By Water & Blood

Panarion 51, Chapter 10: Herod’s years and “as was supposed”

For in the thirty-third year of Herod the Lord is born; in the thirty-fifth the magi came; in the thirty-seventh year Herod dies, and Archelaus his son succeeds to the kingdom, having reigned nine years, as I have already said in other places.

So Joseph withdrew when he heard about Archelaus and, coming, settled in Nazareth, and from there again each year he went up to Jerusalem.

You see how great a precision there is in the divine Gospels concerning each narrative. But those carried by ignorance, having darkened their own mind, do not know the end of each word, but simply raise their mouth against the holy evangelists and loosen the tongue, saying nothing in truth, yet alienating themselves from life.

Hence, then, Luke, after narrating the first things, again says how in the twelfth year he went up to Jerusalem, so as not to leave room for those who supposed that he had simply appeared in the world as a full-grown man and come to the Jordan to John, as was imagined by Cerinthus and Ebion and the others.

For the serpent is dread when it goes crookedly; it does not stand in one opinion, but to some he seems to have been born from a man’s rubbing-together and seed, and to others simply to have appeared as a man.

Therefore the holy evangelists, narrating everything in detail, are precise. And Luke by nature, as carrying the mind up from below to what is above, says, “And Jesus was beginning to be about thirty years old, being the son, as was supposed, of Joseph.”

But “as was supposed” is not the truth; rather, Joseph stood in the rank of a father because it so seemed good to God, yet he was not a father who had had no union with Mary, except only that he was called husband because he had been betrothed, being an old man of about eighty years, more or less, and having six sons from his true first wife, and having taken on this arrangement, as I have also treated more precisely about this somewhere else.

How, then, was he who had no union his father? Which is impossible.