(4 of 12)
In lieu of inventing a whole life of Jesus, I'll choose a few pregnant situations: the first from Matthew and Luke, the others largely from Mark--and then I'll examine them imaginatively but responsibly, adding a few glancing notes on my sources. It is, after all, a process with which Jesus himself would have been familiar--Haggadah and Midrash being traditional, and often narrative, expansions of Hebrew scripture.
THE START
The Apocryphal Protogospel of James says the angel Gabriel first spoke to Miriam by the well. The suggestion that Jesus' childhood may have been dogged by the accusation of bastardy is perhaps implicit in his townspeople's question in Mark 6, "Isn't this Mary's son?" To be called one's mother's son, as opposed to one's father's, was often an implication of bastardy, or at least a sign that one's paternity was unknown, whether divine or not. Early opponents likewise suggested that Miriam had conceived Jesus with a Roman soldier, Panthera. His childhood may well have been clouded by questions about his paternity. --R.P.
In the slit-eyed world of a country village, the boy's mother Miriam conceived him mysteriously. Promised in marriage to Yosef the builder, she found herself pregnant without explanation--she had known no man, not intimately. Steeped in the malice of small-town talk, she knew not to tell the story she believed--God's archangel Gabriel had visited her at the village well one early-spring morning as she lifted her jar to climb back home.
He had looked very much like an actual man, a lot like her elder brother Amos, who had been her favorite but had died in agony with a breathing demon--tuberculosis--when she was nine. The angel had Amos' startling eyes, a light brown, but his voice plainly said, "I'm Gabriel, from God, to ask if you'll agree to let him make on you his only son."
When she hesitated, assuming that this was some evil joke, the voice spoke again: "You're free to refuse, and I'm free to tell you that should you accept, your life will last much longer than most, and long years of it will feel like no pain other humans know, not even your mother with the demon that ate her breast like bread."
But before he finished that, she looked well past him--the rim of the skyline back of his shoulders--and there was an odd cloud forming itself in the shape of a dark bird rushing toward her. She met the angel's eyes again, gave an awkward nod and said, "I'm Miriam. Let me be God's slave."
So the boy grew up--she called him Yeshu from his full name, Yeshua--in the same narrow town: one narrow lane, two rows of rock houses, sealed with mud and roofed with branches daubed with mud, and each house full of the mouths he could hear saying "Bastard, Miriam's bastard boy, God's big baby!" His mother's story had leaked out somehow, likely through Yosef, who claimed that he had dreamed it but nonetheless married her, took in Yeshu and made other sons and daughters on her body. All of them grudged the favors their mother gave Yeshu as her eldest child; he was only half their brother.