Sunday, November 19th, 2017
Stephan: The truly weird thing about the Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States is that although they passionately assert the inerrancy of the Bible, and quote it endlessly, they actually seem to know almost nothing about it. The most notable thing about fundamentalist clerics is their lack of scholarship. I can only imagine what their seminaries must have been like. Disneyland presents a more accurate picture of reality.
The idea, for instance, that the world is 6,000 years old is entirely the creation of a 17th century Irish Protestant cleric named James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh, who wanted to prove to the world that Protestants were just as good scholars as Jesuits. So he added up the begats in the Bible, so and so begat so and so, etc., in order to work out the moment of creation. He came up with "the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October... the year before Christ 4004"; that is, around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BCE. I know it sounds like an SNL skit, but that's the source of all the nonsense of Young Eartherism.
In this latest business with pedophile and teen stalker Roy Moore I have read, or heard on Fox, interviews with half a dozen fundamentalist clerics. Over and over I hear references to Joseph and Mary, making it clear that in the fundamentalist community there is a general belief that Joseph was a man in his 30s, or even older, while Mary was 14 or 15, and therefore Roy Moore is just a "Biblical Christian" not a pedophile. This is absolute nonsense, pure pastor fantasy, but coin of the realm in the christofascist world.
Let's deal with some actual research.
The fantasy of Joseph and Jesus
After allegations broke last week that Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore had pursued relationships with several (and sexually assaulted at least one) teenage girls some 40 years ago, when Moore was in his early 30s, Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler reached for one of the most reliable weapons in the religious right’s defensive arsenal: the Bible. “Take Mary and Joseph,” Ziegler told the Washington Examinerwhen he defended the morality of Moore’s conduct on November 9, just hours after the Washington Post story broke. “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”
But those who ascribe to Ziegler’s reading of Scripture—and many of Moore’s evangelical supporters could be among them—should read more carefully. The Bible offers no evidence that Joseph was older than Mary. “We know virtually nothing about Joseph, and no age is mentioned for either Joseph or Mary in the Gospels,” says Paula Fredriksen, professor emerita of scripture at Boston University, and author of Jesus of Nazareth, King of the […]