Definitely not your usual male behaviour...

It all just gets queerer and queerer.

The storyteller tells us that Joseph was an honourable man, and an upright man, but an honourable and upright man in the patriarchal society of his day would've known just what to do when he found out that the woman he was going to marry was pregnant.

Pregnant and not a virgin.

Young women are murdered in patriarchal societies to this day for such things.

Murdered if not by the husband's family, then by their own family.

But we're not told about Mary's family.

It’s almost as if she doesn’t have one…

What is happening here is incredibly unusual.

Queer, even.

We're told that Matthew is the most orthodox of the gospel writers, the most Jewish, the most traditional, the most patriarchal.

But what he is telling us here is something that would have been unheard of.

Something that had never happened before.

And perhaps would never happen again…

I’m pursuing a bit of a personal obsession here, that’sconnected with my work with my “Gospel According To Jesus Queen Of heaven”

It’s about re-discovering texts that have been used to suppress and condemn us for centuries; and discovering new and subversive meanings in them.

Let me know if this interests you.

And do feel free to subscribe and spread the word..