Was Mary a virgin? Did she stay a virgin? How Christ’s early followers turned a biological necessity into a vice

December 26, 2019

 

“HOW CHRIST’S EARLY FOLLOWERS TURNED A BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY INTO A VICE”

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach two pieces below.

The first piece is by Diarmaid MacCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the church, at the University of Oxford, and one of the leading church historians in the world.

He writes:

Did Jesus have two human parents? Well, he certainly grew up with a mum and dad, Mary and Joseph; but the story we hear in church at Christmas, amalgamated out of two different accounts in two of the four gospels, suggests that somehow Joseph didn’t get involved in the initial process of parenting, and that Mary had remained a “virgin”.

Yet those gospel-writers, Matthew and Luke, seem confused. They set out, at great length, Joseph’s family tree, which suggests that he was Jesus’s biological father – otherwise why would they bother with the genealogy?

Maybe because of this shaky knowledge of Jesus’s parentage, Christianity has tied itself up in knots about sex and marriage: it must often seem to outsiders that Christians do little else but argue about these questions…

Matthew tries to prove Mary was a virgin. Yet Matthew was writing in Greek, and unfortunately the original Hebrew didn’t talk about a “virgin” at all, just a “young woman”. On that slight shift in translation, Christianity built a great deal… Christians have been struggling with the fallout ever since…

***

The second piece below is about how The Hallmark Channel, known for its light and romantic Christmas movies, has come under fire from New York Times and Washington Post critics for its attempts at Hanukkah films this year. (The photo above is from the film “Double Holiday”.)

 

WAS MARY A VIRGIN? DID SHE STAY A VIRGIN?

Was Mary a virgin? Did she stay a virgin? The confusion goes back to Christ’s early followers, who turned a biological necessity into a vice

Why Christianity has been struggling with sex ever since the Nativity
By Diarmaid MacCulloch
The Guardian
December 24, 2019

At Christmastide you can’t escape from the fact that Christianity centres on the birth of a child, and glories in it. But Christians say that this Jewish baby from 2,000 years ago is also the supreme God, and then it gets complicated.

Birth generally involves sexual encounter, all messy and sweaty: what about this one? Did Jesus have two human parents? Well, he certainly grew up with a mum and dad, Mary and Joseph; but the story we hear in church at Christmas, amalgamated out of two different accounts in two of the four gospels, suggests that somehow Joseph didn’t get involved in the initial process of parenting, and that Mary had remained a “virgin”.

Yet those gospel-writers, Matthew and Luke, seem confused. They set out, at great length, Joseph’s family tree, which suggests that he was Jesus’s biological father – otherwise why would they bother with the genealogy?

Maybe because of this shaky knowledge of Jesus’s parentage, Christianity has tied itself up in knots about sex and marriage: it must often seem to outsiders that Christians do little else but argue about these questions. And frequently, confident Christian assertions about sex are made without understanding the history behind it all.

Matthew tries to prove Mary was a virgin by referring his story back to an ancient Hebrew prophecy from Isaiah, that “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son”. Yet Matthew was writing in Greek, and unfortunately the original Hebrew didn’t talk about a “virgin” at all, just a “young woman”. On that slight shift in translation, Christianity built a great deal.

Around a century after the first four gospels were composed, new Christian writings, also claiming to be gospels, began to emphasise Mary’s virginity, removing any taint of sex from her story. One of these is the gospel of James. It was never regarded as an official gospel, but it was hugely popular in its day for filling in the bits of a very patchy New Testament tale. It tells Mary’s story from her birth through to the birth of Jesus, and one of its main aims is to emphasise that Mary didn’t just start out a virgin – she stayed a virgin. So in a key part of the text, a midwife examines Mary after childbirth and exclaims in astonishment: “Behold, a virgin hath brought forth: which nature doth not allow.”

This “gospel” has another new departure: the idea that God had already intervened not just in the birth of Jesus, but in the conception of Mary herself. James tells us that Mary’s mother (called for the first time Anna, another detail not in the Bible) was infertile.

Then an angel appeared to Anna, saying: “Anna, Anna, the Lord has heard your prayer. You will conceive, and bear a child, and the child will be famous throughout all the world.” And immediately Anna fell pregnant with Mary. This is the origin of the Roman Catholic idea that Mary, let alone Jesus, was conceived without sin: the “immaculate conception”.

Take note: we’re not dealing with the original four gospels here. There are references in those biblical gospels to Jesus having brothers and sisters – which sounds as if Mary at the very least didn’t stay a virgin. Christians began to explain them away as Jesus’s cousins – or Joseph’s children by a previous marriage. As a result, Christianity came widely to accept Mary’s perpetual virginity: she stayed a virgin. This means that the most important marriage in the Christian story didn’t involve physical sex at all, which makes for a confused start to any Christian theology of marriage.

Christianity’s problem with sex goes back to these first centuries of its history, when early Christians turned sex from a biological necessity into a vice; from a pleasure into a sin. Christians have been struggling with the fallout ever since.

According to the gospels, Jesus Christ had very little to say about sex. He did insist on monogamy in marriage, and he decreed that there should be no divorce (something about which Christians began disagreeing with him straight away – including the apostle Paul). But beyond those two pronouncements, Jesus said virtually nothing – nothing, for instance, about homosexuality.

One gospel story, more than any other, sums up his attitude towards sex (John 8:3-11). Jesus was teaching in the Jerusalem Temple, where the Dome of the Rock now stands, when a group of men dragged in a woman caught in the act, they said, of adultery. They asked Jesus whether they should stone her to death – the ancient Jewish penalty. But all he said was: “He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” And when they’d all shuffled off looking sheepish, all he said to her was to go off and sin no more.

That is a story of forgiveness and mercy. Jesus was very hot on forgiveness and mercy. It would be nice if Christians were too.

 

AS HALLMARK DABBLES IN HANUKKAH FLICKS, JEWISH SCREENWRITER FENDS OFF CRITICISM

As Hallmark Dabbles in Hanukkah Flicks, Jewish Screenwriter Fends Off Criticism

Nina Weinman says ‘Double Holiday’ – which she wrote – and ‘Holiday Date,’ which critics say invokes anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes, is just spreading holiday cheer

By Danielle Ziri New York
Haaretz
December 21, 2019

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-as-hallmark-dabbles-in-hanukkah-flicks-its-jewish-screenwriter-defends-her-movie-1.8292905

NEW YORK – The Hallmark Channel, known for its light and romantic Christmas movies, has come under fire from critics for its attempts at Hanukkah flicks this year. Yet while some op-eds and tweets say the films are rife with stereotypes and portray the Jewish festival as another aspect of Christmas cheer, the Jewish screenwriter who penned one of them defends her work.

Last year, the Hallmark Channel announced it would include two Hanukkah-themed movies in its 2019 “Countdown to Christmas” programming – a lineup of cheesy seasonal films that has become the network's trademark and given it its highest annual ratings. But when the plots of the two movies, “Double Holiday” and “Holiday Date,” were released earlier this month, some of the excitement dimmed.

“Double Holiday” features a Jewish, career-minded, real estate project manager named Rebecca Hoffman (played by Carly Pope). She is tasked with organizing a Christmas party for a client alongside her office nemesis, Chris (Kristoffer Polaha), and has to juggle the job with her and her family’s Hanukkah plans. As their planning progresses, Chris learns about and embraces Rebecca’s Jewish Hanukkah traditions as he joins their celebrations all week. Of course, as the classic Hallmark formula suggests, the pair falls in love at the end of the movie.

“Double Holiday” drew criticism for what some saw as leaning on stereotypes – the Jewish protagonist has a loud, big family – but also for its Christmas imagery eclipsing its portrayal of Hanukkah. Rebecca’s office is decked in red and green, and her nephew performs in a Christmas play dressed as Santa.

These are not Hanukkah movies, writer Britni de la Cretaz kvetched in a Washington Post op-ed. “They are Christmas movies with Jewish characters. And they rely on some of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes in the book.”

A New York Times article by Nancy Coleman echoed the sentiment: “These are Christmas movies through and through, with Hanukkah portrayed as an afterthought. Instead of helping to make non-Jewish Americans more comfortable with Jewish traditions – which is what true inclusion looks like – they are trying to make Christmas more comfortable for Jews.”

But “Double Holiday” screenwriter Nina Weinman stands behind her movie. “All I can say, to speak for myself, is that I was really, really careful to try not to be very cliché, and to not be super stereotypical,” she tell Haaretz. “In this day and age, people can find fault in anything.”

Weinman, who was raised Jewish in California and has written over 20 movies for the Hallmark Channel, says she was very excited to include Hanukkah in one of her plots this season, and never intended to assimilate a Jewish narrative into a Christmas story.

“That was never something I was interested in doing, because what we really wanted to do is show a non-Jewish person assimilating into Hanukkah and really explore those traditions,” she says. “Hallmark was super encouraging about that, and they loved the story when we first came up with it and pitched it to them.”

She and her producer, Joel Rice, who is also Jewish, used their own experiences and traditions to create the scenario. Her being married to someone who isn’t Jewish also came into play in writing the movie's script.

“To say that something is anti-Semitic when it was made by Jewish people who were involved in this and took it very seriously, without having ever seen it, was really upsetting to me,” she adds.

Weinman was not involved in “Holiday Date,” Hallmark’s second Hanukkah movie and perhaps the more problematic of the two.

The film’s plot sees aspiring fashion designer Brooke dumped right before Christmas, leaving her dreading going home to celebrate without a date. She enlists the help of actor Joel to play the part of her boyfriend over the holidays.

Fully committed to the role, Joel enthusiastically participates in all the yuletide festivities. However, the family grows suspicious when he shows little knowledge of Christmas celebrations: He doesn’t know Christmas carol lyrics; fails at decorating the family tree; and makes a number of other faux pas during the visit. The movie portrays him as a clueless Jew who always wanted to celebrate Christmas, but has no idea how.

When her family eventually finds out Joel is Jewish, they incorporate his Hanukkah traditions into their plans. And yes, Brooke and Joel eventually fall in love.

“The trope of the sneaky, untrustworthy Jew, who is a perpetual outsider, is an enduring and pernicious stereotype,” de la Cretaz says of Joel’s charade. “In fact, it’s the cornerstone of anti-Semitism’s conspiratorial mode.”

The Jewish characters of both films, she says, are coerced into Christmas celebrations, and the tension only breaks once they learn how to properly embrace the tradition of the majority.

“This isn’t Scrooge waking up after a long, bad dream and deciding to give his employee a break,” de la Cretaz writes. “Forced assimilation is a form of violence, not an adorable caper or a heartwarming meet-cute.”

Addressing the Hallmark Channel, journalist Erin Biba tweeted: “I was pretty excited for your ‘Hanukkah’ movies, but these don’t actually have Hanukkah in them and even worse this one is borderline anti-Jewish and honestly now I wish you’d just go back to pretending we don’t exist.”

“Double Holiday” writer Weinman says she was never given a directive by the Hallmark Channel that the movie should include Christmas, but she viewed it as a “Hanukkah-Christmas” hybrid.

“I always knew that I was putting Hanukkah into this season and we were encouraged to weight it toward Hanukkah,” she says. “I think my producer and I both understood this is ‘Countdown to Christmas,’ so there’s gonna be some elements of both in it. But we weighted it more toward the traditions of Hanukkah with some Christmas sprinkled in the background too.

“What we wanted to do is have people come away with a little bit of better understanding of that celebration,” she says. “It’s about family, it’s about community, it’s about being thankful for the gifts, and sort of reflecting upon the end of the year and celebrating with the people that you love.”

Weinman adds, “I’ve never felt like, ‘We got one shot, we gotta get it right.’ I felt like this is the first of many to come.”

 

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