(DISCARDED DRAFT) DIARY OF A COFFIN DODGER CHAPTER A

VIRGIN MARY AND CHILD JESUS WITH A ROSARY 

BY

ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS PUBLIC DOMAIN

Bloody annoyed, I sat in front of the plate-glass window. Pissed off by my invisibility to passersby.

The multi-gendered crowds of people of various ages and noise levels, with their endless, fatuous selfies flowing past. They only look my way when they are searching for a seat.

If I died while sitting here, slumping forward onto the table before me, they would shove my body onto the floor and plonk their trays of food onto the table. Once they sat down, they would kick my body out from under their feet, regarding removing my carcass as someone else’s job.

I want to implode their peace of mind by removing my dentures and placing them starkly on the table. Then I would be known as something other than an inconvenience and would not be invisible.

But the dentures are glued to my gums, so they don’t flop around as I chew a cheeseburger.

I let loose the occasional controlled fart, a trick I learnt at school. A consequential act that beams bright rays of joy into my soul as I delightedly watch grimaces shatter the looks of bovine contentment on the faces of passersby.

The sound and the stench of the flatulence maintain a space around me I feel comfortable inhabiting. As well as disturbing the myth of my invisibility. Until the farts run out.

The sunlight streaming through the window behind me aids my search for visibility as it casts my shadow across the floor of Macca's.

I am treated as if I'm invisible because of assumptions about those in aged care. Like them, I am a coffin dodger.

The callous cruelty of being ignored by arrogant individuals infuriates me and drives me to confront their delusion, yet a stronger fury is burning within me.

Like an apocalyptic fire, I feel it blazing within my inner being, seeking to wreak havoc on the malignant world of men.

That pestilent, foul domain and its conniving, duplicitous inhabitants and the multitudinous ways they fuck us over provide the eternal fuel for the fiery rage within me.

If it wasn’t for their sperm, the world could do without those fucked-up bastards.

However, my diary will not achieve an apocalyptic outcome.

It will be a straightforward narrative of my journey in the world of men, where they, like dogs pissing on poles, mark their trails through that world with the roasting heat of hatred they direct at girls and women.

A straightforward tale for those who can concentrate on something other than preening themselves for their next selfie.

A story of fucked-over humanity that begins with this chapter.

A simple tale that will tell of the many ways, like cancer spreading nodules and pustules of death in a human body, men practice the art and the science of violence they direct at women and girls.

Whether by stealth or by visible demonstrations of damage, men scotch any attempt to interfere with those trails or their entitlement to build the world as a comfort zone for their needs, fantasies, and desires.

Like you, the male reader, who will stuff up the narratives in this diary in all the mendacious ways you are skilled at.

After all, you have an inheritance stretching over centuries of practising those arts.

But I don’t fucking care.

I am a proud coffin dodger.

and do not have long to live in the world you have screwed up.

Do your fucking worst, but I will have my say before I depart.

So, you, a dick-led wonder, get your hand off your cock, do up your zipper and piss off because your ego tells you that you belong to that elite group of individuals, masters of the universe, and the world can teach you nothing that you already don’t know. Particularly by reading the narrative set out on the limp pages of this diary.

Or, if you choose to stay, after all, you have choices and freedoms which you deny to others, read on, and maybe, a light will glow, however dimly, in that great darkness of your child-like intellect, and you could gain an insight why so many resent the outsized space you take in our world.

By staying, try, though it will be a struggle, to dim the light of your fantasy world. Remove that light beam from thinking about your dick and the hole you want to shove it into.

You know, that wrinkled piece of meat between your legs and how stiff it becomes when you fantasise about a hole, particularly a young hole where no man has shoved his dick, but you, according to your sperm-soaked dreams, can push your dick in and jiggle it around a few times as the deluded outcome of your pipe dream; a jiggling within a young, virginal female space.

That’s right, stop thinking about sex for at least a minute and concentrate.

By doing this, you may take your first wobbly, scary steps, like a baby learning how to walk, into a world light years away from yours, where you get to know girls and women and cease viewing them as only holes.

Because they are nothing but a series of holes for you and your ilk. Holes you consider, you are entitled to enter with any object or any of your appendages whenever you wish.

Other genders and identities suffer the same malign gaze, seeing them as nothing more than a series of holes. But I will stay with women and girls as they are of the gender where most men, like you want, welcomed or not, to access a warm female hole into which to thrust a dick.

I’m told this depraved, ugly, non-knowing of women and girls because they live in a world outside your spew-inducing male gaze achieves its apotheosis in colleges and universities. In particular, in those colleges and universities where the patriarchal, sanctimonious pledge of virginity burns brightly, blokes know the pledge applies to one hole only. Women and girls have another hole that male students and staff assume their dicks are entitled to violate, and that hole isn’t a female student’s mouth.

I hope I have pissed you off.

Have a squirting session.

Let the filth of your favourite fantasy of a hole, its enclosing female package and what coercive means you would use to access that hole blossom beautifully. Groan as each erotically provocative petal unfurls in your mind as you ease the sexual tension.

Or if a wank doesn’t do it for you, take charge of a hole. I’m sure you’re not stupid not to know you can buy access to girl’s or woman’s holes.

Or, who knows, you may be an A-lister in trolling. Go on, fuck up a woman's or girl’s life with your words. You have done it countless times. Being a gutless wonder, you are anonymous, so there will be no cost. But isn’t it disappointing that you can’t out yourself at something you shine at, even to those with whom you share the darkest spaces of the internet?

There’s a tension-relieving thrill, ain’t there, in destroying a girl or woman’s life, eh?

Enhance your toxic, polluting presence in the world by joining the other alpha males on the internet living the high life by making money from the denigration of women and girls.

Women and girls close to you with whom you have taken steps to ensure they will never get to know the real you. Girls and women like your mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, cousin, niece, girlfriend, fiancee, wife, or daughter.

Aren’t they also just a parade of holes for an alpha male, like you or your mates on the internet, to stupefy, deceive, threaten, bludgeon, choke, whatever you think will work without harming you, to achieve success in accessing those holes? Isn’t this what you boast about to your alpha mates as you lie soaking in dank, slimy internet pools with the excrement that oozes from your orifices?

A few men, unlike yourself, take proactive steps to get acquainted with women and girls. To know and respect them, but not for what girls or women bring into a bloke’s life. But for who the women and girls are as they present, the narratives they relate about their presence in the world, and how they would like to be known.

I hope you are by now thoroughly pissed off. And also annoyed because I have said little about myself.

Bugger off, then. This is my story, my narrative. It does not entitle you to know any more about me than what I choose to reveal. I haven’t asked you to read this diary. If I’m not addressing matters as you want them to be addressed, fuck off from my space.

If you don’t clear off, you will find that the narrative will present information about how I, not you, want it to be ordered. There’s a high probability, therefore, you will show the fragility of your ego by damaging others because this narrative won’t be dancing to your tune.

Suppose that statement’s meaning is beyond your egocentric mind’s scaly grasp.

Then, of course, being an alpha male, you have never reflected on the vehemence with which male violence targets women and girls.

Rivers of that sort of violence rage throughout a particular holy book. Misogynistic abuse, beloved by alpha males, floods through the book the Christians call the Bible.

About twelve months before a relative’s death, while reading a newspaper in the local library, I rejected the notion that the writings in the Bible were the literal word of God.

Instead, I began a journey of discovery into the Bible as a world of texts. Understanding Bible stories and themes through spiritual insights and textual criticism, not Divine authority.

The relative, my father, the late Reverend S.B. (the Reverend Sadistic Bastard), had also stopped considering the Bible as the literal word of God.

However, his move did not influence mine.

Nor did it have any theological purpose unless paedophilia is considered a theological purpose because his reflections and reasons lay in the murky, dark world of human depravity.

Despite the dark, wicked world of misogyny scorching through the narratives, themes and texts of the Bible, there are also life-enhancing portrayals of girls and women as they travel life’s journey with the God of no name. Many of these narratives tell how that dark wickedness lacerated and scarred those journeys.

We can find one of several such narratives in the story of Jesus’ alleged birth as narrated in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke.

Looking at that account, if the accretions added to the story for multitudes of theological and marketing reasons are removed, what emerges is a depiction of disrespect mangling the lives of women and girls in the hideous ways men know well. Descriptions of violent male disrespect, in this case, targeting a woman, litter this narrative.

Denial of women's place in the story, minimizing how women supported each other, and violent reactions from men when threatened by women - it's all there. As well as a miraculous turnaround serves to highlight the male violence that weaves its virulent way through the narrative.

As I order the information in my narrative the way I want to, I will now state that I believe Jesus, whose mother was the Mary of that narrative, exists.

I also believe the God of no name, the God of Jechocobeh, Miriam, Rahab, Deborah, Tamar, Eliyahu, Amos, Nathan, David, Mary, Jesus, Peter, Ananias of Damascus and Paul, exists.

The Bible has a tradition of telling narratives depicting disrespect and male-initiated violence, examples of which are seen in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke. The following is a non-exhaustive list of these kinds of incidents which cascade through the Bible.

Child sacrifice; Racial and gender-based slavery, torture, discrimination and murder; incest; prostitution; bestiality; mass murders; ethnic cleansing; genocide; cultural appropriation; rape; false imprisonments; judicial murders; sexual abuse of children; elder abuse and murder; fratricides; matricides; filicides; pedicides; environmental destruction on an epic scale; the wholesale destruction of cultures and the people who lived within those cultures

Despite these accounts of violence and misogyny, narratives of women's and girls' lives shimmer as they cast bright rays of hope throughout the Bible. Stories of women and girls’ journey with the God of no-name whose existence is attested to by the movement and power of that God in people’s lives. 

Power and movement, which needs no acknowledgement, which is seen in the lives of men who get to know themselves in a new and radical way when they turn away from the patriarchal, misogynistic world into which they are born and encouraged, facilitated and supported to remain throughout their lives. A movement to a position where they affirm and acknowledge the right of women and girls of all ages to live their lives, without the shit men eagerly, maliciously pour into the lives of girls and women.

A miracle attested to by Joseph - a man whose parental link to Jesus is open to question.

A place to start telling that narrative is when Joseph’s betrothed confirms the truth of the whispers he has heard. Yes, she has had sex.

The woman and girl-loathing men who edited the texts of the original narrative spoken by and written by girls and women of the so-called Christmas story and were eager to give an imprimatur of male legitimacy to their, i.e. the male editors’ version of that story, however, downplayed that sexual act. Those editors wrote a shocking act of male violence out of the text.

Mary was raped.

A sexual assault that, even in the fucked-up world of men, reaches new heights of sadistic horror in those male-edited narratives found in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke.

Men, as they so willingly do, instead of offering support and comfort, celebrate rape, a gross example of the abusive power of men, which men unashamedly exercise over women and girls, with cheers, laughter and back-slapping.

A time to crack open a few beers, ain’t it, boys, and let your chests swell with pride about the sexual violation of a girl or a woman?

Go on, you deranged, sick, fucked up, nappy-soaked infants, chortle and gloat when you send videos of the event scorching around the internet.

Centuries ago, maybe the men who kicked off a particular commemoration did not intend to celebrate a woman being raped.

But by failing to get to know girls and women, and therefore disregarding the misogynist violence inflicted on them, this celebration is a farce.

A woman, Mary, has been violated in her body, her soul, and her spirit.

In the male-edited texts in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke, however, an attempt is made to eradicate any sense that a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood woman was sexually assaulted. With Mary, the assault was rape.

Therefore, that particular commemoration, The Feast of the Annunciation, is wholly divorced from any sense, hint, mention, or suggestion of a woman being raped or sexually violated.

Instead, that Feast (how men arrived at the day Mary conceived is another wild journey men take into the world of Biblical speculation), given the imprimatur of male authority, is an occasion to cement men’s view of the birth of Jesus into place.

I had a light-bulb moment and spewed my guts up when I realised that celebration is a total bastardisation of a woman’s shock, hurt and confusion.

Mary would not be the first woman to think of killing herself after such a violation.

Whether the men who edited the texts written by women downplayed this truly horrific sexual violation to protect a well-known male, whether a Roman soldier was the perpetrator, or whether it was a bloke known to Mary and Joseph, who now knows?

Or, just as likely, being men, they did not want a woman’s story buggering up their account about how the Christian’s Jesus entered this world.

Then the editors piled further horror on the story when their description of the assault glossed over the perpetrator’s actions.

‘The holy spirit will come upon you,’ replied the angel, ‘and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.’

Of course, it will overshadow Mary. It will consume her body, soul and spirit and cast a shadow over her life because the male editors imply Mary has been penetrated vaginally. An unsought event to which Mary metaphorically shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Let’s get on with it,’ according to the male editors’ account in the Gospel of Luke.

These editors’ account is in the world of the God of the book the Christians call the Old Testament and the world of the gods of the Greeks and Romans.

In those worlds, no woman or girl is safe from the sexual violence of rampaging male deities.

This time, according to the Gospel of Luke, the God of no name is fingered as the perpetrator.

However, Jesus' adult life and close bond with the God of no name shows something of that God's kindness and compassion. Therefore, this accusation is one hell-of-a spew-inducing horror.

A horror compounded as the accusation somehow makes rape 'OK'.

Therefore, why view one episode of sexual misconduct towards a woman as sacred, but not all incidents of sexual assault of women and girls?

This is a woeful indictment of men’s chilling unwillingness to get to know girls and women. It does this by demonstrating men's failure to consider how their behaviour slams into the lives of women and girls.

Though not all acts of sexual intercourse lead to pregnancy, in Mary’s case, it did.

She became stressed and fearful of Joseph’s reaction because he had discovered that not only had she had sex, but she had a bun in the oven that was not his.

As countless women and girls’ narratives attest, men go ballistic when the woman or girl the man claims as his own confirms she is pregnant, but not by him.

The gospel texts, edited by men, have sugarcoated the rape of Mary by sanctifying the terrifying ordeal Mary has been through.

They also attempt to sugarcoat Joseph’s reaction by minimising its impact on Mary by saying he would have a quiet divorce. Pathetic. As if that would shield Mary from the wrath of the villagers where she lived and were undoubtedly dangerously fully aware of her so-called fallen status.

However, nothing is sugarcoated about Mary’s reaction when Joseph discovers she is pregnant. Mary clears off out of the village where she and Joseph live.

Now, the pricks who attempted to edit women out of the story do a bit of slick marketing to explain how Joseph found out about Mary’s pregnancy.

They brought the world of angels and the supernatural into play when it was more likely to be one of Joseph’s mates who pulled Joseph aside when they were having drinks in the back garden of the pub

and said quietly,

‘Now listen, mate, and listen good! Put a leash on that temper of yours and keep your cool. I’ve got to tell you something because you’ll find out, anyway. Now you know your missus, Mary, has been up to no good, but, mate, it gets much bloody worse….'

Like pregnant girls and women across centuries and cultures, faced with the rage of a slighted male, Mary fears for her safety and the safety of her unborn child.

Therefore, by the time Joseph gets back to his workshop from the pub, Mary has scarpered.

Mary stops running when she finds a place of refuge with Elizabeth, a relative.

By doing so, Elizabeth extends to Mary an act of kindness, protection, and comfort.

Demonstrating that women stand together, no matter the era, culture or circumstances a woman finds herself in.

Though misogynistic editing attempts to diminish the impact of these stories of women's courage and compassion, their voices will not be stilled. Their stories peep through the male-centric focus now given to the narrative originally narrated and written by girls and women.

A pivot by men, the Jesus Crew,

who wanted their narrative of Jesus to remain the centre of attention and, therefore, downplayed a woman's trauma and put a spin on the life of John the Baptist.

After three months, according to the editing of the Biblical texts, Mary returns to Joseph.

Countless women and girls over the centuries know the plausibility men pile on when they want their woman to return to them. After all, it would have been humiliating for Joseph that his woman had left him.

Undoubtedly, to get her home, Joseph promised not to harm Mary or her child by showering her with the customary male smoodging.

'You can trust me not to hurt you. (AKA kick you in the belly, thrash you, choke you, shout, rave, roar, or chuck items around a room). I love you, please come home; I'll care for the child as if he were my own.' Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

My father, the late Reverend S.B., also knew about social embarrassment. My mother, a proud follower of the suffragettes who also believed in the worth of eugenics, walked out on him. It took the Rev. S.B. over three months to get her back.

The astonishing thing about Joseph is that he put those blandishments into practice. He supported, cared for, comforted and did not leave Mary. That is the bloody miracle of Christmas. Joseph, knowing his missus is preggers by some other bloke, in an act that brings me to tears, stays with Mary.

This is a section of the original women's story that peeps through that male-centric editing of the texts. A section that only women could narrate because they would grasp the magnitude of Joseph's act in staying with Mary.

If blokes had a hand in the original narrative, they would have written Joseph out of the story by murdering him in a sanctified way. 

Hurled off a rooftop by an angel or trampled to death by a herd of donkeys possessed by devils and demons. Whatever the means of Joseph’s eradication, he would have been removed while Mary stayed with Elizabeth.

His challenge to male authority would not have been mentioned.

A challenge to male norms of how men must behave towards women who, to use male terminology, have strayed beyond the nest.

Christ and the Woman Taken in AdulterybyMax BeckmannWikiArt Public Domain

By staying with Mary, Joseph (as Christ did time and time again from what is known of Christ's adult life) behaved in a way that challenged, disrupted and tore apart thousands of years of patriarchal conditioning.

Joseph staying with the pregnant Mary is an event so unusual; I think there is hope for men to change into better angels in their relationships with women and girls, and why I believe the God of Jesus Christ, the God of no name, and of Jechocobeh, Miriam, Rahab, Deborah, Tamar, Eliyahu, Amos, Nathan, David, Elizabeth, Mary, Joseph, Peter, Ananias of Damascus and Paul exists.

Imagine the pressure on Joseph when his mates drop around for a couple of beers after work.

Those mates, driving community expectations, would want Joseph to do the right thing and not shame them.

‘Throw the bitch out;' 'chuck the slut into the street, as Yahweh did with Jezebel;' 'It ain't your responsibility to take care of the whore and her bastard child;' That's the way with women. You can't trust them to keep their legs shut.’ They would say.

Joseph would have listened. But he did not prioritise his mates’ interests. Girls and women, no matter what century or culture they live in, know how men put their mates and what they want above all other concerns. Which only makes Joseph’s turnaround even more miraculous.

When the community realised Joseph would not do the right thing, they reacted as communities do when a person challenges male authority and the accepted way of doing things.

Villagers scrawled graffiti on the walls of his business. They greeted him with stares and silence when he stopped at a village stall. Friends would not call around. They threatened Mary with physical violence if she left the house. They threw rocks through windows, and people refused to do business with him.

Isolated in the village, fearing for his and Mary’s safety, Joseph closes his business and puts his life savings into a leather pouch.

Taking the pouch with him, and after he and Mary pack a few belongings onto a donkey, he helps Mary onto the donkey. Joseph then leads the donkey into the night as he and Mary flee for their lives.

Mary, exhausted when they reach another town, begs Joseph to stop.

Joseph, therefore, asks at a pub for accommodation.

However, gossip has preceded them.

The pub owner has listened to the gossip and knows Joseph has not consummated his marriage to Mary.

The child the weary, dusty, sick Mary carries is not Joseph’s.

If the pub owner allows this whore to stay on his premises, gossip will smash his business.

He brusquely informs Joseph,

‘We’re chokers, mate. There ain’t a spare bed in the place. There’s a game in town tomorrow. You’d best try further along the road. They might have a bed.’

However, yet again, the downplayed part of the story breaks through.

A woman steps up and supports another woman.

Peering past Joseph to the teary-eyed, pregnant Mary, swaying unsteadily despite her tight grip on the donkey,

the pub owner’s missus ignores the gossip.

Despite the owner's history of violence towards her, she courageously stared him down and declared.,

‘Yer, there’s a game tomorrow. But the stable hands pissed and crashed out on the bar floor. The lean-to, out the back of the pub, where he sleeps, is vacant. You’se can have that. But you’se will have to pay full rates, given the demands for beds and all.’

A sobbing, relieved Mary thanked the God of no name for women like the pub owner’s missus

as Joseph clinks coins into the scowling pub owner’s outstretched hand.

Joseph guides the donkey to the rear of the pub, while shouts and screams shatter the silence of the night. Mary alights from the donkey and Joseph helps her into the lean-to.

The original account of this episode, spoken and written by girls and women, is a narrative of women’s strength, resilience and hope. Of women working together and, in doing so, knowing and accepting the potential for an explosion of male violence in their lives.

Here, also, is a narrative of the in-breaking of the God with no name into the life of a man, Joseph, calling him to challenge male authority, like that God’s influence on the actions of Jechocobeh and Miriam.

A call to eschew a socially sanctioned response of physical, emotional, financial and social violence towards Mary when she confirms to Joseph that she is pregnant but not with his child.

A narrative of a man, Joseph, who gets to know Mary when he rejects the patriarchal orthodoxy governing his relationships with girls and women by answering that call. A knowledge of her based on the renewal of his mind through a transforming view of his relationship with Mary.

A call extended to all men by the kindness of the God with no name to oppose a male-centric conformity holding sway over their relationships with women and girls and, for the men who answer that call, like Joseph, experience the transforming power of the love of God in their lives and their relationships with girls and women. A change that will give people a chance to get to know those men in a new and life-transforming way.

Despite the male editors’ cinematic conceits in dressing up the events surrounding that birth, another bastardisation of the original narrative where the uncomplicated birth of a woman's first child was rightly celebrated, that original telling remains a God-infused, life-celebrating and women-affirming narrative.

The message from that narrative implied by the friendship and support between women, and the life-affirming strength of the relationship between Mary and Joseph, is a resounding assertion of what the critical term in the Judaeo-Christian faith tradition, ‘neighbour’ means.

An all-encompassing principle that takes in the homeless,

the marginalised, and the socially ostracised.

As well as the financially destitute, children born of rape, women and girls who have been sexually abused either by their partners or others, single mothers, and women and girls facing the wrath and violence of men.

None of these people are to be shunned, and that includes those who have been cast out from their faith-based communities, as well as men who acknowledge and support the personhood of girls and women. They are all embraced within the blessedness of this God of no name-illuminated birth.

Not even the well-off is forgotten in the narrative.

Men, unknown to Mary and Joseph, who had the finances, the time and the knowledge to undertake a journey of several hundred kilometres, brought gifts for her child.

The story of the census is, of course, just plain bullshit.

A stinky cowpat, the Jesus Crew, their media manager and his PR hacks, have used to divert the human mind from the role played by women in this narrative. By side-lining women, the Jesus Crew continues the Biblical tradition of male-initiated violent disrespect towards women and girls.

Try to imagine what's involved in this census on a practical level (which men, in other contexts, prioritise over matters of the heart and emotions). In this census, everyone returns to their hometown because '...there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world is to be taxed.' (Luke 2: 1) Therefore, everyone in the Roman Empire has to return to the town where they were born to be registered.

Given the size of the Roman Empire, imagine a woman working in Massillia in Gaul. She was born in Damascus. She, with her daughter, runs a street stall selling take-away snacks. Her daughter was born in Lutetia.

Now consider this: her daughter has to travel to Lutetia. Mum has to travel to Damascus. How the fuck are they going to do that?

The shop has to close. Where’s the money coming from for these journeys? Are the Romans going to give them travel vouchers? Subsidised boat fares for mum to cross Mare Nostrum? If the boats are still running, that is. After all, the boat owners and crew may have also buggered off to the towns of their birth.

Like the story of Noah’s ark and two of every kind of animal (Pandas, buffalo, blow flies, redback spiders, badgers, stoats, wombats, koala bears, Kakapos, Keas, Moas, Dodos, Black snakes, stingrays, currawongs, robins, vipers etc.) it’s a load of testosterone-fuelled bullshit.

Apart from the catastrophic disruption to the social, political and economic functioning of the Roman Empire by the mass movement of millions of people across the Empire, no contemporaneous Roman record is yet to be found recording a census as described by the wankers who edited the original narrative of Joseph, Mary and the birth of a child to a currently unknown father.

That original narrative, spoken and written by girls and women, of why Mary and Joseph fled into the night is lost to human history. Instead, the men of the Jesus Crew have put their spin on this story of Jesus’ birth.

Worried that the group forming around John the Baptist may triumph in claiming John was the Messiah, fearing the devotees of the various self-proclaimed Messiahs popping up across Palestine (like rumours bursting into life within a village) may gain traction, (or the Romans may lose interest in nailing these Messiahs to bits of 4 x 4), the Jesus Crew

worked hard to promote their guy.

Working hard to hinder the recounting of women’s narratives and by borrowing texts from earlier writings (like university students using cut and paste from textual sources to advance an argument in an essay), the Jesus Crew strived to promote their guy as the real Messiah, the one chosen by God, the God who became the God of the Christians.

However, there is a mystery surrounding this story. The Jesus Crew’s clumsy attempts to eradicate the original narrative written by women and girls reveals this mystery.

The census never happened.

As described by the Jesus Crew, it is impractical and lacks a supporting contemporaneous historical record.

Therefore, why did Joseph and Mary leave the town they lived in, where Joseph had his business?

Mary, heavily pregnant, would have known the women in the town where she lived. Those courageous women would ignore men's abuse of Mary and step up to help her at the time of giving birth. It is what women do across cultures and centuries. Women take risks to support each other.

Yet Mary undertook an uncomfortable, dangerous, life-threatening journey - a ride on a donkey in the night to an unknown destination.

What if she gave birth on that journey? Even the male editing acknowledges that the delivery was imminent. Who could she call on to assist with the birth and keep her and the baby safe? If she reached a town before her waters broke, how would she let the women in the town know she would need help with the birth?

Mary lived in a village where she knew women who would help her and the child during and after the birth. Therefore, if the journey needed to be undertaken, why not wait until it was safe? After Mary gave birth.

The women’s narrative would have spelled out, by relying on women’s knowledge of how dangerous and problematic that journey was for a pregnant woman, why Mary undertook that journey. There is an urgency to that decision.

A decision where the motivation for it is open to speculation because the reason remains a mystery; it is lost to human history.

------------------------------------------------------------------