Thoughts on Christmas
Christmas in the US is an amalgam of three different holidays, Winter Solstice, St Nicholas’ Day, and the birth of Jesus. Of the three the commercialization of St Nicholas’ Day has become the most obvious, with the carols inspired by both the Solstice and the birth of Jesus, second. The ideas in this essay are quite preliminary and are subject to further expansion and revision over time. These are first thoughts on the topic.
The focus of this essay is the incorporation of the birth of Jesus into a holiday. Looking at the source materials in context for the birth story, they come from two of the four Gospels, Luke and Matthew, and neither tells the same story. The Christmas story as is done in church and, at one time, school pageants, is a forcing together of the Matthew and Luke birth stories.
Both Matthew and Luke state that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, and Luke gives a lot of additional detail such as John the Baptist being the cousin of Jesus. Matthew has the Magi, and Luke has the manger, shepherds, and angels. Matthew has the flight to Egypt, but Luke simply has them going home to Galilee.
Of greater interest to me is that Mark makes no mention of Jesus birth. Mark is the oldest of the Gospels, with Matthew and Luke coming 25 to 30 years later. In that time Paul had done a large amount of his evangelizing and creation of a Christology—Jesus as savior and Messiah, not just as a rabbi and teacher. It crosses my mind that, by the time Luke and Matthew started creating their versions of the story of Jesus, additions to the oral tradition had been created. The motivation would be similar to: a person as important as Jesus would have to have a day of birth in keeping with the significance.
In addition to the virgin birth, Matthew apparently obtained a story concerning astrological events. No one in over a hundred years of astronomical attempts has been able to explain the “star” of Bethlehem. Furthermore, one cannot literally take it that the star, if it were a heavenly body, would lead them to the manger or to Judea. In fact, from a parsing of the text, the Magi did not arrive until Jesus was about two years old, hence the Herodian decree that all male children under the age of two were to be put to death. Actually, I think the historicity of this is also in question. So the standard vision of three wise men giving gifts to Jesus in the manger is a modern myth.
Luke, on the other hand, uses an entire chapter to describe the pregnancies of both Esther and Mary and establishing that John the Baptist was a cousin of Jesus. He also states that there was a tax on the Roman world, causing Mary and Joseph to go to Bethlehem. Luke also gives us the angels announcing the birth to shepherds, who leave their flocks to go see the baby. Luke has them go live in Galilee. As with the Matthewan story, the historicity is lacking, as is a certain lack of knowledge about sheep herding. Luke in his desire to illustrate the humble beginnings and the humble audience for early Christianity makes a serious error in stating the shepherds left their flocks.
One of the characteristics of Christianity is that it co-opts the prophecies of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, as being the prophecies of the coming of Jesus. The evangelists that wrote the gospels set the pattern for this as did Paul, relating Jesus and the events of his life to fulfillment of prophecy. It begins with the birth story’s fulfilling the prophecy of Micah 5:2-5a. However, it is notable that 5b puts the lie to the passive peaceful image usually portrayed for Jesus. The Jews were looking for another David, not a spiritual messiah.
Part of the appeal and the tremendous staying power of the Christmas story as it has come down to us, is the desire for it to be so. It feels so good. It is an affirmation of absolute goodness in the world. The story is so powerful that it can cause us to suspend our judgment on it and the larger contexts of it. Ex-bishop Shelby Spong did make a valid observation that we tell this wonderful story of the birth of a baby that in thirty-some years will be murdered in the most horribly violent way that the society of the day could devise. The cognitive dissonance is more than we can handle, so we focus on how wonderful this baby is to us, and ignore how he will become important.
It also shows what happens when we do not understand the way in which the Gospels were written. Many if not most Christians, and at one time myself, take them as historical documents, which in fact they are not. They are selective telling of the events the evangelist considered important in telling his version of what the life of Jesus meant to him and should mean to others. The “rules” by which they wrote allowed the attribution of their own ideas to other people’s dialog, and a conflation of both fact and fiction in the telling of the story. We then read this literally and create what is a fantasy.
Despite all the fantastic and a-historical nature of the story, rather than its being derided, it needs to be seen for what it does, stimulates the benign feelings of good-will among people. Even if the effect lasts only for the season, it provides something that does not seem to occur any other way. As such regardless of our intellectual assessments and judgments, emotionally it is valid and should be accepted as such.
The focus of this essay is the incorporation of the birth of Jesus into a holiday. Looking at the source materials in context for the birth story, they come from two of the four Gospels, Luke and Matthew, and neither tells the same story. The Christmas story as is done in church and, at one time, school pageants, is a forcing together of the Matthew and Luke birth stories.
Both Matthew and Luke state that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, and Luke gives a lot of additional detail such as John the Baptist being the cousin of Jesus. Matthew has the Magi, and Luke has the manger, shepherds, and angels. Matthew has the flight to Egypt, but Luke simply has them going home to Galilee.
Of greater interest to me is that Mark makes no mention of Jesus birth. Mark is the oldest of the Gospels, with Matthew and Luke coming 25 to 30 years later. In that time Paul had done a large amount of his evangelizing and creation of a Christology—Jesus as savior and Messiah, not just as a rabbi and teacher. It crosses my mind that, by the time Luke and Matthew started creating their versions of the story of Jesus, additions to the oral tradition had been created. The motivation would be similar to: a person as important as Jesus would have to have a day of birth in keeping with the significance.
In addition to the virgin birth, Matthew apparently obtained a story concerning astrological events. No one in over a hundred years of astronomical attempts has been able to explain the “star” of Bethlehem. Furthermore, one cannot literally take it that the star, if it were a heavenly body, would lead them to the manger or to Judea. In fact, from a parsing of the text, the Magi did not arrive until Jesus was about two years old, hence the Herodian decree that all male children under the age of two were to be put to death. Actually, I think the historicity of this is also in question. So the standard vision of three wise men giving gifts to Jesus in the manger is a modern myth.
Luke, on the other hand, uses an entire chapter to describe the pregnancies of both Esther and Mary and establishing that John the Baptist was a cousin of Jesus. He also states that there was a tax on the Roman world, causing Mary and Joseph to go to Bethlehem. Luke also gives us the angels announcing the birth to shepherds, who leave their flocks to go see the baby. Luke has them go live in Galilee. As with the Matthewan story, the historicity is lacking, as is a certain lack of knowledge about sheep herding. Luke in his desire to illustrate the humble beginnings and the humble audience for early Christianity makes a serious error in stating the shepherds left their flocks.
One of the characteristics of Christianity is that it co-opts the prophecies of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, as being the prophecies of the coming of Jesus. The evangelists that wrote the gospels set the pattern for this as did Paul, relating Jesus and the events of his life to fulfillment of prophecy. It begins with the birth story’s fulfilling the prophecy of Micah 5:2-5a. However, it is notable that 5b puts the lie to the passive peaceful image usually portrayed for Jesus. The Jews were looking for another David, not a spiritual messiah.
Part of the appeal and the tremendous staying power of the Christmas story as it has come down to us, is the desire for it to be so. It feels so good. It is an affirmation of absolute goodness in the world. The story is so powerful that it can cause us to suspend our judgment on it and the larger contexts of it. Ex-bishop Shelby Spong did make a valid observation that we tell this wonderful story of the birth of a baby that in thirty-some years will be murdered in the most horribly violent way that the society of the day could devise. The cognitive dissonance is more than we can handle, so we focus on how wonderful this baby is to us, and ignore how he will become important.
It also shows what happens when we do not understand the way in which the Gospels were written. Many if not most Christians, and at one time myself, take them as historical documents, which in fact they are not. They are selective telling of the events the evangelist considered important in telling his version of what the life of Jesus meant to him and should mean to others. The “rules” by which they wrote allowed the attribution of their own ideas to other people’s dialog, and a conflation of both fact and fiction in the telling of the story. We then read this literally and create what is a fantasy.
Despite all the fantastic and a-historical nature of the story, rather than its being derided, it needs to be seen for what it does, stimulates the benign feelings of good-will among people. Even if the effect lasts only for the season, it provides something that does not seem to occur any other way. As such regardless of our intellectual assessments and judgments, emotionally it is valid and should be accepted as such.
posted by Bill | 10:28 AM
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