Was Jesus a Bastard?

Baptism (“washing”) was for sinners, so Jesus’
baptism required some explanation. 

Of the four canonical gospels, Mark is the earliest and the most reliable. Mark’s style is frank and hasty, reporting rather too frankly on some of Jesus’ embarrassing biographical details. Later gospel writers “improved” on Mark’s embarrassing stories by omitting them, revising them, or explaining them away. For example, when Jesus was crucified, did he cry out in despair, like a mortal man? Yes, says Mark. No, say Luke and John. Did Jesus get baptized as a repentant sinner? Mark says yes, but the other three gospels finesse the issue away. Mark wrote about Jesus getting angry at a pathetic leper. Imagine that, sweet Jesus being angry at a sick person! Later, a scribe changed Mark’s text so that Jesus felt not anger but compassion. In addition to all these questionable details, Mark makes Jesus look bad by implying that he had no father. There’s no Joseph, and Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth refer to him as “Mary’s son.” In Jesus’ patriarchal culture, if you were a woman’s son, that meant you had no father.

Being a bastard fits the life story of the historical Jesus, a penniless hillbilly. When he talked about the poor and the hungry, he wasn’t making it up. His charismatic career took place in the hinterlands of Galilee, where rural Jews were being systematically impoverished by the Greek-speaking foreigners in the cities. In Jesus’ insignificant home village of Nazareth, people lived in built-out caves. In Jerusalem, Jews were having a tough time of it, but at least they could look down their noses on the racially impure Jews in the hills of Galilee. Jesus wasn’t an aristocratic philosopher like Plato. He wasn’t a learned poet like Lao Tzu. He wasn’t a prince (the Buddha), a priest (Zarathustra), or a merchant (Muhammad). He was a country preacher, a faith healer, and an exorcist. How perfect, that this poor indigenous laborer, sent to his death by the elites of Jerusalem, should also be a bastard.

After the gospel of Mark, Matthew and Luke assign Jesus a respectable father: Joseph. This addition was part of the same campaign that edited out Jesus’ mortal cry on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” No one wants to worship someone who felt abandoned by God, and no one wants to worship a bastard.

Readers' Questions

Q. When you say that the gospel writers after Mark finessed Jesus’ baptism away, what to do you mean?

A. Bible scholars conclude that Jesus’ baptism was embarrassing (and probably factual) because of the way the other gospel writers minimized it. Matthew leaves the baptism in, but explains it away. Here, Jesus isn’t repenting of sins and he doesn’t need baptism, but he goes through the motions because it’s proper. Luke mentions Jesus’ baptism in passing, and he has the heavens open up when Jesus is praying, not when he’s baptized. In John, Jesus isn’t baptized at all. In fact, Jesus one-ups John by leading an even bigger baptism campaign of his own.

Q. Even with the addition of Joseph, isn’t Jesus still a bastard because Mary got pregnant before he had sex with her? Didn’t early Christians consider him a bastard based on that story?

A. In Jesus’ culture, a man’s father was the man who publicly proclaimed him as his son, biology aside. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus has a father and is not a bastard by local standards. That’s why Matthew changes Jesus from being a carpenter (in Mark) to being the son of a carpenter (that is, not a bastard).