal follower…Mary Magdalene. But I feel it incumbent to recommend the honoring of the woman who probably more than anyone else made Christ’s ministry possible. That seems more noble than doing an end-run around the other clods trying to get the best seats in heaven, or…getting your mother to Metaphorically Do It For You…your biological mother, that is. But it didn’t end there. The Lukists had a connection to Joanna and, through her, a connection to an aged and wealthy former High Priest…Grandpa. And Grandpa was willing to back the writing of the Gospel of Luke…with cold hard shekels…that is. He would do so in honor of his grand-daughter. Was Theophilus a Christian? I don’t know. Was Joanna? Absolutely. But even if Theophilus wasn’t a Christian…his grand-daughter was, and that might have been good enough for him. Of course, you might find yourself feeling a bit obligated to Theophilus. I would imagine that whatever his views about the new religion, or the Man From Nazareth himself, he would be overjoyed to read this book and find his grand-daughter…standing at the tomb of Christ at the moment that history would be changed forever. My opinion of the Gospel of Luke? Matthew? Mark has primacy, and when there are discrepancies…default to Mark…unless other things are brought to bear. Mark is the definitive record, although bear in mind that our Gospel of Mark is an extracted version of the Original Gospel of Mark, which was available only to the Highest Christian Elite. Primitive Matthew is second. Luke is third. John should be read as pseudepigrapha. If Joanna wasn’t at the tomb, but it would thrill Theophilus to read that she was…surely that’s falsification of the record. No…it’s not that straight-forward. History in antiquity was never what it is today…history was written in the service of something else. In this case, something much greater. Kudos to Luke for being the only one willing to come forward and identify the women who bankrolled Jesus’s career…making chairs and tables wasn’t going to do it. Was Joanna there at tomb? No. Was Luke guilty of something bad in putting her there? No. He who has eyes let him see! A study of the gospels will make it clear that she wasn’t there…literally…standing next to Mary Magdalene, a woman Joanna probably knew very well. But Joanna was there…figuratively and metaphorically…the whole thing happened in part because of her. She didn’t make an investment expecting dividends. She was present when she took it upon herself to find the head of John the Baptist…the man Jesus described as the Greatest Man Who Ever Lived, and buried it properly…at great risk to herself. When John died he…died. Jesus died and rose again…destroying sin and death in the process. Everything had to go a certain way…and Joanna helped make sure that it did. So there can be no doubt that she was present at the tomb on the day it was found to be empty as much as anyone else who was standing there. People cam be present even when you can’t see them. I’m sure Theophilus understood that, and the Lukists did nothing wrong in giving a more tangible picture of something that was certainly true. And she continued to help things along by being the conduit through which the funds of Theophilus could pass in order to produce one of the most important books in history.

And so it is that Lukists attempted to fix a broken fix to something that never really needed fixing, but a quick fix could help deal with all of the confusion that Mark inadvertently help bring about…just add Joseph’s name…

So all bore witness to Him, and marveled at the gracious things he just said. And they said, Is this not Joseph’s son? (Luke 4:22).

Because in doing this, the Lukists made a big mistake. Yes! Read Luke 4:22 again…we now know that Jesus’s father was Joseph…but Luke forgot to include the fact that Joseph was a carpenter. Wait! A mistake is only one possible explanation…indeed…not the best one. The Lukists knew they could insert Joseph’s name into the text because of what the Prologue of Matthew had brought about. However, they balked at claiming that Joseph was a carpenter because it was known at the time that while Joseph was a real Jewish man…a real husband of Mary…the real step-father of Jesus…he still wasn’t…a carpenter! So one can look at Luke as the best indication, in the end, that Joseph wasn’t a carpenter. And! Could it be that Luke 4:22 now created a problem? It names Jesus’s father, but in order to emphasize this, it left out the name of Jesus’s mother! The Johnnites, those who produced the Book of John, wrongly referred to as the Gospel of John, and who were in tense competition with both the followers of Peter and the remaining disciples of John the Baptists, produced a wholly unreliable historical fiction. But one can almost hear their frustration and see them stamping their feet as they proclaim…we will fix Luke’s fix of the problem created when Primitive Matthew attempted to fix Mark 6:3 and lead to that fix being broken by the fix offered by the redactors who added the Gospel of the Young Jesus to the front of Matthew…

And they said…is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? (John 6:42)

But wait! We bring Jesus’s mother back into it after Luke so wrongly left her out…but we forgot to name her? So now we know that Jesus’s father is Joseph, and we also know that Jesus has a mother…we just don’t know her name now. And notice the difficult reading…the son of Joseph, whose father... So they know Jesus’s father Joseph, or are they saying that that they know Jesus is the son of Joseph, and they also know Joseph’s father, so they know Jesus’s grandpa as well? I will offer a final fix of all of this in the totally spurious, non-canonical, and completely unauthoritative Gospel of Tektonikus…

Then Jesus went to his hometown, Nazareth, and his disciples went with him. On the Sabbath, Jesus went into the middle of the synagogue and began teaching. Those who were present were amazed, wondering how this man attained such wisdom! Where did he learn such things? And his deeds are mighty too!

Is this not…STOP! YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE!!! The following service announcement is being made to fix all broken fixes and require no subsequent fix! 

Is this not Jesus, a man about 33 years old, a long-time resident of this very town of Nazareth, who grew-up here, and who lives in the house just over there? The one painted white with the pretty garden! Is this not the Jewish man who is a carpenter by trade that we know so well? Do we not know his Jewish mother Mary…who is married to a Jewish man named Joseph? Do we not know their Jewish children…including, to wit, the aforementioned Jesus…really…Joshua, and his four Jewish brothers, these being… Joseph, Simeon, Judah, and James, the latter who will later be the leader of the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem and will be known as James the Just so as to distinguish him from a man who is not related to Joseph, Mary, Jesus, Joseph, Simeon, Judah, or James the Just…but will become a Christian leader nonetheless and will be called James the Greater, not to be confused with the other James who will be called James the Less and is not related to James the Just or James the Greater! And are we not familiar with Jesus’s sisters…all being Jewish girls who are the daughters of Jewish Joseph and Jewish Mary of Nazareth…this very town…who live in the white house with the pretty garden? And are we not thoroughly knowledgeable about every conceivable facet of what began as Mark 6:33; then became Matthew 13:55, which was compromised by Matthew chapters 1 – 2, and then not-quite-so-fixed by Luke, which, in turn was not quite so fixed by the Johnnities?

And they looked upon Jesus with contempt.

That is my attempt to fix everything and cover all the bases in detailed and comprehensive manner. Wait! Did I mention that Joseph was a carpenter? Oh, skip it. I give up. And I have a headache now. We don’t know who Jesus’s father is…then we know his job…then we learn about Joseph…we find out that he thought something not-very-nice about Mary…so we shut him up…then we had to break him out again so Jesus could be his son even though Luke is a Virgin Birther and so Joseph can’t be Jesus’s father but someone has to shut up those people in Nazareth and we don’t really have anyone else to trot out seeing how we really can’t turn God into a carpenter, but without a human guy we can’t counter those other guys who have a scandalous explanation for how Mary became pregnant that is not too unlike the awful thing Joseph thought that caused us to shut him up before we had to trot him out to…I give up! But one thing that I think is crystal clear is that a host of biblical redactors had more than enough opportunities to simply say that Joseph was a carpenter…and they simply wouldn’t do it…despite all the machinations that sought to keep everyone from noticing that no one really knew who Jesus’s father was. I think that the review of the relevant biblical material clearly shows that Joseph, who was real, and was Jesus’s real step-father…was NOT a carpenter! He was an older man with money, not rich, but he didn’t have to work and could easily give Mary, Jesus, Joseph, James, Simeon, Judah, and Mary’s girls, a comfortable life.

I can not resist taking one more shot at The Gospel of the Young Jesus and the Virgin Birth Myth. It runs like this. Paul of Tarsus, a Jewish persecutor of Christians, decided one day to be a Christian. Not content with just being a Christian, he decided that he would promote himself to apostle, despite the fact that he never knew Christ, wasn’t chosen by him, and wasn’t even chosen by the Real Apostles. But Paul said that he would take the Gentile Christians, while Peter, and Jesus’s brother James the Just, would lead the Jewish Christians...so what could it hurt? Paul knew nothing about Christianity other than the fact that he had tried so hard to wipe it out. Since there were no gospels then, and no written Christian works of any kind, he decided to learn from the two experts. First he spent time with Peter. Then he spent time with James the Just, the biological brother of Jesus, and thus a biological son of Mary of Nazareth. Paul, in his writings, shows virtually no knowledge of Jesus’s biography, which isn’t too strange since Peter only knew Jesus after his baptism at the Jordan and didn’t consider Jesus’s life before then to be very important. But it is exceedingly strange that Paul never and at no time in any way, shape, form, or fashion shows any knowledge of the Virgin Birth Story despite the fact that he sat around talking with James the Just who was the biological son of Mary and biological brother of Jesus which would seem to indicate that the kid who grew up with his mother Mary and his brother Jesus and would follow his brother and become the leader of the Christians in Jerusalem, obviously knowing that his brother was NEVER called Immanuel, leaving the Archangel Gabriel in trouble with God for not bothering to read the Book of Isaiah before declaring that Mary would give birth to Immanuel and that she should name him…Joshua? Back to Sunday School for Gabriel! So Paul didn’t find out about the Virgin Birth of Jesus from Jesus’s brother James because either James thought it didn’t really matter anyway or because he managed not to know this couldn’t-be-more-important-thing-in-all-of-human-history about his mother and his brother even though Luke would have us believe that even shepherds kicking around the farmyard knew what happened? Along with the everyone else. And Luke! Paul had a companion named Luke and many think that Paul’s Luke is Luke’s Luke who wrote Luke but was not a disciple or follower of Christ and simply wasn’t there for any of it and so…how is it that he had all this knowledge to be able to write a rival gospel to Mark and Matthew? Did God just fill up his head? And one last thought…if Paul didn’t learn from James the Just about his brother’s supposed Virgin Birth it seems strange that Paul was also followed around by a guy who supposedly wrote the Gospel of Luke which accepts and greatly expands the Virgin Birth Story and still Paul doesn’t seem to know…the Virgin Birth Story. Alas! Not only does he not know anything about a virgin birth of Jesus he actually states categorically…

But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were born under the law, that we might receive adoption as sons.

That is Galatians 4: 3-4. So the most Paul could say about Jesus’s birth is that he was born of a woman…born under the law. Sounds kinda like Jesus’s birth and upbringing were pretty ordinary...just as Mary’s neighbors in Nazareth believed. This passage is fascinating for another reason…it speaks of becoming a son of God by adoption…not by birth. So if we follow Mark and Primitive Matthew and thus the Virgin Birth Myth will appear later, and Jesus was merely born of a woman, when did Jesus become the Son of God? And how? First, Mark…

It came to pass in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And immediately coming up from the water, Jesus saw the heavens opening up and the Spirit descended upon him and a voice came out of heaven saying…You are My Beloved Son! The one who pleases Me!

That almost sounds like becoming the Son of God through adoption! I will also consult Primitive Matthew and, with no recourse to The Gospel of the Young Jesus, being forced to rely on an Ebionite-Like Matthew beginning with Matthew chapter 3, I find…

Then Jesus, when He had been baptized, came up immediately from the water and behold, the heavens were opened before him, and he saw the Spirit of the Living God descending like a dove, until it rested upon him. And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying…This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!”

It’s funny how often Primitive Matthew sounds just like Mark. Jesus becomes the Son of God following his baptism? And why be baptized anyway?

John came baptizing and preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.

Odd, and it is after Jesus undergoes this baptism of repentance for the remission of sins that he discovers that he has been adopted as God’s Own Son! Sure…there are plenty of gymnastics you can go through to get around the apparently clear meaning of that. And I have since found out, from Paul, that believers in Christ will likewise become adopted sons and daughters of God…but only because Jesus was adopted as the One True Son of God, making it all possible. Of course, the Ebionites did not believe in the Virgin Birth, but did believe that Jesus was the Messiah. They also rejected the Divinity of Jesus. I both do, but also…don’t. I will add another twist…Theodotus of Byzantium started a Christian movement that firmly held the Virgin Birth Story was literal, historical truth. But, following this miracle, Jesus lived just like any other guy, well, except for his righteousness and piety, although it would appear that Theodotus better not read the story in which Jesus kills his teacher. Virgin Birth…you like him already…surely better than those pesky Ebionites. True, Theodotus believed in what I don’t…the Virgin Birth. But for Theodotus, there was Jesus the ordinary man, whose birth was a miracle, but his life soon became pretty ordinary. Then there was “the Christ” which descended upon Jesus at his baptism, and it was only at that point that Jesus became the Son of God. What did the Expanded Version of Matthew, complete with the newly attached fables, say was the importance of the Virgin Birth? Not much…it just fulfilled a prophecy. Expanded Matthew, by chapter 3, drops the Virgin Birth completely, and will never mention it again. It was just a miracle. But Primitive Matthew and Theodotus align beautifully on the question of when Jesus became the Son of God…the Descent of the Spirit of the Living God following Jesus’s baptism. There will be many adopted sons and daughters…but only One Christ. So if you’re inclined to harp on Expanded Matthew about the Virgin Birth then…knock yourself out…I’ll assume you agree with Matthew that it was a neat trick with no more significance than it fulfilled a Greek mistranslation of the Hebrew reading of Isaiah 7:14. So have your cake and then find out you can’t eat it? Don’t drink a glass full of copepods and Guinea worm larvae as well! I’m all out of Nehushtans for you to gaze upon…or smash into pieces…I’ll leave that up to you. I will walk a middle ground. The Virgin Birth is a fiction intended to fix a thing that would seem irrelevant, but soon became the source of vehement disagreements…who was Jesus’s father? Actually, there are several different Virgin Birth stories…some far more interesting than that found in Matthew or Luke; my favorite is the one called…The Angels Of the Flower Garden. Who was Jesus’s father? I think Mark is dead-on…but Primitive Matthew is a little right too. Mary’s first husband was a carpenter who lived in Nazareth. He died when Jesus was very young, and by the time that the people of Nazareth were being nasty to Christ, he had been dead for a long time. The people of the town didn’t even remember his name. Mary then married Joseph, a righteous and pious man, older than Mary, who could provide for a large family without working. Jesus was a man who was called to undergo a baptism for the remission of sin. Emerging from the water, he was adopted as God’s son, and waited to take over as leader of John the Baptist’s Repentance Movement. So in some ways I’m a proud Ebionite…in other ways, I’m a proud Adoptionist. I think that’s great even though it may be a double-whammy insofar as both Christian movements have been declared heresies, and all proponents were excommunicated. So I’m a Double Heretic, Twice Banished to the Theological Wastelands! A Great Religious and Spiritual Dracunculus!