In Luke, Mary and Elizabeth and Zacharias had remarkable experiences but kept them such a dead secret that Paul and Mark never heard of them! Pious liars always come up with plausible explanations of these anomalies and satisfy the alarm of some of the faithful who were beginning to look a little askance. Now, Christianity is such a tissue of lies from end to end, believers believe it because it looks so implausible!

A priest named Zacharias had a barren wife, and “an angel of the Lord” appeared and told him that his wife would have a son. This son is to be “great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink”, and then the angel went and said much the same to Mary, except that her son was to be fatherless.

Now, clerics avoid bringing to the notice of their readers another passage of the bible, referring to the birth of Samson:

And there was a certain man of Zorah… and his wife was barren and bare not. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto the woman, and said unto her: Behold, now thou art barren, and bearest not, but thou shalt conceive and bear a son. Now, therefore, beware, I pray thee, and drink not wine nor strong drink, and eat not any unclean thing; For, lo, thou shalt conceive and bear a son, and no razor shall come on his head, for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb.

Judges 13:2-6

Familiar?

The angel tells Mary that she will conceive. As she is engaged to be married, this should not be a startling announcement but Mary is troubled and expostulates that she “knows no man”. Mary might have been a little deaf or simple, and misunderstood him to say that she had already conceived, but the oldest Latin manuscript of Luke has not the words, “How can this be? I know no man”. Has somebody, later, interpolated the words? An apocryphal gospel of the second century, considered below, describes Mary as vowed to virginity for life, not engaged to Joseph, and such virgins sometimes observe their vows. It would suggest that the virgin Mary was a type of nun, a female Nazarite consecrated to God, and had a ritual role as a mother.

There were more miracles and “these things were noised abroad through all the hill country of Judæa”, by the shepherds as you would expect, and created an enormous sensation, but everybody forgot in a few years. The incarnate God submitted to the delicate operation known as circumcision and there were more miracles. Yet, when this wonderful being, at the age of twelve, showed signs of precocious wisdom, his father and mother “were amazed” (2:48) and apparently as irritated as parents of any naughty boy would be.

The story in Luke of the boy Jesus remaining in the temple when his parents spent three days looking for him contains no elements of Nazarene tradition, except that Jesus might have been intensively coached by the Essene priesthood. No Jewish boy would have been so rude to his parents as to say: “Why are you looking for me? You ought to know I’d be about God’s business!” Such lack of respect for parents, then or now, is quite un-Jewish. Since Mary and Joseph did not understand this reply, the circus of the nativity must have been nonsense. The composition of this brief episode preceded the nativity as the use of the word “parents” shows.

So, despite kings, gifts, shepherds, heavenly hosts, precocious intellect and what have you, Jesus’s mother later on did not know her son had been designated a king. An editor of Luke in 2:19 and 2:51 acknowledges the problem, pretending that Mary kept it to herself. Apparently everybody else forgot all about it all too, and the secret was only let out a hundred years later. Matthew goes so far as to make Mary and her sons think of putting Jesus under restraint as a madman! So Mary definitely had forgotten it all for the duration of the rest of the gospel stories.

The final verse (Lk 2:52) of this section indicates that Jesus was himself a Nazarite—he was “in favour with God”, a scribal formula meaning he had been consecrated to God, which was why he was being coached by sages.