The Virgin Mary is also a great contrast to real human women. Mary established the child as the destiny of woman, but does not experience the sexual intercourse necessary for all other women to fulfill this destiny, Defined as wholly unique, she is set up as a model of womanhood that is unattainable. As the male projection of idealized femininity, a patriarchal construction, she is the good woman, stripped of all dangerous elements; she receives worship, not equality. Man exalts Mary for virtues he would like woman to exhibit, and projects onto her all that he does not resolve to be.

      Evil, on the other hand, is projected onto the rest of women. The shadow side of the glorification of the passive and dependent Virgin Mary is the denigration of women. Carl Jung comments that the consequence of increasing Mariolatry in the later Middle Ages was the witch hunt. The Mary myth reduces woman to something less than a whole human being. This symbolic reduction then becomes a rationale for the unequal treatment of women and for women's self-devaluation. As Mary Gordon asks, "What hope is there for the rest of us, who eat, breathe, menstruate, make love, bear children?" She holds it is necessary to reject the traditional image of Mary created by some men "in order to hold onto the fragile hope of intellectual achievement, independence of identity, and sexual fulfillment." At her deadliest, Mary is the mother who - unlike Demeter - conforms to patriarchal expectations, and pushes or pulls her daughters into that conformity." pages 12-13

      2) "Further comments are in order about the type of feminist criticism The Illegitimacy of Jesus is. Feminist biblical criticism approaches texts directly in at least four different ways, which are not mutually exclusive.

      1) One approach exposes the androcentricism and the sexism (gross and subtle) in the text and its interpretation.

      2) Another approach attempts to counter biblical sexism by reinterpreting texts that have been distorted, revisioning previous androcentric exegesis, or by highlighting countercultural texts positive to women, ones that challenge patriarchal structures, attitudes, images, and presuppositions.

      3) Some criticism is a retelling , sympathetic to the woman victim, of a "text of terror." Sometimes the critic interprets against the narrator, plot, other characters and the biblical tradition; at other times forgotten or neglected nuances in the text are discovered.

      4) In some cases there is a shift from the text to a reconstruction of biblical history, in an attempt to show that the actual situations of the Israelite and Christian religions allowed a greater or different role for women than the canonical writings suggest.

      5) In addition to these four direct approaches to the text, a fifth approach focuses not on individual texts but on the Bible in general, in the hope of finding a theological perspective, such as the prophetic insistence that God sides with and liberates the oppressed - some central witness that offers a critique of patriarchy." page 15

      "1) All four find themselves outside patriarchal family structures: Tamar and Ruth are childless young widows, Rabab a prostitute, Bathsheba an adulteress and then a widow pregnant with her lover's child.

      2) All four are wronged or thwarted by the male world., Without claiming a full feminist consciousness for the authors of these narratives, we can claim an awareness, however dim, that society was patriarchal, that this caused suffering for women in certain circumstances, and that certain women and men sometimes rectified or manipulated those circumstances in extraordinary ways to lessen the suffering. Alter speaks of "extra-institutional awareness of women's standing."

      3) In their sexual activity - or in Ruth's case perhaps only suspicion of sexual activity - all four risk damage to the social order and their own condemnations. Accusation of improper sexual conduct is actually made in the case of Tamar, implicit in the case of Rahab, avoided in Ruth's case by the secrecy of Boaz, and leveled in Bathsheba's case against her partner.

      4) The situations of all four are righted by the actions of men who acknowledge guilt and/or accept responsibility for them, drawing them under patriarchal protection, giving them an identity and a future within the patriarchal structures, legitimating them and their children-to-be. In the final analysis, they are exalted for their acceptance of the patriarchal status quo , because it is believed that within that status quo the covenant promises to Abraham and David are being kept, and the generations move toward the establishment of the nation of Israel and the monarchy.

      4) "Seen as being about a virginal conception, Matthew's statements about begetting through the Holy Spirit have been regarded as unique, exceptional. It is rapidly becoming a scholarly consensus that the idea of divine begetting as a virginal conception is found in the biblical and intertestamental periods only in the Infancy Narratives of Matthew and Luke. There are no real parallels to this belief in the Hebrew or Greek Bible, in Philo, in the Old Testament apocrypha, or pseudepigrapha, in the Pauline or Johannine writings, or anywhere else in the New Testament. A tradition of the virginal conception of Jesus (in contrast to a tradition of his illegitimacy) was evidently not known to the other New Testament writers." page 65

      5) "This means that the Matthean phrases should be read in a figurative or symbolic, not a literal, sense. They are more like than unlike the other statements of divine begetting. In the post-New Testament period, the metaphor of the divine begetting of Jesus was rejected as metaphor. Literalism produced the notion of a biological virginal conception, all bur rupturing the connection with its Jewish and early Christian source in the metaphor.

      The story of this conceptions is not "theologically mute." It is about a creative act of God that does not replace human paternity. Sexual and divine begetting are integrated. Jesus is begotten through the Holy Spirit in spite of - or better, because of - his human paternity. In the light of the wider context, Matt 1:18, 20 can be read to mean that the Holy Spirit empowers this birth as all births are divinely empowered, that this child's human existence is willed by God, and that God is the ultimate power of life in this as in all conceptions. My sense is that Matthew means more - but not less - than this. In the situation he describes, this dimension of meaning is extremely significant and should not be underestimated: this child's existence is not an unpremeditated accident, and it is not cursed. The pregnant May is not to be punished." page 67

      6) "What I am proposing is that they searched, with a great deal less success, not to explain why he was ignominiously born (because no answer could be found for that in the tradition), but to show that although or, better, because he was born that way, he was the Messiah." page 73

      7) "The wording in which the conception story survives is, as Vermes says, "when scrutinized closely, curious and equivocal." That is due, I think, not to the desire to be enigmatic, nor to the theological stress and strain of presenting a novel notion of divine begetting without human paternity, while trying to avoid all suggestion of a hieros gamos. It is due rather to something I judge harder: the effort to be honest, delicate, and profound, in dealing with material that resisted - and still resists - in great part the theologians' arts and tools: the siding of God with the endangered woman and child." page 73

      8) "Second, Matthew's understanding of God as Father is significant. The God believed to side with the outcast and marginal cannot be a projection or endorsement of patriarchal ideology. Matthew's Jesus commands, "Call no man father on earth, for you have one father who is in heaven" (23:9). In this community and in society in general no one has the right to claim this name or to exercise the power of the "father" - a power that does not empower all. The Jesus movement, as Matthew understood and describe it, tried to found a new family, a family of God." page 77

      9) Regarding the Magnificat: "I think that Luke saw the appropriateness of the Jewish Christian hymn for use as Mary's canticle, and he inserted it as hers in order to communicate the tradition he received: that she had been violated and made pregnant, but that God vindicated her, protecting her and her child, even recognizing and causing to be recognized this child as God's Son and Messiah. Her own experience, in Luke's mind, stands in itself as an anticipation of the resurrection. He is presenting her here as one who was oppressed and liberated, one who triumphed over her enemies, one to whom God was merciful, one for whom there was a radical overturning of social expectations. Hannah's canticle is appropriate as a model for Mary's because Mary, in the tradition Luke inherited, experienced a disaster worse than barrenness: sexual violation." page 95

      10) "The Magnificat forces us to compare extremes and so to think of a radical overturning of society, precisely by presenting "God's choice of the lowly mother and his overturning of society as one act." " page 95

      11) Comparing the pregnancies of Elizabeth (formerly barren) and Mary (pregnant out-of-wedlock): "But what is "greater" in the case of Jesus is not a miraculous manner of his conception, but God's overcoming of the deeper humiliation of his mother." pages 102-103

      12) "We have seen that earlier Jewish tradition, which associated God with human begetting, still considered illegitimate children as bearing the curse of their parents. The involvement of the Holy Spirit means also for Luke that this child, recognized and nurtured by no biological father, will be Son of God." page 124 - Does this mean that "Son of God" or "Child of God" is a euphemism for illegitimate?

      13) "This child will be holy because the Holy Spirit will come upon his mother, and she will experience divine protection and empowerment even in a situation deemed holy. . . . Divine paternity, then, does not replace human paternity." page 125, 126

      14) "Mary's verbal acceptance, her consent, is a Lucan innovation when we read the scene as a commissioning as well as when we read it as an annunciation and as a blend of the two forms. In none of the twenty-seven Hebrew Bible commissionings, none of the ten nonbiblical accounts, none of the fifteen other commissionings in Luke-Acts, and of the nine other New Testament commissionings analyzed by Hubbard are the commissioned ones depicted as assenting verbally and directly to their commission." page 131

      15) "Mary's role is often characterized as passive. Luke may intend her consent in 1:38 to be an expression of her active, free choice and courage, and he may see her as much more than just a passive instrument of God. It must be noted that the Lucan Mary is not "merely the means of Jesus' birth." Her life is not at Joseph's disposal as his property, nor does she obey him. She is evaluated in terms of her relationship not with him, but with God. Joseph is not depicted as her protector or the agent of her liberation. And in the Magnificat (which is not the song of a victim) she proclaims that liberation with tough authority." page 143

      16) "Luke, I think, is not really interested in the discipleship of Mary in itself; rather, the use of this motif is one of several strategies to defend her honor.. . . It is not fully the story of a woman for women, but a story told by a man's world for a man's world." page 144

      17) "In any case, and whatever the historical circumstances of the conception, the pre-gospel tradition did break with an important sociological prejudice: that of accounting a child conceived illegitimately as inferior, doomed, cursed. This break, this defiance of social expectations, is illustrated by the historical action of Joseph, who accepted the child into his family. To what can we trace this action of Jospeh's? Common decency, the desire to avoid scandal, concern for the fate of his betrothed wife and the child to be born, careful interpretation of the options open to a Torah-abiding man? Matthew's Gospel traces it to a revelation, to divine aid. Luke's Gospel deals not al all with this aspect of the story." page 153

      18) "Origen's responses to the story of "the Jew" are surprising. he first gives it as his opinion that "all these things worthily harmonize with the predictions that Jesus is the Son of God" (1:28). He appears to accept Celsus's portrait of Jesus and Mary as outsiders par excellence, "quintessential aliens," conceding everything but the conclusion that Jesus' claim to the title of God is unwarranted. Jesus, "with all these things against him" has yet been able to shake the whole world (1:29). His reputation is victorious over "all causes that tended to bring him into disrepute," not only those things Celsus has enumerated, but also the shame of the crucifixion (1:30).

      In 1:32, however, Origen calls the stories of Mary's adultery and rejection "blindly concocted fables," invented to overturn the story of Jesus' miraculous conception by the Holy Spirit. Inadvertently opponents have preserved the fact that it was not by Joseph that the virgin conceived Jesus. It is not reasonable, Origen argues, that he who did son much for the human race should not have had "a miraculous birth, but one of the vilest and most disgraceful of all." Jesus' great soul merited a body in conformity with its character; whereas a body produced by an act of adultery such as that between Pathera and the virgin would have produced "some fool" to do injury to humanity, a teacher of wickedness (1:33, cf. 6:73)." pages 167-168

      19) ". . . as far as we know, Origen was the first theologian to ponder deeply the question why Christ had to be born of a betrothed virgin. His answer, given elsewhere, is that it was possible only in that way to protect her from the suspicion of adultery, and that moreover in that way Jesus' birth was concealed from the devil." page 168

      20) Quoting Richard P. McBrien, "Nowhere, he says, did the church define the "how" of Jesus conception. "Clearly, his origin is in God, and the Holy Spirit is directly operative in his conception. But whether the Holy Spirit's involvement positively excluded the cooperation of Joseph is not explicitly defined." " page 196

      21) "[Mary] Daly reads the New Testament Infancy Narratives as being about a virginal conception which is a rape. . . .

      My own proposal is different. I agree that the doctrine of virginal conception is a distortion and a mask, but I think behind it lies the illegitimacy tradition. Unmasked, that tradition presents us with fuller realities and therefore with deeper theological potential. it presents us not with a Goddess, but with a woman in need of a Goddess, with a woman we look at, not up at. On the one hand, Catholic attitudes toward Mary can e expected to change once they no longer have to bear the burden of the repressed feminine dimension of the devine. On the other hand, as reinterpretation of the image of God brings to light the ways in which the symbol of Mary has usurped the functions of the divine, the way is clearer for reimaging God with female imagery." page 197

      22) "What is needed is an alternative Mariology, grounded in the Lucan Magnificat's identification of Mary as liberated Israel, and in the analogy Luke makes between her pregnancy and liberation. For Ruether, Mary's pregnancy

does not follow from the proper role of women. Indeed, it puts her under danger as someone who has been making her own choices about her body and sexuality without regard for her future husband. She may be accused of being a prostitute or a "loose woman" and "put away." In Luke, the decision to have the redemptive child is between her and God . . . . Luke goes out of his way to stress that Mary's motherhood is a free choice."             page 198-199

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