The earliest gospel written, Mark, has nothing to say about Jesus’s father. Though Jesus is described as a carpenter, his father is nowhere mentioned either as the carpenter or as Joseph. This suggests that, in the earliest tradition, Jesus was a waif or a foundling. The earliest refutation of Jesus is that he was the illigitimate son of a Roman soldier called Pantheras. The name Pantheras was found among Roman soldiers.

According to Origen (185-254 AD) in Contra Celsum, the Pagan philosopher Celsus, who was famous for his arguments against Christianity, claimed in 178 AD that he had heard from a Jew that Jesus’s mother, Mary, had been divorced by her husband, a carpenter, after it had been proved that she was an adultress. She wandered about in shame and bore Jesus in secret. His real father was a soldier named Pantheras, possibly a Moor to judge by the name. Tertullian, in 198 AD, quoted the Toldot Yeshu, where Jesus is several times called Ben Pandera to the same effect. So, Jesus was the son of the Panther, ben Pandera, and so he was known from an early time by the Jews. In the Jewish material, besides Ben Pandera, Jesus is called Ben Stada. In one story, this is a besmirching name of Mary, from a pun on “stada” as meaning a woman who has rejected her husband. Interestingly, this Mary is called a braider or hairdresser, implying a meaning of “magdalene”.

Christians always argue that this is an attempt to denigrate (oops!) Jesus because “son of a virgin” is “huios parthenou”, in Greek, and “huios pantherou” (son of a panther) is a plain enough pun on it. The presence of the name, Ben Pandera, in the Jewish writings shows that the rumour probably began in Palestine, yet Pandera is not a pun on the Hebrew or Aramaic words for a virgin, so it arose among Greek speakers, if the excuse is true. Some Greek-speaking Jews must have been laughing at the Christian birth story by punning on the word “parthenou” to get the name “Pandera”.

Equally, however, the stories of the virgin birth could be a way of trying to explain that Jesus was called Ben Pandera. There was nothing unusual in Paganism about demi-gods being born of virgins, so there seems no obvious reason why the pun should have been invented by Pagans, but that it should have been used by gentile Christians to defend their new god against a true but undesirable rumour seems quite likely.

Which is the chicken and which the egg is not evident, but since Matthew all but admits the truth writing about 100 AD, it is rather more likely that the virgin birth narratives were invented to dispel the rumour that Jesus was the bastard son of one Pantheras than that Pantheras was invented to denigrate the birth stories. There must have been a pressing need for them because they spoiled the purpose of the genealogies. With a convenient interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 as a messianic text, though it plainly is not, Matthew was able to justify his invention. Luke’s version is also aimed at refuting the same rumour, so that when an angel appears to Mary to say she will conceive, she immediately replies, with no thought of Joseph to whom she was betrothed:

How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

Luke 1:34

The gentile bishops came up with the ruse of changing the Greek name “Pantheros” to “parthenos”, the Greek word for virgin, to explain the defaming story of “the panther”. It is not a mistake that is easy to explain accidentally in Greek. Not only do the “n” and “r” interchange, but also the vowel “e” in Pantheros and Parthenos differ in the Greek. One is epsilon and the other eta. The bishops pretended the misunderstanding was in Hebrew, the name “Pandera” being a Hebrew attempt at pronouncing—“parthenos”—but problems remain, and the change still looks deliberate rather than accidental.

Since the birth stories are accepted as late additions to the gospels, Jesus did not have the title, “Son of the Virgin”, until late in the second century of Christianity, and the Pagan pun on the title could not have arisen before, unless it was not a pun but a genuine tradition. The tombstone of a soldier was found in Bingerbrück, Germany, inscribed:

Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera of Sidon, aged 62, a soldier of 40 years’ service, of the first cohort of archers, lies here.

The first two names are the obligatory Roman names he took when he was granted Roman citizenship. “Abdes” is his own Semitic birth name. “Pantera” is the personal or nick name his friends knew him as.

Eventually, in typical fashion, the Christian bishops incorporated a Panthera into the holy family, as the father of Joseph, to have an excuse for the name. “Pantheras” (Greek, “panther”, “leopard”, whence “hunter”) was popular as a personal name of Macedonian soldiers in the armies of the Seleucids. Epiphanius (320–403 AD), with no evidence he was willing to quote, cites Origen as saying that “Panther” was the nickname for Jacob (James) the father of Joseph. He took the name as an epithet giving him some dignity, thus explaining the name “Pandera”, but in that case, it implied that Jesus’s ancestry was not Jewish but Macedonian. He was fair and red-headed, after all!

Now you have to question the motives or efficiency of God, or the Holy Ghost, one of whose tasks was to ensure the inspiration of the Holy Word. Why was all of this necessary? Why did God make the twelve year old Mary pregnant before she even got married? Or why did the Holy Ghost have to tell the story as if she had been impregnated as a minor, causing all the questions and doubt. She could have married Joseph normally, and God could then have seen that the “Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee”, making her respectably pregnant by the Holy Ghost without any knowledge of Joseph or any impropriety to the outside world. It is not a question that Christians are supposed to think about, but the need for it from the plain fact that the girl was illegally pregnant is obvious.

The silence of the gospels over Mary’s condition cannot dispel the doubts about it any thinking person must have. The easy acceptance of the miracle does not gel with the harsh treatment the Jews meted out to promiscuous women, indeed, even victims of male lust. It tells against the Christian myth that this was a family. A Jewish husband would have been outraged, and notionally the adulterous woman could have been stoned to death. Had the girl been raped, then the rapist could have been stoned, but, as today, the suspicion fell upon the victim as encouraging the act.

In practice, stoning under the Roman Peace was probably itself illegal, but the social attitude behind it must have remained strong, and it happened as a mob action. Where stoning was impossible, social rejection must have been the usual rersponse. The Essenes had systems of fines and penances, leading to ultimate expulsion from the community, so their attitude might have been more like that of Jesus in the instance in John, where he invited the guiltless to throw the first stone. The crime was dire and frowned upon, but could be dealt with less harshly than death. So, if the scandal is to be accepted as real, then the seduction of the maiden looks more compelling within an Essene community than in Judaism at large. The Essenes famously maintained their numbers by taking in those troubled by the vicissitudes of life, and what could have been more of a vicissitude than being born in scandalous circumstances?

Since the perpetual virginity of mother Mary is absurd, what could have suggested it other than the need to hide a scandal. Apologists like Geoffrey Ashe (The Virgin) think this is “inadequate to inspire such a doctrine or secure general assent”. The story was invented a minimum of half a century later, among gentiles not Jews, in a country distant from Palestine, and among bishops who had already secured themselves a following among Godfearing gentiles and Hellenised Jews. Are we to imagine that believers, even then, would accept the scandalous truth when the bishops had a well prepared explanation? These believers, as they are today, are not called sheep for nothing.

The lie was perfectly acceptable in a society that expected miraculous conceptions and births of gods and demi-gods. Believers were happy that the new Christian demi-god, Jesus Christ, conformed. Ashe concedes “the logic of the son of God concept” was enough. The miraculous nature of the relationship between the god, his son and the chosen virgin was sufficient. These early believers noticed the parallels with the previous gods and demi-gods, and virgins that had given birth and remained virgins because they received the same titles and epithets as their illustrious predecessors. What right has a poor Jewish girl to the title Queen of Heaven? The simple fact is that Mary was not the first Queen of Heaven, nor was Jesus the first son of God. These honours were transferred from classical precedents.

Ashe accepts that religious fiction was indeed written, but he cannot bring himself to believe that it was written from the outset over the basic events of Christian and Marian belief. But the ultimate truth could uphold the origin of the mythology as not being utter fiction, though at another cost.

A suggestion on these pages (the www.askwhy.co.uk website) is that the Essenes had various rituals that have not come fully to light, but can be hazily seen in the New Testament and Christian practices. One was a rebirth ceremony, one a ritual wedding and one a ritual feeding, the precursor of the Eucharist. We know there were women Essenes, because some Essenes married and the strictness of their practices would demand that they married wives of the same beliefs. We do not know that there were female celibates to match the male ones, but the graves of women have been found at Qumran, and the closely similar Therapeuts, described by Philo, had female celibates in the order. Moreover, women as well as men could be consecrated to God as Nazarites. It seems most unlikely that there were no female Essenes, and to judge from the gospel ceremonies they served ritual roles.

Mother Mary was one of these celibate nuns and she served as the ritual mother of Jesus at his rebirth ceremony, a ritual probably associated with Baptism, as it still is. This Mary, therefore had an important relationship of a ceremonial kind with Jesus in the order, but she was not his natural mother, indeed could not have been because she was a chaste nun, but was his ritual mother. As a ritual mother, she could remain utterly virginal forever, while having a son. Equally, Jesus could have this ritual mother, but have no recognisable earthly father, but consider himself reborn of God. It is likely that all the Essenes considered themselves reborn as angels, at least from the age of thirty, and therefore directly sons of God. Barabbas was the ritual name of these born-again men.

Several saviours are sometimes shown as being black, including Jesus Christ. There is more common sense evidence that the Christian saviour was black or dark skinned, than there is of his being the son of a virgin. Though the gospel writers say nothing about Jesus’s appearance, his earliest disciples obviously knew. In the pictures and portraits of Jesus by the early Christians, his complexion is black, but care is taken to show his lips as red, suggesting realism rather than an odd convention. Solomon’s declaration in the Song of Songs, “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem” (Song 1:5), has always been taken to mean Christ, a curious belief unless it stems from a very ancient tradition perhaps going back to Jesus himself.

If the belief of the Christians were to come true and Jesus were to return at his second coming as a black man, how would he be received by negro-hating Christians? Would they bow their knee to a black god, asking forgiveness for the grave error of their racialist ways? Or would they decide that he was an imposter and crucify him afresh?