Son of man

The virgin birth. It has the over-dilated ring of implausibility about it, I mean in terms of: miracle verses a naive cover story for the inevitable consequences of rumpy-pumpy outside of the sanctified unity of wedlock. The purposeful credulity of the legend of lady Pope Joan is a case in point. A better theological yarn, less likely to unwind before the suspicious peasant mind, would have been the claim that Joseph gave birth to the Saviour child and that Mary was the hanger-on who usurped his limelight. At least that has more of a miraculous connotation. Perhaps not these days, where it's as regular an occurrence as sunstroke, but back then it would be hard to refute on the basis of their rudimentary knowledge of the biological sciences, and excusable, given future ignorance of how the practitioners of the medical arts would yearn to play God. And besides, wouldn't it make him more of a man's man? The church-going misogynists missed a trick there.



Now people have witnessed everything under the sun and the devil has no purchase except in the microdot font detail of consumer legislation.