Pagan Model | Pagan Model

Yet upon this sketchy outline a full-bodied character was to be fleshed out soon enough by ‘creative’ Christian scribes. Pagan gods, as often as not, were supposedly sired by virgin goddesses – quite commonly as a result of impregnation by a sun-beam. The resultant sun-god was depicted as an infant at the breast of his mother – the ‘Madonna and Child’ no less! Such iconography is to be found all the way from Egypt to China. The Romans' own virgin goddess, Vesta, was served by women who maintained her perpetual flame and their own chastity for thirty years.

The ‘Mary’ of the Christians considerably upstaged this achievement by the double whammy of mothering a god and maintaining her virginity for two millennia! But it was to take a few centuries of creative story telling for all the paraphernalia of the pagan myths to be fused into the Christian one.

Rather like a delayed echo of the invented life of the illustrious super-hero himself, Mary’s own ‘biography’ blossomed over the centuries. Early Christian writers, like Justin and Irenaeus, elevated Mary as a ‘second Eve’, her ‘obedience’ reversing the sin of the original garden dweller.

Justin ‘Martyr’, a Greek from Palestine who had fled to Ephesus at the time of Bar Kochbar’s revolt, adopted the embryonic Christianity he found in the city with relish. But Justin’s enthusiasm came with a prior familiarity of Greek classics. In his adopted city the venerable cult of the moon goddess Artemis (or Diana as the Romans called her) had been the eternally virgin protector of youth, chastity and fertility for a millennium. In the process the city had become a wealthy place of pilgrimage – the world’s first bankers had been the priests of Artemis.