`Do you think Jesus was celibate?' `I would think so; there was very little playing around in those days'

VB: What was Jesus really like? JMOC: You see, what I find extraordinary are the references in Paul (the epistles of St Paul) to Jesus. They emphasise qualities like steadfastness, tenderness, compassion, gentleness.

VB: How reliable is Paul in talking about Jesus, since he probably never met him? JMOC: No, he never met Jesus in the flesh, that's for sure. But he lived with Peter (the apostle) for two weeks and I can't imagine that they spent time talking about fishing or the weather or whether his mother-in-law ever got sick again. He's much more likely to have asked "well how did you get the funny name Rocky?" which would have brought him right into the middle of the Gospel story.

VB: Two weeks - it's not very long . . . JMOC: No, but he specifies the time, he had 15 days. I imagine that Paul spent that time asking about the historical Jesus, not anything else. Because I mean the fact that he was converted meant he recognised Jesus as Messiah, as Lord. What he would have wanted to know at that stage is more about the figure.

The adjectives that Paul uses or the qualities that Paul emphasises would indicate a very gentle figure, not the fiery prophet like John the Baptist. He strikes me as a much more, as I say, attractive, welcoming, conciliatory type of figure - nonetheless with a very definite message.

VB: Do you think that Jesus ever got married? JMOC: No, but I don't think he made a vow of celibacy either.

VB: Do you think he was celibate? JMOC: I would think so. There was very little playing around unless you were very upper class in those days, and especially not in villages, it was the valley of the squinting windows. But I think he wasn't in any great hurry to get married and destiny overtook him before he could.

VB: You accept that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. How could anybody have known that she was a virgin? JMOC: Oh Mary must have told them; that's the only way it could be known.

VB: But Mary is not quoted anywhere in the Gospels, apart, I think from the wedding feast at Cana, is that right? JMOC: Yes that's the only time she speaks.

VB: So it's not likely that she would have been much of a source for much in the Gospels? JMOC: Certainly not the public ministry. But if you look back at the virgin birth story realistically as a historian, there are lots of stories about God's popularity with women. But all the ones I know are polytheistic, in other words many gods are involved and they're pornographic to the extreme. Now, to imagine a conservative Jewish community like the community at Antioch, where Matthew (the writer of the second gospel) lived, to imagine that they would accept a pornographic story as a way of saying something positive about Jesus - I think that's entirely implausible.

VB: But why would they have accepted the virgin birth story anyway - almost certainly it wouldn't have come directly to them from Mary? JMOC: No, because it was presented to them as a fact. This is the way it is. If it was presented to them as a way of talking about Jesus theologically, I'm quite sure they would have rejected it.

VB: Is the issue of the virgin birth crucial to your understanding of Jesus - does it really matter if you were to change your mind on this? JMOC: No, it doesn't matter at all because some people have a very simplistic idea that virgin birth is somehow related to deity. But that's ridiculous, I mean every Jew in the first century believed that Adam and Eve were historical figures and Adam didn't even have a mother. But no one thought of Adam as divine. He had only one parent. No one ever thought of Eve as a goddess.

VB: Did Jesus think he was God? JMOC: Yes. We have to work backwards. John affirms that Jesus was God in the full sense because there was this tremendous ambiguity in the first century about the way the terms God and divine were used; it was said, for instance, that Moses was god.

VB: But Jesus thought himself as exactly the same as God the father. JMOC: Well, we have to work backwards as I say, that if we accept, as I do, that John says Jesus is divine, so does Luke, so does Matthew, then he must have known he was divine. And it's not as if he woke up one day and said "My God, I'm God!", he must have known it all the time.

VB: It began from when? JMOC: From the beginning of his existence, which goes back to eternity. But you see that's all you can say. All the rest is philosophical speculation.

VB: But does that fit in with his tentativeness on these issues? JMOC: No, because you can't say how the divine mind worked. We don't know anything about divinity except through the humanity of Jesus.

VB: Did Paul think Jesus was God? JMOC: No. Let's put it this way, I can't see any evidence that he even thought of Jesus in those categories, that for him Jesus was the new Adam. The perfection of humanity, he was exactly what God intended him to be.

VB: If Paul didn't think Jesus was God then can you see how the Gospel writers thought he was God? JMOC: Oh certainly. But this is what we mean by the ongoing revelation and revelation continued to the death of the last apostle, which means new things were being revealed. And so it's in writings at the end of the first century.

VB: Do you think Jesus had brothers and sisters? JMOC: Oh yeah, they were children of Joseph's first wife.

VB: Why do you think Joseph was married twice? JMOC: Because Jesus was first son of Mary. That happens only when the father has multiple wives.

VB: Did he have two wives at the same time? JMOC: He could have, it wasn't excluded. Multiple wives for the Ashkenazi Jews was only stopped in the Middle Ages, and it has never been stopped for the Sephardi. So that it could have been simultaneous as it could have been, of course, accessible to all that Joseph married a second time because he needed someone to look after the kids.

VB: Do you think that Mary had other children by Joseph? JMOC: No.

VB: Why? JMOC: Because very early she's identified as a perpetual virgin.

VB: Identified by whom? JMOC: Well, I mean you find talk about the virginity of Mary as early as the first and the second century. And if she had six other children after Jesus, no one in his right mind would think of her as a virgin.

VB: So is it likely that Jesus grew up in a household where there were lots of children and maybe two wives? JMOC: Yes.

VB: Did any of his half-brothers or halfsisters take part in his ministry? JMOC: No.

VB: Why do you think that was so? JMOC: I think they didn't believe in him. I mean it's explicitly said in John Chapter 7 that his brothers disbelieved and the family judgment on him in Mark Chapter 3 is that he's out of his mind.

VB: Did his mother, Mary, think Jesus was out of his mind? JMOC: She's included in that group, because he says very explicitly Who is my mother - those who listen to me, not that lady outside, in Mark Chapter 3. I mean there's no interpretation here, and one can understand why Mary would have felt that way because, as I said, I accept the virgin birth but all that Mary knew was that this child, her child, had been chosen by God for some special destiny. She was left to work it out. What would she work out? Well the prophecy of Micah was the only tool she had and that would say that her child should be a warrior king, a ruler who would do something about the occupying Romans. And Jesus was not doing any of that, Jesus was hanging around with tax collectors and sinners. His mother could have felt that he was not obeying the will of God as she understood it. But, of course, Jesus had a different understanding of his ministry, remember he said I must be about what I think is my father's business.

VB: Did any of his contemporaries think he was divine, did they think he was God the Father? JMOC: No, you see no Jew who was heavily indoctrinated with Monotheism would ever think that.

VB: So how did the idea grow up that he was God? JMOC: I can only think of it in terms of their understanding of love. We only get one Christian definition of divinity and that is God is love, in the first letter of John. Paul had the same idea basically, but for him love is what constituted a person as human, without love I do not exist. And like all Semites he defined love as power, love is a power that reached out to improve others and Paul would certainly have related that love to the growth of the Church. Eventually, of course, it was seen that this power is so much closer to the creative power of God who brought the universe into being than to any human love, that then they decided this is divine power. This is the way I would see the development from Paul to John in terms of love is power, a greater understanding of precisely what was implied in love.

VB: Did you think that Jesus was God, in the sense of God the Father? JMOC: Yes. I see no reason not to accept the traditional definition of the Church, which would be the certain reading of John's Gospel.

VB: Do you believe that in the resurrection in the little form that he rose from the dead and appeared through the Gospel to the Apostles afterwards as a human being? JMOC: Yes, because I cannot see how anyone would make up the stuff we have in the Gospel.

VB: Are you struck by the fact that this would have been such an extraordinary event to them and such a powerful experience that you'd at least expect the Gospels to be consistent in their accounts of the apparitions of Jesus, after the resurrection? JMOC: The resurrection stories that we have had no constituency. You see, if you make up a story it's because there are people you want to believe it. Now, at the time of Jesus, 9 per cent of Jews did not believe in resurrection, the documentation shows that they believed in immortality of the soul, which meant that the soul, the spiritual part, survived. The only crowd that explicitly believed in resurrection were the Pharisees who were perhaps 2 per cent of the population. But Pharisees didn't believe in empty tombs, they say very explicitly you get another body. So in other words you have a story that doesn't satisfy anyone, turns everyone off. It turns off the 90 per cent because there's a body involved and it turns off the Pharisees because there's a corpse that disappears.

VB: So, in other words because nobody believed it, you believe it. JMOC: No, but no one can make it plausible to me that someone made up this story, that's the point - there's no constituency.

VB: Does it matter to your understanding of Jesus whether the resurrection took place or not? JMOC: Absolutely. That's when everything changes. The disciples become courageous, the brothers come on board, they become apostles as Paul says and Mary appears with the disciples in the upper room. The movement which Christ began wasn't much of a movement because Jesus didn't make very many converts and those he did didn't really understand him. And then, bingo! it takes off. There must be something to (the resurrection).

VB: Do you think that Jesus intended to establish a new religion? JMOC: No. I think he intended to reform Judaism, of which he was a reformer. But I think, too, that there was a change and that he eventually thought of himself as the Messiah. But it was Paul who drew out the full implications of that.

VB: From what stage did Jesus think he was the Messiah? JMOC: The latter part of his ministry in Galilee.

VB: How would he have not known that all along if he was God? JMOC: Now, if you want to tell me how divine brains and human brains work go right ahead, I've no idea.

VB: But you already said that you hold that Jesus believed he was divine right from the beginning. JMOC: I did, but I also said that's all you can say about it. I cannot tell you how a divine brain interacts with a human brain and so I prefer to stay on the human level.

VB: So, staying on a human level, it would have been quite some while before he realised he was God. JMOC: Did he ever do it with his human mind? That's another question. You see, these are silly questions frankly, that have no relevance to a historian. You see, all I can say is confess the divinity but then you can't let it interfere, otherwise you end up with a totally bizarre actuality that doesn't conform to our idea of what a human being is.

VB: What would you say to the contention that it was really Paul who was the founder of Christianity, not Jesus, as you said Jesus didn't intend to start a separate religion but Paul did. JMOC: No, Paul would have said that he was a Jew all his life. If you asked Paul "Are you a Jew?" he would have said: "Of course I'm a Jew". He would have seen Christianity as the authentic fulfilment of Judaism. Opening out now not just one chosen people to the chosen universe. Paul keeps referring back to Jesus.

VB: But never quotes him, or hardly ever quotes him. JMOC: No, there must be a thousand references.

VB: References yes, but no quotations of Jesus. JMOC: But why would he use quotations?

VB: Because he would have thought what Jesus said was important. JMOC: But everyone knows the bonding force of illusions. You see the references that scholars who know their Gospels and Paul very well can say, ah yeah, that's a hint of sermon on the mount and this is insider talk. You see if he had to put a label on it then that would mean that Paul was writing for non-Christians. He had to tell them that Jesus said this, whereas others would have recognised it.