Mark and Paul never mention Joseph, and nor does Matthew when the birth narrative is excluded. Contrast Mark 6:1-3 with the parallel Matthew 13:53-55, written about 25 years later. In Mark, Jesus is the carpenter, and his father is not mentioned. In Matthew, Jesus is the son of the carpenter. Mark has nothing certain to suggest the nuclear family of the birth narratives. The Jewish custom was to associate a son with his father’s name not his mother’s. Joshua ben Miriam is absurd and insulting, implying precisely what early critics claimed—Jesus was illegitimately born. To speak of someone as the son of Mary is to imply he has no father.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, Jesus is the son of Joseph, a contradiction of the birth narratives, unless Jesus was adopted. More likely is that Jesus was a son of Judas, meaning Judas of Galilee. Jesus might have been a natural son of Judas, but he could have been called a son of Judas in the sense that he was a follower—he was a member of the Galilean bandits founded by Judas. This tradition would have had to be dropped like a hot cake, as soon as it began to emerge, and evidently it was too hot to mention in the earliest gospel, Mark, though no alternative had been substituted. To get rid of the accusations that Jesus was a son of Judas of Galilee, later gospels made Jesus the son of Joseph, and Judas was the name given to Jesus’s “betrayer” to complete the revision.

Joseph is therefore fictional. In Matthew 1:19, Joseph is called a “just man” which is code for an Essene. Joseph was chosen as the name of the father of Jesus as a sop to the Samaritans who were amongst the first Nazarene converts. Samaritans lived in what was the Northern Kingdom of the two Jewish kingdoms where the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, descended from the Joseph of the Torah, had settled in legend. Samaritans thought of themselves as “sons of Joseph”. Jesus was therefore given a father with the name Joseph so that the messiah was a “son of Joseph” in line with their expectations. Further proof is that Matthew tells us Joseph’s father is Jacob, just as the father of the scriptural Joseph was Jacob.

Mary the Virgin is central to the gospel narrative only in the birth stories in the early chapters of Matthew and Luke. Elsewhere, she travelled to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve (Lk 2:41-52), she urges Jesus to change water into wine at a mysterious wedding at Cana (Jn 2:1-12), she is snubbed by Jesus (Mk 3:31-35; Mt 12:46-50; Lk 18:19-20; 11:27-29), her neighbours at Nazareth have little respect for him (Mk 6:1-6; Mt 13:53-58), she is present at the crucifixion where Jesus entrusts her well being to John, according to John (Jn 19:25-27), and finally she appears, in Acts 1:14, at prayer with the apostles.

It is not a lot to build a historical picture of her, especially when she is unique in history if not in mythology, as parthenogenesis has never been attested in human beings, or even vertebrates, yet miraculous births were common in the classical myths for both gods and outstanding men.

Mary was certainly called “The Virgin” from the time of Matthew and Luke, around the end of the first century, and Mary could really have been a virgin. If she were a sister in the women’s branch of the Essene sect, akin to the female Therapeutae, she would have been chaste by choice, just as the male Essenes were, and many a pious Christian nun. She could not then have been a natural mother, but she could still have been a ritual mother. Catholic priests call themselves “Father” and nuns still call themselves “mother”, even though they are lifelong virgins.

Christians automatically reject any notion that their superstition did not begin with the man described in the gospels, even though much of the terminology seems to have been already established before Christ. Mary was a type of nun. She officiated as a ritual mother at a rebirth ritual, part of the rights of passage of any Essene, but being a ritual mother did not relieve her of her virginity! The apologists will say that this is hypothetical, and so it is, but it is a better hypothesis than one that actually requires a virgin to give birth to a natural son while still remaining a virgin.

In the two gospels with the birth stories, Joseph was betrothed to Mary. The implication is that she was too young to marry, yet Joseph is her husband (Mt 1:19, although the words “to be” are inserted in some texts), and they seem married too in Luke 2:5. Apologists, like Geoffrey Ashe, once a devotee of Mary (The Virgin), claim betrothal was like marriage in practice—when the man took the girl into his house they were effectively married and sexual relations could begin. It is unlikely, and, though it doubtless happened, it was not proper.

Even so, it was not true of Joseph for Mary was already pregnant when he supposedly took her for his wife (Mt 1:20), meant to denote when she joined his household. He found she was pregnant and decided to divorce her, but the angel appeared and persuaded him otherwise. Apart from the angel, which solves the problem for believers but for no one else, Joseph had found his virgin bride to be pregnant when he took her in. There is only one honest interpretation of this. Mary had allowed herself to be seduced as a minor. The fourth century Jewish work, Toledot Yeshu, the History of Jesus, explains that this was the case, though it is too late to be good evidence. What is closer to the events is that the same allegation was considered by Origen as a widespread rumour in the second century.

That Christians had two quite different traditions of Mary and Joseph at the birth of Jesus gives us no confidence in the historicity of either. In the story that Jesus was illegitimate are three possibilities, and the absence of the story in several of the sources suggests other possibilities—Jesus had an utterly unremarkable birth, or he was an orphan brought up by a home for destitute boys and girls. The Essenes took in such children.

The Essenes in the Scrolls called themselves the Poor or the Ebionim, and early forms of Jewish Christianity had the same name. The more Jewish of the Ebionite sects of the second century rejected Paul, and the miraculous birth stories. They saw Jesus as a prophet who would return in glory, but had been born as a normal man. Apologists say they were just anti-Paul but Paul advocated no miraculous birth either. Paul’s epistles prove that the first Christian missionary made no use of the supposed miraculous birth of Christ! So, it seems no far-fetched inference that these Ebionim were in the tradition of the Jerusalem Church of James the Just. Their fathers were the first Jewish Christians.

They were said to have used a Hebrew version of Matthew. Geoffrey Ashe, one who considers himself a careful historian, calls the Ebionite gospel “a censored text of Matthew in Hebrew”, inferring from it that the Ebionites were a breakaway group of Christians rather than the original ones. Like most biblicists and pseudo-historians, he is careful to fill his book with footnotes, but gives no authority for this statement and the conclusion from it. It is simply his own assumption derived from his own belief in Christianity. It is more likely that the Hebrew Matthew was a Syriac sayings document, perhaps the one known to scholars as “Q”, a variation of which seems to have appeared as the Gospel of Thomas. The Christian Matthew was the Greek recension of this book amalgamated with Mark, the editor retaining the original authorship of the sayings work, Matthew.

When the same procedure was followed elsewhere, the book was given a new name, whether the name of the editor or not, Luke. If this is so, then it confirms the hypothesis of the Ebionites as the earliest Christians, and enjoys the characteristic of plausibility, to use a favourite Christian criterion of truth. Ashe is as bogus a scholar when it comes to his beliefs as most other Christians. A reason he offers for disregarding the Ebionite evidence is that it is from outside the Church, an excellent reason for accepting it, the Church never having been noted for its honesty. Moreover, the Ebionites were outside the Church because Rome had expelled them as heretics.