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The Birth of Jesus ; Meacham, Jon; ; Newsweek ;
12-13-2004
From Mary to the manger, how the Gospels mix faith and history to tell the
Christmas story and make the case for Christ.
THE NEWS WAS UNWELCOME, baffling, frightening; nothing about it was expected or
explicable. Roughly 2,000 years ago, according to the Gospel of Luke, in
Nazareth of Galilee, a young woman found herself in the presence of Gabriel, the
angelic messenger of the Lord whose name was known to Jews of the day as the
mysterious figure who had granted Daniel his prophetic visions. The woman, Luke
writes, was "a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of
David," and her name was Maty, Luke's Greek form of the Hebrew Miriam, the
sister of Moses and the first great prophetess of Israel. "Hail, thou that art
highly favoured, the Lord is with thee," Gabriel said, "blessed art thou amongst
women"-terrifying Mary, who "was troubled at his saying." Stunned and confused,
Mary made no reply, her face apparently betraying anxiety and awe. Sensing her
confusion and fear, Gabriel was reassuring: "Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found
favour with God."
Then the angel said: "And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring
forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be
called the Son of the Highest ... and of his kingdom there shall be no end." In
other words, Mary was to bear the Messiah, the fabled and long-promised figure
who, in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, would "reign as king and deal wisely,
and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land." Mary was silent, then
finally found her voice: "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?"
Gabriel's reply-that "the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee"-raised more questions
than it answered, not only for Mary but for Joseph, for the early Christians
and, two millennia later, for us. In Luke's account, Mary absorbed the tidings
of her child's miraculous origin and mission and "pondered them in her heart,"
still puzzled, still overwhelmed. In the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph, knowing
nothing about Gabriel's appearance, is humiliated by the news that his future
wife is pregnant, and "was minded to put her away privily." In later years
Christians had to contend with charges that their Lord was illegitimate, perhaps
the illicit offspring of Mary and a Roman soldier. Now, at the beginning of the
21st century, some scholars treat the Christmas narratives as first-century
inventions designed to strengthen the seemingly tenuous claim that Jesus was the
Messiah.
And so the story of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is, fittingly, as riven with
complexity and controversy as Christianity itself. This month more than a
billion Christians will commemorate their Lord's Nativity. Amid candlelight,
carols and the commingled smells of cedar and incense, the old tale will unfold
again: Gabriel's visitation, the journey to Bethlehem, the arrival of the baby
in a stable, the glorious announcement to the shepherds in the night, the star
in the East, the mission of the Magi.
Yet, as with so many other elements of faith, the Nativity narratives are the
subject of ongoing scholarly debate over their historical accuracy, their
theological meaning and whether some of the central images and words of the
Christian religion owe as much to the pagan culture of the Roman Empire as they
do to apostolic revelation.
The clash between literalism and a more historical view of faith is also playing
out in theaters and bookstores. This year Mel Gibson's hugely successful movie
"The Passion of the Christ" provoked a national conversation about Jesus' last
days. With 9 million hardcover copies in print, Dan Brown's thriller "The Da
Vinci Code," one of the most widely read books of our time, is partly built
around the assertion that the early church covered up important facts about
Jesus in order to manufacture Christian creeds. (A Ron Howard movie starring Tom
Hanks is in the works.)
Like the Victorians, we live in an age of great belief and great doubt, and
sometimes it seems as though we must choose between two extremes, the
evangelical and the secular. "I don't want to be too simplistic, but our faith
is somewhat childlike," says the Rev. H. B. London, a vice president of James
Dobson's conservative Focus on the Family organization in Colorado Springs.
"Though other people may question the historical validity of the virgin birth,
and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we don't." London's view has
vast public support. A NEWSWEEK Poll found that 84 percent of American adults
consider themselves Christians, and 82 percent see Jesus as God or the son of
God. Seventy-nine percent say they believe in the virgin birth, and 67 percent
think the Christmas story-from the angels' appearance to the Star of
Bethlehem-is historically accurate.
Others, though perhaps fewer in number, are equally passionate about their
critical understanding of the faith. The Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars
devoted to recovering the Jesus of history, is a battalion in this long-running
culture war. One of its members, Robert J. Miller, a professor of religion at
Juniata College, wrote "Born Divine: Jesus and Other Sons of God," a 2003 book
which argues that the Nativity narratives can be seen as Christian responses to
the birth stories of pagan heroes like Alexander the Great and Caesar
Augustus-literary efforts depicting Jesus as a divine figure in a way
Greco-Roman listeners and readers would understand and appreciate.
To many minds conditioned by the Enlightenment, shaped by science and all too
aware of the Crusades and corruptions of the church, Christmas is a fairy tale.
But faith and reason need not be constantly at war; they are, John Paul II once
wrote, "like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of
truth"-and the spirit cannot take flight without both. This is why modern,
grounded, discerning people do make leaps of faith, accepting that, as the
Gospel of John put it, "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."
Just how he became flesh is the business of Christmas. If we dissect the stones
with care, we can see that the Nativity saga is neither fully fanciful nor fully
factual but a layered narrative of early tradition and enduring theology, one
whose meaning was captured in the words of the fourth-century Nicene Creed: that
"for us men and for our salvation," Jesus "came down from heaven, was incarnate
of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary and was made man."
For Jesus' contemporaries, the explosive story of his life and its cosmic
significance did not begin with his birth but with his Passion and resurrection.
Jesus of Nazareth was executed by Pontius Pilate at Passover in about A.D. 30
for the crime of sedition. After dying a terrible, humiliating death on
Golgotha, Jesus, his followers believed, had risen from the dead, turning the
world upside down. Working backward from the Easter miracle, the early
Christians-almost all of whom were Jews and thought of themselves as such-told
stories of their Lord's last days, of his ministry and, eventually, it seems, of
his birth.
The first followers, we should always remember, believed that the Risen Lord was
going to return and usher in a new apocalyptic age at any moment. "Truly, I say
to you, there are some standing here who shall not taste death before they see
the kingdom of God come with power," Jesus tells his disciples in Mark, and in
the Epistle to the Romans-a very early writing-Paul says: "The night is far
spent, the day is at hand."
AS THE YEARS ROLLED BY AND THE WORLD endured, however, the Apostles and the
first generations of church fathers realized they were not witnesses about to be
swept up into heaven but earthly stewards of a message that had to be written
down, explained and defended. The construction of Christianity, the early
believers gradually discovered, required preserving the stones and sayings of
Jesus, shaping that gospel ("good news" in Greek) and spreading it to fellow
Jews and to Gentiles.
The evangelists believed the salvation of the world was in the balance. They
strove to convince other Jews, to convert pagans and to control rival Christian
factions whose views of Jesus differed from their own. To lose on any of these
fronts would set back the cause, so when we read and hear the story now, we are
reading and hearing some of the original Christian attempts to ensure the
survival and success of a religion that began as little more than one sect
within first-century Judaism, a milieu of great religious ferment.
To make their case in this congested theological universe, the Gospel writers
collected traditions in circulation and told Jesus' story-not in a clinical way
but, as John put it, so "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son
of God, and that believing you may have life in his name." The origins of the
Nativity stories are much murkier than the accounts of Jesus' adulthood. Where
did the details-of miraculous conception, of birth in Bethlehem, of stars in the
sky, shepherds in the night and wise men on a journey-come from? Apparently not
from Jesus. John P. Meier, a Roman Catholic priest and professor at Notre Dame,
the author of a monumental series, "A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical
Jesus," points out that there is no convincing evidence Jesus himself ever spoke
of his birth, and neither Mary nor Joseph (who is not a figure in the years of
Jesus' public life) appears to have been a direct source. "The traditions behind
the Infancy Narratives," Meier writes, "differ essentially from those of the
public ministry and the passion," which were the result of firsthand testimony.
The Gospel authors were thus confronted with a literary problem that had to be
solved. They wanted to tell the story of Jesus' birth, but apparently had little
to work with. Here, then, is where tradition and theology came in. In 1965, the
Second Vatican Council held that while the Scriptures are ultimately "true,"
they are not necessarily to be taken as accurate in the sense we might take an
Associated Press wire report about what happened at a school-board meeting as
accurate. The council focused on the importance of paying attention to "literary
forms" in Scripture. The Gospels are such a "literary form," and the accounts of
Jesus in the canon are not history or biography in the way we use the terms.
Classical biography, however, was a different genre. Writers like Plutarch
invented details or embellished traditions when they were reconstructing the
lives of the famous, and the Christmas saga features miraculous births,
supernatural signs and harbingers of ultimate greatness similar to those found
in pagan works. If we examine the Nativity narratives as classical biography,
then the evangelists' means and mission-to convey theological truths about
salvation, not to record just-the-facts history-become much clearer.
The earliest and sparest Gospel, Mark's (circa A.D. 60), begins at Jesus'
baptism by John as an adult, skipping the Nativity altogether. The latest and
most philosophical, John's (circa 90), links Jesus with God at the very birth of
the universe ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
Word was God") with a grandeur and force that renders the details of Jesus'
earthly arrival irrelevant. Though Paul writes that Jesus was "born of a woman,
born under the Law," the rest of the New Testament is silent about the Nativity.
So we are left with Matthew and Luke, Gospels composed between A.D. 60 and 90.
The central events in both Nativity accounts are Mary's virginal conception,
which renders her child a truly unique figure, and Jesus' birth in Bethlehem,
which makes him the long-expected Davidic Messiah.
Miraculous conceptions have deep roots in Jewish tradition: the aged Sarah
bearing Isaac, the barren wife of Manoah bearing Samson, the barren Hannah
bearing Samuel (and, according to Luke, Mary's kinswoman Elizabeth, both aged
and barren, bearing John the Baptist just before Mary conceived Jesus). What is
distinctive about Mary is the Gospels' emphasis on her sexual virtue. The other
Biblical examples of God's granting children to the aged or the barren do not
involve virgins but ordinary married women living with their husbands.
This is no small difference. By asserting Mary's virginity, Matthew and Luke are
taking the device of the miraculous conception farther than any other Jewish
writer had before. Why? The simplest explanation is mat it happened. As
uncongenial as that opinion may be to modern audiences, Shakespeare was right
when he had Hamlet say, "There are more things in heaven and earth ... than are
dreamt of in your philosophy." The miraculous may strike some as fantastical,
but countless people have believed, and believe now, that God intervened in the
temporal world in just this way. If the virginal conception were a historical
fact, however, it is somewhat odd that there is no memory of it recorded in the
Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry or in the Acts of the Apostles or in the rest
of the New Testament. It is also striking that in parts of the Gospels Mary
herself appears unaware of her son's provenance and destiny. (In Mark, when
Jesus is casting out devils at the beginning of his ministry, "his friends"-the
sense of the Greek is "family," or "household," which would presumably include
his mother-thought he was mentally disturbed and tried to stop him, saying, "He
is beside himself." If Mary had received Gabriel's message, then she should have
known her son was not mad, but the Messiah. And even if she were not around in
this story in Mark, had Jesus been born in such extraordinary circumstances, it
is logical to assume that those closest to him would have known at least
something of it-enough, anyway, to see Jesus as someone with a special role or
destiny of which the exorcisms were a likely part.)
If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the virginal conception is not a
fact but an article of faith, there are other explanations for Matthew's and
Luke's Nativity accounts. Theology (that Jesus was not merely another
prophet-king figure like Moses or David, but something more) and narrative
symmetry both argued for a unique birth. "The early church insisted on the
virginal conception as the logical beginning to a story that climaxed with the
physical resurrection," says Deirdre Good, a professor of New Testament at the
General Theological Seminary in New York. "The two separate miracles form a
theologically perfect whole. It simply would not have been enough for Jesus to
have been 'chosen' by God in his lifetime. Through divine intervention, Jesus
was seen to be both divine and human from the start."
The virginity detail did not particularly help the cause early on. To
non-Christian Jews and pagans, the first Christians were superstitious and
backward, a group of marginal people on the fringes of empire preaching an
outlandish message. According to the Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan, Celsus, a
fierce Platonic critic of Christianity who wrote between A.D. 175 and 180,
attacked the idea that God had come into the world in "some corner of Judea
somewhere," and one Roman emperor, Pelikan writes, dismissed the Jewish and
Christian God as "essentially the deity of a primitive and uncivilized folk."
Defensive about such charges, educated Christians fought back. The apologist
Origen of Alexandria answered Celsus, arguing that "we tell no incredible tales
when we explain the doctrines about Jesus." The last thing the Christians wanted
was to appear to be yet another mythological cult, worshiping some kind of
demigod; their deep Jewish faith in the commandment to have "no other gods
before me" foreclosed that possibility. "Incredible tales" were for the
idolatrous.
And there were scandalous tales in circulation, too: was the story of the
virginal conception told to hide Jesus' illegitimacy? As startling as the
allegation is for many, it dates from at least the second century, and maybe as
early as Jesus' lifetime. "It was Jesus himself who fabricated the story that he
had been born of a virgin," Celsus wrote in A.D. 180. "In fact, however, his
mother was a poor country woman who earned her living by spinning. She had been
driven out by her carpenter-husband when she was convicted of adultery with a
soldier named Panthera. She then wandered about and secretly gave birth to
Jesus. Later, because he was poor, he hired himself out in Egypt where he became
adept in magical powers. Puffed up by these, he claimed for himself the title of
God." Second- and third-century Christian writers alleged that some Jews also
suggested Jesus' birth was illicit.
PERHAPS THE MOST INTRIGUING possible hint of illegitimacy in the New Testament
comes in the Gospel of John, in an exchange between Jesus and the Temple
priests. The back-and-forth is sharp, even brutal, with Jesus accusing the
priests of failing to live up to the example of their common father, Abraham.
Their reply: "We be not born of fornication; we have but one Father, God
Himself." In his exploration of this passage, the late Raymond E. Brown, a
distinguished scholar and Roman Catholic priest who taught at Union Theological
Seminary, wrote: "The Jews may be saying, 'We were not born illegitimate, but
you were.' The emphatic use of the Greek pronoun 'We' allows that
interpretation."
If Jesus had been conceived by a human father before Joseph and Mary had begun
their lives together as husband and wife (either by Joseph himself, a soldier or
someone else), then the Holy Ghost would have provided a convenient cover story
for the early church. Such speculation can be only that: speculation, and even
contemplating it is interesting chiefly for the window it opens on the ferocity
of early debates over Jesus. To the first believers the virginal conception was
not a fiction to hide an embarrassing truth but a way of understanding their
Lord's uniqueness. He was not a prophet or a god but the son of God who, in the
words of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, came to "share our human nature,
to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of
all."
Jesus was such a revolutionary force that both Matthew and Luke sought to make
him comprehensible in the context of established Jewish imagery and prophecy. In
Luke, Mary's indelible 138-word reaction to the incarnation ("My soul doth
magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour") is a powerful
echo of Hannah's 264-word prayer of thanksgiving in I Samuel when she learns she
is pregnant ("My heart rejoiceth in the Lord ... I rejoice in thy salvation").
Jews hearing Mary's story were thus able to associate Jesus with past figures of
deliverance.
Matthew makes an even more explicit connection with the Jewish past, stating
outright that Jesus is answering ancient expectations. Citing Isaiah
7:14-"Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name
Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us"-the evangelist writes: "Now
all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the
prophet."
A problem with this elegant passage from Isaiah is that it may have long been
mistranslated and misinterpreted. In his magisterial work "The Birth of the
Messiah," Raymond Brown calls the conflict over this single, consequential verse
one of "the most famous debates" in the history of Biblical interpretation. He
notes that the original Hebrew used by the prophet is more properly translated
as "the young girl," not "the virgin," and the overall context of the Hebraic
Isaiah passage "does not refer to a virginal conception in the distant future.
The sign offered by the prophet was the imminent birth of a child, probably
Davidic, but naturally conceived, who would illustrate God's providential care
for his people." The Greek sense of the term-and Matthew was likely working from
the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible-suggests that "the virgin" will
conceive, Brown writes, "by natural means, once she is united with her husband."
It is one Biblical war without apparent end: in the early 1950s, when the
translators of the Revised Standard Version rendered the King James "virgin" as
"young woman"-a defensible textual decision-some literalist believers burned the
new Bibles.
Geography, as Napoleon is said to have remarked, is destiny, hence the Gospels'
emphasis on Jesus' birthplace. The expectation was that the Messiah-understood
in the early first century as a David-like king who would end Roman occupation
and rule over a new golden age for Israel and for the whole world-would come
from Bethlehem, the village in which David had been born.
In the Gospels, some objected to the messianic claims made for Jesus by pointing
out that he was a Nazarene. Matthew attacks that skepticism head-on, writing
simply that Jesus was born "in Bethlehem of Judea" and that wise men from the
East, guided by a star, went there in search of the baby who inspired this
celestial sign. Could there have been such a star? Halley's comet is estimated
to have made an appearance in 12 B.C., and Matthew may have appropriated the
detail long afterward. He could also have been thinking of a line from the Book
of Numbers: "There shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out
of Israel."
What is clearer is that the visit of the Magi came to be seen as a fulfillment
of Psalm 72. "The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: the
kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts," reads the Scripture. "Yea, all kings
shall fall down before him: all nations shall suive him." There is no historical
evidence of such a visit, but the symbolic significance is obvious: even as a
baby, Jesus is inverting the very order of things, with earthly potentates
bowing before a child. Matthew's detail about the specific gifts comes from
Isaiah: "... all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense;
and they shall shew forth the praises of the Lord."
To resolve the problem of Jesus' connection with both Bethlehem and Nazareth,
Matthew portrays Mary and Joseph as residents of Bethlehem who were later forced
to move north to Nazareth. With a keen dramatic sense, he also adds two stories
evoking the memory of God's deliverance of his people from slavery in Egypt. The
King of Judea, Herod, learns of the birth of this alleged messiah from the wise
men, whom he asks to go find the child and return to him with the particulars.
In a dream, God tells the Magi not to make their report, and then appears to
Joseph. "Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt ...
for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him." Enraged and jealous, Herod
orders a massacre of all the male children in Bethlehem-thus connecting Jesus'
birth with the first Passover, when God spared Israel's sons from the same
bloody decree by Pharaoh. (History records no such Herodian slaughter, though
Herod was an undeniably cruel ruler.)
LUKE DOES NOT MENTION a journey to Egypt, nor is there any other New Testament
allusion to such an important event in the life of the young Jesus. Once Matthew
has started this story, though, he makes the most of it, writing that Joseph's
mission was undertaken "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord
by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son." (The prophet was
Hosea.) The Nazareth question is then resolved rather neatly, for Matthew has
Joseph and Mary move to Galilee on their return from Egypt.
Luke's conundrum is just the opposite of Matthew's: how to get Mary and Joseph,
who in his Gospel were living in Nazareth in the north, down to Bethlehem in the
south. Summoning the weapons of history, apparently pinpointing time, place and
circumstance with epic eloquence, Luke writes: "And it came to pass in those
days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should
be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph went up also
from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David,
which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to
be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child."
Yet almost nothing in Luke's story stands up to close historical scrutiny; Brown
finds it "dubious on almost every score." Augustus conducted no global census,
and no more local one makes sense in Luke's time frame. Setting Jesus' birth at
a moment when the princes of this world are exerting temporal power over the
people is a deft device, though, for the theological point of Jesus' arrival is
that anyone who chooses to believe in him will ultimately be subject only to
God. Evoking the prophet Joel in the Book of Acts, Peter says that "it shall
come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved,"
and there is nothing any mortal emperor or governor can do to foreclose the
promise of the kingdom Jesus said he was offering.
The power of the Nativity message-that a helpless child is in fact a heavenly
king-lies in its consistent pattern of reversal, of making the weak strong, the
humble mighty. The stable, the manger and the swaddling of Jesus are such
theological touches. Since Matthew seems to assume that Mary and Joseph lived at
Bethlehem, he is silent on these familiar details; it is Luke, the writer who
put them on the road to answer the census, who adds the inn, the manger and the
swaddling. The crèche scene strikes three Old Testament notes. The inn could be
traced to Jeremiah, who asks of the Savior: "Why are you like an alien in the
land, like a traveler who stays in lodgings?" The manger's roots may lie in the
very beginning of Isaiah, when he writes: "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass
his master's crib, but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider." And
Mary's tender care of the baby is similar to a remark of Solomon's in the Book
of Wisdom: "I was carefully swaddled and nursed, for no king has any other way
to begin at birth."
There is, of course, no way to know whether Luke's story of the heavenly host
announcing Jesus' arrival to the shepherds really happened; one has to believe
in angels, and explain away the fact that the Gospels fail to note any ensuing
communal or individual recollection of this spectacular birth, one witnessed by
the rustics (in Luke) and the Magi (in Matthew), in the years of Jesus' public
life. Yet the language never fails to captivate. "For unto us a child is born,"
wrote Isaiah, "unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his
shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God,
The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." So it was that when Luke came to
herald the birth of his hero to the shepherds, he struck the same notes: "For
unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the
Lord."
Such monotheistic theology-a Christian obedience to the Jewish commandment to
"have no other gods before me"-was, however, automatically appealing to only a
slice of the evangelists' ultimate audience. Christianity was to be preached, as
Paul put it in his Epistle to the Romans, "to the Jew first, also to the Greek."
The basic features of the Nativity story were familiar to pagan ears. In
Suetonius' second-century biography of Augustus, who ruled as emperor from 27
B.C. to A.D. 14, omens in the natural world had heralded Augustus' birth, which
was itself the result of divine intervention. Atia, Augustus' mother, was said
to have fallen asleep when Apollo, taking the form of a serpent, impregnated
her. That there was physical contact is suggested by Suetonius' assertion that
afterward Atia "purified herself, as usual after the embraces of her busband."
The baby, Suetonius writes, "was thought to be the son of Apollo"; on the day of
his birth a senator in Rome "declared that the world had got a master," and
Atia's husband, Octavius, "dreamt that he saw his son under more than human
appearance, with thunder and sceptre, and the other insignia of Jupiter ...
having on his head a radiant crown, mounted upon a chariot decked with laurel."
The parallels to the Jesus story are clear: a deity chooses to send a son from
the divine to the temporal world through a woman, the glorious news of the
coming of a king is made known to others, and the woman's loyal husband, rather
than recoiling, is included in the revelation. But Augustus was not the product
of a Christ-like conception as portrayed in the Gospels: the evangelists hewed
to the conviction that Mary had no sexual contact of any kind, and scholars of
antiquity have yet to find another example that precisely mirrors the
Annunciation.
Still, as the Christian Gospels spread through the early centuries of the first
millennium, audiences familiar with Virgil would have been receptive to the
rhythms and ideas of Matthew's and Luke's stories. In his "Fourth Eclogue,"
written in 40 B.C., the poet evokes an age of peace presided over by a baby in a
cradle of flowers. "Upon the Child now to be born, under whom the race of iron
will cease and a golden race will spring up over the whole world, do you, O
chaste Lucina [the goddess of childbirth], smile favorably, for your own Apollo
is now king." The baby's coming is then hailed with these words: "Behold the
world trembles in homage ... the expanse of earth and sea, and the reaches of
the sky!" Virgil and the evangelists were working in essentially the same
literary tradition, and the "Fourth Eclogue" is a sign of how pervasive such
birth imagery was before, during and after Jesus' lifetime.
The collision of different factions and different traditions in the world of
Christianity's first years was mirrored by civil wars between Jesus' followers.
Then as now, Christians tended to disagree sharply with one another, but the
essential creed is so familiar to modern ears that it is difficult to recall how
many different views of Jesus were circulating among Christian groups during the
first two centuries or so. A complex movement popularly known as Gnosticism
(from the Greek "gnosis," meaning knowledge) offered an apparently compelling
and appealing version of Christianity in which believers sought, in addition to
received teaching, "inner knowledge" of God. "Insight, or gnosis, was the
experience of searching for the divine, the source of our creation, within
oneself," says Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton and the
bestselling author of "The Gnostic Gospels" and, most recently, "Beyond Belief:
The Secret Gospel of Thomas." "Such Christians claimed to go beyond the views of
Jesus expressed in the New Testament to seek, in addition, personal perception
and transformation."
In the eyes of competing (and ultimately victorious) Christians, this religious
path put too much emphasis on the personal and not enough on Jesus as the
incarnate son of God who was crucified for the sins of the world. It was, in
other words, "heresy" (interestingly, in Greek "heresy" means "choice"), and the
virginal I conception was one of the battlefields on which the internecine
conflict took place. In the gnostic "Gospel of Philip," Pagels points out, the
Gospel author reinterprets Jesus' birth, suggesting that while Jesus was born
biologically to Mary and Joseph, he was reborn spiritually as the son of God,
his heavenly Father, through the Holy Ghost, who was functioning as a sort of
heavenly Mother. To Philip, Jesus was a paradigmatic figure whose rebirth was
available to others in the rite of baptism.
SUCH A VIEW PROMPTED A fierce counterattack from Irenaeus, a late-second-century
church father who believed that Jesus was utterly unique -that he had been born
in a unique way and had been raised from the dead in a unique way. Writing about
the virginal conception, Irenaeus said: "In the last times, not by the will of
the flesh, nor by the will of man, but by the good pleasure of the Father, his
hands formed a living man, in order that Adam might be created [again] after the
image and likeness of God." By Nicea, this interpretation of the tradition of
the Nativity had largely carried the day-for believers Jesus was in fact, in the
reinterpretation of Isaiah by Matthew, Emmanuel, or "God with us."
A man with no human father, a king who died a criminal's death, a God who
assures us of everlasting life in a world to come while the world he made is
consumed by war and strife: Christianity is a religion of perplexing
contradictions. To live an examined faith believers have to acknowledge those
complexities and engage them, however frustrating it may he. "We are in a world
of mystery, with one bright Light before us, sufficient for our proceeding
forward through all difficulties," wrote John Henry Newman, the great Victorian
cleric whose intellectual journey led him from the Anglican priesthood to the
Roman Curia. "Take away this Light and we are utterly wretched-we know not where
we are, how we are sustained, what will become of us, and of all that is dear to
us, what we are to believe, and why we are in being." The Christmas star is just
one such light; there are others. Whatever our backgrounds, whatever our creeds,
many of us are in search of the kind of faith that will lead us through the
darkness, toward home. In Luke, the angelic host hails the Lord and then says:
"on earth peace, good will toward men"-a promise whose fulfillment is worth our
prayers not only in this season, but always.
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