Nativity controversy
Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 7:18 pm
Here's an article about the Nativity. Assert your opinion on it and the subject at hand.
Religion: The Birth of Jesus
From Mary to the manger, how the Gospels mix faith and history to tell the Christmas story and make the case for Christ
By Jon Meacham
Newsweek
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. 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.
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.
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 demi-god; 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.
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 serve 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.)
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.
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 husband." 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 best-selling 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 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 be. "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.
Religion: The Birth of Jesus
From Mary to the manger, how the Gospels mix faith and history to tell the Christmas story and make the case for Christ
By Jon Meacham
Newsweek
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. 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.
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.
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 demi-god; 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.
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 serve 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.)
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.
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 husband." 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 best-selling 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 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 be. "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.