danc4498 30 points 20 days ago

As a skeptic of the entire story, I don’t think Mary ever claimed she was pregnant by God. Maybe she had an affair and everybody knew and Joseph was just a good dude that wanted to raise this kid right.

Joseph is the real hero of this story.

Edit: not only did he stick around. He even taught him the family triad (carpentry). Not well, of course, since Jesus went into philosophy instead.

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ivanafterall 8 points 20 days ago

Given Mary's age and what became of the religion, Joe was likely a groomer, but the Lord got to her first.

Also, nobody ever talks about the insane pressure Jesus must have felt to have to follow in his real dad's footsteps. What a disappointment, in the end.

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scytale 5 points 20 days ago

This is the first time I’ve seen someone refer to him as Joe and I lol’d. Never would I have imagined reading “Joe was likely a groomer” in a bible context.

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samus12345 2 points 20 days ago

Joe and his stepson Josh (as Joshua is a transliteration of Jesus).

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jaybone 3 points 20 days ago

Given Mary's age and what became of the religion, Joe was likely a groomer

Wasn’t this pretty much normal at the time? So everybody was a groomer.

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ivanafterall 2 points 20 days ago

I'd expect the eternal, almighty Lord God Jehovah who impregnated Mary to know better, even if people didn't.

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Broadfern 5 points 20 days ago

Joseph is the Samwise Gamgee of the Bible confirmed

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im_fine_sandy 4 points 20 days ago

I don't think you have to be very skeptical to conclude that some sneaky unmarried rumpy pumpy is infinitely more likely than being impregnated by magic.

Jesus is not necessarily Joseph's son. If she was pregnant her parents would have wanted to have her married off.

It's been a very common story throughout the ages.

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portuga 4 points 19 days ago

Of course she didn’t. A bunch of fat priests agreed to make that cannon some hundreds of years after the fact because of greed for power and money, you know, the christian values

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Freeposity 3 points 20 days ago

Also, the virgin birth story is the result of a translation error from the original Greek.

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A_norny_mousse 2 points 20 days ago

I remember having read, a long time ago, that back then they had these rituals once a year where young virgins would spend a night in the temple. With (male) priests of course. If a pregnancy was the result they were generally still considered virgins, and the child somewhat holy I guess.

It makes so much sense to me, but every time I try to look it up I get overwhelmed with a tsunami of content...

Did I imagine this, or was it a bullshit story?

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mkwt 1 point 19 days ago

Way back before the Jesus era, back in the time of Solomon, there's some modern scholarship that claims evidence that Asherah was worshipped at the Jerusalem temple as the consort of Yahweh. And this worship would have included sacred temple prostitutes.

I don't know if that's related to what you're talking about or not.

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A_norny_mousse 1 point 18 days ago

It most certainly is, thanks!

Of course these are and probably will remain forever speculations that compete with other speculations that are pushed heavily by christian churches, but I was now able to find a few articles that offer better explanations for the nonsense of "immaculate conception":

Several claim that Mary did indeed work as a temple prostitute (or rather temple virgin) right until she got married to Joseph.
Both such temples and the idea of virgin conception were nothing new at the time, not to Jews, not to other religions.
Original bible texts don't even claim virginity for Mary; the word is "almah" which just means young woman.

Such dirty thought was pushed out pretty soon, or transfered to Mary Magdalene. I'm not sure who went full patriarchy & misogyny (not saying Jews weren't that at the time, but I get the impression they looked at such things more openly) first, but I suspect the turncoat Saulus/Paulus once again.

https://taylormarshall.com/...
https://medium.com/...
This one's outright fishy: https://www.e-seminary.org/twm/mary/virgin.html

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bhamlin 2 points 19 days ago

Must've really botched teaching carpentry for philosophy to be something he could live off of back then....

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Grimy 1 point 20 days ago

From what I was told, people didn't have official babies out of wedlock back then, so the whole thing was basically the church avoiding calling him a bastard.

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Codpiece 2 points 20 days ago

That’s not Holy Spirit she was full off.

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