The Sunday Mail
DURING the time Myriam stayed at the temple as a maiden, the Chief Priest was Zachariah (Zakar-Iah/Zakar-Yah meaning “Yah remembers” or “Yah’s male”), later with Yohanne the Baptist’s father. “Yah” is the shortened version of Yahweh (YHVH).
Zachariah was a priest belonging to the lineage of Abiah (which means “my father is Yahweh”). As a priest, it meant he was descended from Aaron.
Zachariah was of the eighth Zadokite group to serve in the temple according to the listing in 1 Chronicles 24. Levites were required to only marry Levites and Zachariah was married to Elizabeth who was “of the daughters of Aaron”. (Luke 1:5).
The Zadokite hereditary priesthood was the direct ancestor of the Essenes, and they took turns in serving in the Temple of Jerusalem.
On Myriam’s 12th birthday (Bat Mitzvah), the priests held council.
They are reported to have said to Chief Priest Zachariah, “See, Myriam has become 12-years-old in the Lord’s Temple. What then shall we do with her, to keep her from being defiled?” (“Protoevangelium of James 8”)
They also told the Chief Priest, “You have stood on the Lord’s altar. Go in and pray about her, and we will do whatever the Divine reveals to you.”
It is said Zachariah went in and he prayed about her, exactly like what the priest did for Samuel’s mother (1 Samuel 1:17-18).
Was there an illicit sexual relationship between Zachariah and Myriam that was exactly the same as had happened earlier to Myriam’s mother, Hannah, and her namesake, Samuel’s mother, in 1 Samuel 1 and 2?
The subsequent silence shows “details lacking, clues hanging and possibilities offered”.
Was Zachariah, therefore, the “earthly vicar” of the Divine to impregnate Myriam, a “temple maiden,” for the priestly lineage? Is it coincidental that the circumstances of Elizabeth’s conception were exactly the same as that of Sarah, Abraham’s wife?
After the temple encounter, Myriam refused to go home. Zachariah called for all the widowers. Yosef was chosen to be the guardian of Myriam. Yosef initially refused because he was a widower, but he was compelled.
Yosef was an old man with sons and feared he would be a laughing stock among the people and “at that time an unmarried woman who became pregnant was required by Mosaic law to be stoned for committing adultery”.
The priests told him that if he refused, misfortune would befall him and his household.
He then took her in and then said, “See, I have received you from the temple of the Lord. Now I am leaving you at home, while I go out to construct my buildings; later I will come back to you. The Lord will watch over you.”
He went away for six months to attend to his trade as a master builder. (“Protoevangelium of James 8”).
Six months later, Yosef came back from “building houses abroad”. He found Myriam pregnant and was troubled by it.
Yosef had the option to conceal her crime and be guilty of breaking the law; or to reveal her to the priests and betray the life of an innocent unborn child; or to privately dismiss her.
When nightfall came, he received a private visitor (represented as an “angel” in conventional gospels) who told him to respect the pregnancy.
Earlier we said an “angel” is a human messenger of the Chief Priest.
Later, a scribe came to Yosef’s house and saw Myriam pregnant. He went away and told the priest that Yosef had impregnated Myriam.
If it was true, he was to be guilty of a notorious crime, in that he had defiled a “consecrated” young girl whom he received out of the temple, privately married her, and did not revealed this to the priests.
A sexual irregularity of Yahoshua’s conception would not disqualify him from being a great teacher because the Hebrew Scriptures have instances where some immoral women became “holy mothers” of great people.
These are: Tamar, who dressed up as a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law Judah so she might win from him the right of Levirate marriage (Genesis 38); Rahab, a career prostitute (Joshua 2 and 6); Ruth, a merry widow who became intimate with Boaz as he lay drunk (Ruth 3:7); and Bath-Sheba, wife of Uriah and mother of Solomon born out of murderous adultery with David. (Robert M Price, “Was Jesus the Son of the Priest Zacharias?” 2007).
These are the same women mentioned in Yahoshua’s genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew.
The odd mention of women who had adulterous sexual relationships can be deduced to mean that Matthew connected them to Myriam who conceived Yahoshua through an illicit relationship.
Her son went on to become a great religious leader whose male ancestors arose from sexual misconduct.
“Was Yahoshua the Nazarene a secret biological son of chief priest Zachariah and a step brother to Yohanne the Baptist?”
The answer to the question is not direct and readily available, but we should “think through possibilities” beyond traditional assumptions, dogmas and tenets. We should ceaselessly ask uncomfortable but critical questions.
Rabbi Maimonides, a pre-eminent medieval Hebrew theologian, advised that all theological questions should be investigated without fear or reservations and evidence followed wherever it lead.
Those who unquestionably submit, blindly comply and abandon their reasoning by using fideism are actually distorting Scriptures’ authentic meaning by refusing to use their faculties of mind to reason. (“A Guide for the Perplexed”, 1885).
As a historical Essene/Nazarene figure, Rabbi Yahoshua would have been conceived out of the initiatory hereditary priestly bloodline of the Zadokites to make him a consecrated person. Zadokites were the “Teachers of Righteousness, Sons of Light and Sons of the Divine”.
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