Media Attack Jesus and Mary—While the Hanukkah Myth is Protected from Scrutiny
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Media Attack Jesus and Mary—While the Hanukkah Myth is Protected from Scrutiny
A Double Standard Put on Trial
Michael Hoffman
Adam Gopnik, writing in the March 31, 2025 issue of the highbrow New Yorker magazine in an article titled “We’re Still Not Done with Jesus,” re-enacts a dreary ritual which has been performed repeatedly by the New York Times and other “prestigious” publications, television networks and Hollywood movies.
He begins by portraying anti-Christian academic Elaine Pagels as a moderate critic of Christian orthodoxy, after which he favorably surveys the latest tomes of anti-Christian polemic, thereby propagating the movement.
Mr. Gopnik excludes the dissenting views of traditional Christian scholars who could have offered a cogent defense of the Faith contra Pagels’ latest book, Miracles and Wonder. But why bother with fairness or balance?
The New Yorker is a publication which indulges its predilection for mocking the Gospel and traditional Christianity as it has been understood for millennia. With a hypocrisy that amounts to cognitive dissonance, the media make plain their obdurate allegiance to a Zioncentrism which is immune to the withering scrutiny they apply to the most sacred New Testament narratives.
The Blessed Virgin Mary’s Alleged “Occasion of Shame”
Gopnik conforms to the hero-worship with which the corporate media have ornamented Pagels: “Princeton professor emeritus Elaine Pagels, who has written many imposing and engrossing books on early Christianity, is back with a kind of culminating work, Miracles and Wonder…’ Pagels’ books are “imposing and engrossing.” She “ably navigates…the events of Jesus’ life…”
Gopnik makes an opaque reference to the Talmud of Babylon, the source of Prof. Pagels’ defamation, and then cites Mary’s "shame”:
…an early Jewish polemic claimed that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier nicknamed Panther—perhaps employing a tasteless but pointed pun on the Greek word parthenos (virgin)…
Pagels’ larger point is that the most improbable Gospel tales serve to patch a fractured narrative—using familiar tropes and myths to smooth over inconsistencies…She concludes with a delicate rereading of the Magnificat, suggesting that Mary’s gratitude is not for the child himself but for the miracle that transforms an illegitimate birth into a blessing—an occasion of shame recast as a song of salvation.
This as close to the Talmudic zeitgeist as anyone can attain: the detested Jesus depicted as born in sin as a result of the abhorrent adultery of his mother.
“A Conversation about the Virgin Birth that Maybe Wasn’t”
Last year in December, a few days before Christmas, the New York Times published an interview, “A Conversation about the Virgin Birth that Maybe Wasn’t.” Did the newspaper intentionally time the insult to appear near Christmas Eve?
It consists of a dialogue between veteran Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and Pagels. Like Gopnik, Mr. Kristof extols her: “Elaine Pagels, a prominent professor of religion at Princeton University and an expert on the early church.” She has penned a “fascinating” book. On the basis of these characterizations, Mr. Kristof and his editors in Manhattan determined that the book warranted extensive publicity, which they effected by means of a fawning interview, heaping a bucket of slime on the Savior and the Theotokos during the Christmas season. Are we having fun yet?
One of the main thrusts of the Talmudic sword into the heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the teaching that Jesus was a bastard conceived in an act of adultery between His mother and a Roman soldier variously denominated “Panthera, Pandera” or “Pandir.”
Kristof wrote, “Miracles and Wonder is the title of her fascinating forthcoming book. It raises questions about the virgin birth of Jesus, even pointing to ancient evidence that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier, possibly by rape.”
The claim of “ancient evidence” is unsupported. What is offered amounts to rumor rather than evidence capable of sustaining the allegation.
Pagels’ fantastic story about Our Lord and Lady is a polemical incantation formed from a jumble of flimsy Talmudic canards. The Babylonian Talmud’s fiction factory furnishes the supposed “ancient evidence.” In the hate-filled tractate Gittin 90a it is taught that the Blessed Virgin Mary was so consumed by lust that it was necessary to lock her up to prevent her from copulating with all and sundry. These despicable calumnies do not meet any recognized standard of historical substantiation.
In Miracles and Wonder Pagels appears to imagine that Jesus was born from a sex act between Mary and the Roman, even though she concedes, “we do not know what happened.”
By propagating the defamation in spite of her confessed ignorance she convicts herself of reckless hate speech. If one doesn’t know what actually happened one ought to refrain from ritually shaming the holiest woman in Christian civilization.
To the contrary, Pagels seems to perhaps understand that by taking the accolade-strewn path of privileging the scourge that is the Talmud’s anti-Christian hate speech she will be anointed with the adulation of the New York press, which sets the tone for the American intelligentsia as a whole.
Nicholas Kristof to Elaine Pagels: “You cite evidence going back to the first and second centuries that some referred to Jesus as the son of a Roman soldier named Panthera. These accounts are mostly from early writers trying to disparage Jesus, it seems, so perhaps they should be regarded skeptically. But you also write that Panthera appears to have been a real person….You write that there were early accusations against Mary of promiscuity, connected to this allegation of an affair with Panthera…How should we think about this?”
Pagels to Kristof: “Yes, these stories circulated after Jesus’ death among members of the Jewish community who regarded him as a false messiah, saying that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier. I used to dismiss such stories as ancient slander. Yet while we do not know what happened, there are too many points of circumstantial evidence to simply ignore them. The name Panthera, sometimes spelled differently in ancient sources, may refer to a panther skin that certain soldiers wore. The discovery of the grave of a Roman soldier named Tiberius Panthera, member of a cohort of Syrian archers stationed in Palestine in the first century, might support those ancient rumors.” (New York Times, December 21, 2024).
The source of this disgusting and baseless gossip is Talmud Tractate Shabbat 104b which teaches that Jesus was born of the adultery which His mother committed with Panthera (also sometimes spelled “Pandeira”), while Sanhedrin 106a declares that Mary was a whore. As noted earlier, Gittin 90a states she was so degraded in her uncontrollable lechery that she had to be kept confined.
The New York Times conspicuously chose to suppress the Talmudic source of the malicious Jesus/bastard—Mary/harlot teaching when it published Kristof’s creampuff interview with Pagels.
Depraved Talmudic bigotry is never the object of prosecution by the governments of Australia, Canada and Great Britain which have appointed “watchdogs” and “envoys” charged with hunting down speech which factually terms Zionism racist, the Israeli military genocidal, and Israeli leaders war criminals. (In the U.S., President Biden’s appointed “anti-Semitism” envoy in this “watchdog” capacity swore her oath of office on a copy of the “U.S. Army Talmud”).
Categorization of the Babylonian Talmud as hate speech simply cannot be permitted, just as the gradually fading memory of the murder of 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with additional killings of Palestinian civilians occurring weekly since the “ceasefire,” cannot be allowed to hold a candle to the deaths of fifteen Judaic civilians at Bondi Beach, or the 1,200 Israelis murdered by terrorists on October 7, 2023. On the Talmud’s racial supremacist scale, the lives of the innocent of one ethnicity are infinitely more valuable than those of other nations. The western media embody this disparity in their reporting. Our virtue-signaling “progressive” media have for decades enthusiastically adopted the Talmud’s two-tier morality.
This year it was the New York Review of Books’ turn to publish an assault on Jesus and Mary. This will be found in the December 18 issue, penned by the celebrated British academic Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, in which he argues that the Bible condones, or at the very least generally does not condemn, sex between men. I contested his bizarre contention here.
When Prof. MacCulloch parrots her hagiography, stating that “Pagels’ book is full of insight and learning,” the sycophancy becomes so extreme it goes beyond monotony and becomes ridiculous. The ivory tower canonization of Pagels appears to be virtually universal. So does MacCulloch’s reassertion (in case we failed to recall last year’s indoctrination session), that “…the Gospel accounts were shaped by the reality that Jesus was Mary’s child conceived in illegitimacy.” This Talmudic article of faith forms the impregnable substrata of the universities and literary salons of the West.
Unpacking the Hanukkah Hoax
If the corporate media were reality-based and fair they would apply their irreverent skepticism toward the Jesus and Mary Christmas narrative to the sacred Hanukkah story.
Yet so intense is their estrangement from reality that they greet Hanukkah with an express train of uncritical piety and sacerdotal awe, beginning with the didactic declaration that Jesus most certainly celebrated Hanukkah in the form of the Feast of the Dedication (John 10:21–23).
The Bible says no such thing and no one other than a crystal ball gazer can declare it to be true because no one knows. During the dedication festival the Bible informs us that Jesus went no farther than Solomon’s roofed colonnade (covered walkway, i.e. “Solomon’s porch”). Nothing is said about whether he took part in the religious observance itself. The questions surrounding the appearance of Jesus that day defy a definitive determination.
What the documentary record does indicate without ambiguity is the sad fact that the central rite of Hanukkah, the “Miracle of the Oil,” is a myth — unless you credit the traditions of men as taught in the Talmud, which half of Christendom and almost all of the media eagerly do — thereby rendering themselves guilty of “teaching for doctrine the commandments of men.”
Central to Hanukkah is this “miracle,” a man-made tale with zero Scriptural support but which is dogma according to Talmud tractate Shabbat 21b:
“When the Greeks entered the Sanctuary they defiled all the oils that were in the Sanctuary by touching them. And when the Hasmonean monarchy overcame them and emerged victorious over them, they searched and found only one cruse of oil that was placed with the seal of the High Priest, undisturbed by the Greeks. And there was sufficient oil there to light the candelabrum for only one day. A miracle occurred and they lit the candelabrum from it eight days. The next year the Sages instituted those days and made them holidays…”
When Christendom supports Hanukkah’s Miracle of the Oil folktale it is complicit in the mockery of conveying to the Church belief in a Talmudic myth. For sola Scriptura Protestants to subscribe to this charade is a uniquely incoherent travesty.
Will the New York media print the preceding truths debunking their sacred legend? They consider themselves entitled to direct their fire at the Christmas story, why not the Hanukkah yarn?
As you may have surmised, the truth about Hanukkah’s “familiar tropes and myths” is strictly off-limits on Fox News, CBS, CNN and the pages of the New York Post, the New Yorker, the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. Skeptics may however, freely doubt the holiest Christian beliefs about Mary and her divine son with no fear of repercussions, either financial or reputational.
Not so with the tale of Hanukkah’s “Miracle of the Oil Festival of Light” contrived to rival and surpass the magnetic attraction which the radiant purity of the nativity scene has exerted over humanity for two thousand years.
The virginal Mary gazes at the infant Jesus suffused with divine illumination — “the glory of the Lord.” The most eminent painters and poets of our civilization have produced magnificent works of non-pareil art inspired by the Holy Family infancy narrative. The detestation and malice this iconography has evoked in certain quarters is incalculable.
Nativity displays in our public squares are dwarfed by the elaborate civic ceremonies which accompany the lighting of Hanukkah menorahs across America, from San Francisco’s Union Square to Washington D.C.
The designated “National Menorah” is installed on the Ellipse, in view of the White House. Its elevation is celebrated with an annual public lighting ceremony attended by political leaders and broadcast nationally.
This year there is no federally-permitted Christian nativity scene outdoors on or near the grounds of the White House. The Hanukkah candelabra, symbolizing the “Miracle of the Oil,” is the sole religious symbol visible on government property in the vicinity, a tacit validation of the authority of the Talmud in our nation’s capital.
Here at our residence in north Idaho our nativity display is on our lawn. While we have not as yet had a visit from three magi, a few day ago three moose, a huge cow and her calves, came to feast on our yew bushes, after which they settled down for the night, close to our fragile statuary. By morning they had departed, affording this writer the opportunity to examine the ground marked by their hoof prints. They were close to the nativity as well as the spotlight we have affixed in front of it. Yet all was untouched, as if homage to a representation of the true spirit of Christmas had been paid by God’s own creatures.
As John Keats opined, “Truth is beauty.” The feeble attempts to smear and supplant the veritas of divine pulchritude will fail.
Tidings of comfort and joy! Let nothing you dismay.
“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger” (2: 8-12).
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