It is an entertaining game, reconstructing the bits of the story the Holy Ghost forgot to clarify, but where does it get us? Such reconstructions are meaningless when there is nothing to distinguish them. All are plausible but desperate attempts to keep the idea of a Holy Family, maintaining as much as possible of the gospels’ persistence that Jesus had brothers and sisters, yet had to be an only child if the virginity of Mary was perpetual. The criterion of parsimony demands the simplest explanation of the central historical facts set in the proper historical context.

All of it is better explained by rejecting the invisible holy family as a construction of the early Church, and accepting that Jesus was a member of an apocalyptic fraternity with an associated sorority, and one that has undoubted and extensive similarities with Christianity. The James the Less, son of Mary (Mk 15:40) is listed as an apostle. The epithet will signify rank in the brotherhood. Another James had a higher rank. If it is James the son of Zebedee, then James the Less became the leader of the Jerusalem Church. The last shall be first! James the Less also seems to be the son of Alphaeus, a problem solved by equating Alphaeus with Cleophas, both being different Greek attempts to translate Halpai or Chalpai, according to the degree of gutterality of the “h”. Chalpai is a form of the name Caleb (Chalubai), who was, with Joshua, the only two of twelve spies, each standing for a tribe, sent into Canaan to bring good news back about the prospects. Caleb stood for the tribe of Judah. God, therefore, allowed only these two to cross into the Promised Land. Jesus identifies with Joshua, so Chalpai/Cleopas seems to be another title in the Essene setup, their idea of entry into God’s kingdom being modelled on the original entry into the Promised Land. If the ceremony of inauguration of an Essene required a rebirth, then each Essene had a ritual mother. It begins to look as if these ritual mothers were called Mary.

The Book of James, later called the Protevangelium, written in the second century but showing signs of an Essene original, offers yet another plot. It says Mary was the daughter of a wealthy but previously childless couple. Told by an angel she would give birth, the woman, Anna, resolved to consecrate the child to god. It is a copy of the mother of Samuel, also called Hannah, doing the same (1 Sam 1). The child was therefore a Nazarite! The story says Mary became a temple maiden, living in the temple precinct, and ministered to by angels. The High Priest, Zachariah, eventually entrusted the adolescent Mary to the guardianship of Joseph, an elderly carpenter, who already had sons. Mary remained in the service of the temple and was spinning thread (suggesting the word “magdalene” meaning braider!) when the angel Gabriel brought her his news. Joseph the guardian was suspected of illegal seduction, but the accusation passed by and Mary thereafter remained a virgin. Here, then, is yet another version of Jesus’s brothers, but Mary’s father is named as Joachim, not Heli.

The great historian and apologist, Geoffrey Ashe, tells us “it is not history” and has “little genuine tradition” behind it. He knows the author was ignorant of the setting, but for no other reason that he believes the gospel accounts rather than this one. That is not good historical methodology. The people in the Protevangelium were members of a village community of “Israel”, in which they were all close neighbours. Moreover, the Jerusalem temple did not employ young virgins! Ashe thinks it comical to imagine the small girl skipping about the feet of the armies of workmen employed by Herod who was rebuilding the temple at this time. So, the author was ignorant. Unless, that is, it is Christian apologists who are ignorant.

Ashe knew about the Dead Sea Scrolls, though it did not dent his prejuduces. The Essenes called themselves “Israel”, as opposed to Jews generally who were “All Israel”. The distinction between them was righteousness. Only the Essenes were, and that is why they alone were the true Israel. So, James, if he was the author of the Protevangelium, was quite plainly and characteristically describing an Essene community. They, above all Jews, kept themselves apart from All Israel when they could, although they were practical enough to have a book of rules, the Damascus Document, for those who had no choice but to meet the impure and unrighteous in their everyday business. They preferred to live, like the modern day Amish, in their own “camps” or villages separated from the villages of other Jews, and those who lived in cities, like Jerusalem, had their own houses in their own Essene quarter, where intercourse with their impious neighbours would be minimised. Thus they were clearly identifiable with the community described in the Protevangelium.

What Ashe thinks utterly proves the author’s ignorance is that Mary was a temple maiden. Essenes rejected the built temple, but considered their own congregation as a living temple. They themselves were in transit between heaven and earth and so were embryonic angels. Anyone not aware of the Essenes, or not wanting to admit it if they were, would have read the references to the temple and angels as being actual, and not the product of a particular understanding. Gentile Christians quickly wanted their belief to seem to be a unique revelation, and so they expunged everything obvious about the Essenes. They never appeared in the New Testament for example, and here Mary was depicted as a maiden brought up in the Jerusalem temple. It rather convincingly shows that the community were indeed Essenes because of the way they thought of themselves as a living temple.

The prejudices of the great historian, and Christian apologists in general are inexcusable. They believe the gospels are God-given, with no proof other than what they have always been led to understand, and that therefore suffices. It does not suffice for anyone who is properly scholarly. Christians cannot be scholarly and simply believe their childish fairy stories with no conclusive proof they should have the respect they give them. It does not matter that their parents believed it and so do millions of their friends. They all suffer from the same lack of discernment. They just believe what they are told. No historian could make such cavalier assessments of competing texts. The fact that the texts they prefer are religious texts is an excellent reason for treating them with suspicion. People will give them excessive credence simply because they have been accepted as authoritative in the past, irrespective of their validity. Once the canon of acceptable books had been decided by the Church, other books that were historically more valid, were forgotten, or even deliberately destroyed in the Church’s timeless war against unorthodoxy and heresy. So it is that a book like the Protevangelium, long ignored, might contain genuine tradition quite contrary to the beliefs of the dogmatised.

In this book, Joseph is not the husband of Mary but her guardian. The reason is given—she has been devoted to God as a life long Nazarite vowed to perpetual virginity, and could not marry, just as modern Catholic nuns cannot without breaking their vows. She was seduced by a charmer pretending to be Gabriel, or by her own guardian, betraying his trust, or by one of his sons, or by a Roman soldier called Pantherus, to consider the various options open, and gave birth to an illicit child. It might well have been that he too was consecrated to God as a Nazarite and an Essene, becoming a great but unrecognized Jewish martyr, and gentile god.

Gabriel is not described as appearing to the girl at Nazareth, but contrary to the views of the apologists, that is a point in its favour, for Nazareth seems to be another Christian fiction. She is, though, described as would a Nazarite, a much more likely origin of the description Nazarene than Nazareth is. That Mary was vowed to chastity also explains her question to the angel, “How shall this be?” It is typical of apologists that Ashe asks, “How is it that she married if she had a vow of virginity?” When Christ enters, all reason departs. The different story offered simply does not register in their consciousness. The evidence mounts up that the girl was seduced contrary to her vow of chastity. Mysteriously getting pregnant was itself a scandal, as it generally has been ever since, and the Church found it convenient for more reasons than one to hide it as a miraculous conception. The putative marriage was to legitimise what seemed illigitimate in fact. But the truth might be the idea offered here, that the girl was a ritual mother, and no scandal occurred, merely a misunderstanding that could not be righted without the Church having to admit it had emerged from an older Church—the yahad or congregation of the Essenes.

In summary, Joseph is a cipher. His son is homeless and owns nothing but a coat. His wife had to be left to someone else’s care when the son died, yet Jesus had brothers. This is not a description of a family. The Essenes owned nothing except their clothes. Yet everyone had a means of support from the communal purse, and everyone had somewhere to stay in the communal houses. Acts is utterly clear that the first Christians lived in the same way, and it was a crime to violate the rules of poverty. The Holy Family was a brotherhood!