Published Mar 27, 2013.
The New Testament has honored the mystery of the virginity of Jesus' mother and the Catholic Church has designated August 8 on the ecclesiastical calendar as the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, however that date only allowed for four months until the Messiah's birth in December. I personally long favored late-March as the night on which God visited Mary of Nazareth and I was a math major at university.
Once I lost my faith in the Virgin Mary, I theorized that she had been knocked up by a passing Roman soldier and Mary declared a virgin pregnancy to prevent the village of Bethlehem from stoning her to death. Joseph was an old man happy to have an heir. The lie saved her life and that of the baby.
Supposedly in banned New Testaments Jesus had two brothers.
Izzy and Moise.
No one ever heard of them.
Immaculate Conception was a good myth for the faithful, but back in 2006 Nguyen Thi Oanh, a death-row inmate, held in solitary confinement in Vietnam for almost a year was declared pregnant by prison authorities. Officials were at a loss to explain the mystery. None of the evidence pointed to the guards and her husband was in another prison awaiting the firing squad.
By Vietnamese law no pregnant woman can be put to death and the heroin traffickess was pardoned to give birth.
Someone isn't telling the whole story, but in 2007 authorities arrested a prison guard for having facilitated a chance rendezvous with a male convict.
Nguyen Thi Oanh has disappeared into the past. Her child would be almost fourteen. It's almost as if it never happened and that is the best thing about legends.
There are never the truth until someone starts believing them.
