Some not particualrly original festive thoughts on our Christmas traditions and the only two canonical gospels that mention Christ's childhood (Matthew and Luke):
We three kings of orient are
Matthew writes about wise men, but doesn't directly say that there were three of them,* or that they were kings. Luke doesn't mention them at all.
Once in royal David's city / Stood a lowly cattle shed and Away in a manger, no crib for a bed
Really? Matthew doesn't mention Mary and Joseph having to travel to Bethlehem to be counted for any census, or getting turned away from any inns and ending up in a stable. He just writes 'Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king'. When the wise men arrive in Bethlehem they see the star standing over where the child was and go into the house. Just a house - no mention of an inn, or a stable and no indication that Joseph and Mary are away from home. If Matthew was your only source, the whole back story about the prospective parents wandering around far from home and ending up in a stable would be lost and you'd conclude that Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem and had a home birth.
But it's in Luke, isn't it?
Well, it's there in the King James version, but the word 'inn' is apparently a very loose translation of the Septuagint's katalemna, which means something more like "temporary shelter". Innkeepers have been getting a lousy rep for countless generations on account of this one.
As for the manger, the word used in was thaten. Depending on context this word could mean an animal's feeding trough, but it could also mean a child's crib. Given the context, it's far more likely that the child was laid in a crib rather than a trough, and that the translator has probably just used the wrong sense of thaten.
All those carols, all that art, all those nativity plays, all those children's crib scenes, all those jokes about Joseph and Mary being in a stable relationship, down to a simple translation error.
At last, something that's definitely in one of the gospels, Matthew. Luke makes no mention of the massacre of the innocents. Some scholars have pointed out that, not only is this story omitted from Luke, but there are no independent records of this atrocity, (for example in Josephus). There is a relatively reasonable counter argument, often used by Christian apologists. These were brutal times and there were probably many atrocities that would seem shocking to us today that contemporaries wouldn't have thought extraordinary enough to mention, (also, history is usually written by the winners, who don't tend to advertise their misdeeds, and countless documents haven't survived the passage of two thousand years).
I could just about buy that, but it's the discrepancy between the two gospels themselves that makes me suspicious. Say you're a a Roman historian and you decide not to record that a paranoid puppet ruler in one of the provinces killed a few local kids. Or maybe you mention it in passing, but the last copy of your account is lost five hundred years later. Both scenarios are quite plausible.
Now imagine that you're Luke, writing an account of Christ's childhood. Your story isn't a general history of Caesars and other celebrities, it's a biography of Jesus. Don't you think that if the king, no less, tried to have the baby Jesus killed, slaughtering innocent children in the process, forcing Jesus' parents to flee and live abroad as refugees, it might be worth a mention? Especially as you've found time to mention unremarkable details like the infant Jesus being circumcised.
You just wouldn't hold the front page to report that Jesus had the snip like any other Jewish kid, but not think it newsworthy that his parents also smuggled the baby hundreds of miles to a foreign country to escape an attempted high-level assassination attempt that resulted in numerous collateral casualties. It sounds as if either the massacre didn't happen, or Luke was the kind of guy you wouldn't want editing a newspaper. No Pulitzer Prize for you, Lukey boy.
The missing massacre underlines the fact that we're being told two separate and incompatible stories. In Matthew, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, then his parents get a tip-off from the wise men and flee to Egypt to keep Jesus safe from Herod. Eventually, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him that Herod's dead and it's safe to go back home. Joseph and Mary have trust in God, so they head back home. But not that much trust, because when they find out that Herod's son is now on the throne in Jueda, they decide not to return to Bethlehem, but divert to Nazareth, just to be on the safe side.
In Luke, Joseph and Mary start off in Nazareth, then we have that odd story about Caesar Augustus telling everybody in the Empire to up sticks and return to their ancestral homes to be counted and taxed (if the Romans really had faffed about like that, ordering everybody to return to their birthplace every time they wanted to raise a few sisterces, their empire would have fallen a damn sight sooner). As a result, they wind up in Bethlehem when the baby's due. From Bethlehem, the couple take Jesus to Jerusalem 'to present him to the Lord'. After that, they go home to Nazareth.
Both versions of Jesus fulfil earlier prophecies by being born in Bethlehem and by being a Nazarene, but there are two conflicting back stories. Matthew's inclusion of the flight to Egypt gives him a chance to throw in another authoritative prophecy, but means that his account and Luke's are irreconcilable,
Lo, he abhors not the Virgin's womb
The virgin birth is there in both accounts, but it's very well-known that the idea of a virgin birth might plausibly just be another simple translation error. In the authoritative Hebrew text, Isiah uses the Hebrew word "almah", which could mean "maiden," "young woman," or "virgin," which was translated into the Greek "parthenos" in the Septuagint. It may well be that Matthew and Luke decided that Jesus had to be born of a virgin, to fulfil Isiah's prophecy, but Isiah never had a virgin birth in mind in the first place. The argument isn't a clincher, but taken together with the other discrepancies, it makes the whole tinsel-covered edifice look a bit wobbly.
At this time of year we're used to hearing clerics telling us to pause and think about the real meaning of Christmas, but it seems to me that if more people looked clearly at what was written in the gospels, rather than the familiar, cosy, soft-focus, fuzzy amalgam of two different accounts that now passes for the Christmas story, their reflections might lead to more sceptical conclusions than the clergy would like. Be careful what you wish for, guys - after all, there are plenty more discrepancies where these came from.
But what's with Doris and Cleopatra? Nothing significant, just a quite interesting factoid I stumbled across when reading round the subject. King Herod the Great , I discovered, was an even more enthusiastic proponent of serial matrimony than Henry VIII. Herod wasn't content with a mere six wives, but seems to have got through nine in his infamous career. According to Wikipedia (and why would anyone lie about it?) his first wife was called Doris and wife number five was called Cleopatra. There's even a rumour that Herod's wife Cleopatra was that Cleopatra, in which case the old girl certainly got around a bit, (sounds more like a case of mistaken identity to me, as it's as hard to reconcile with the other accounts of her life as the two gospels are to reconcile with each other).
I can't help regretting that there's no place for Doris and Cleopatra in the Christmas story. After all, we know to next to nothing about the wise men, not even whether or not they were real, but they've traditionally been given names - Melchior Caspar and Balthasar -and assigned a starring role, which is a tad unfair on some of the other people who were around at the time who unambiguously did exist.
Anyway, however flaky the Christian stuff tacked on to the pagan midwinter festival is, it's still as good an excuse as any to take some time out, get together with friends and family and pop open a bottle of your favourite tipple, so I'll happily drink to that bit:
*As the unspecified number of wise men gave three gifts, or three types of gift, gold frankincense and myrrh, it's not surprising that the tradition of three wise men emerged, but it ain't necessarily so.
We three kings of orient are
Matthew writes about wise men, but doesn't directly say that there were three of them,* or that they were kings. Luke doesn't mention them at all.
Once in royal David's city / Stood a lowly cattle shed and Away in a manger, no crib for a bed
Really? Matthew doesn't mention Mary and Joseph having to travel to Bethlehem to be counted for any census, or getting turned away from any inns and ending up in a stable. He just writes 'Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king'. When the wise men arrive in Bethlehem they see the star standing over where the child was and go into the house. Just a house - no mention of an inn, or a stable and no indication that Joseph and Mary are away from home. If Matthew was your only source, the whole back story about the prospective parents wandering around far from home and ending up in a stable would be lost and you'd conclude that Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem and had a home birth.
But it's in Luke, isn't it?
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
Well, it's there in the King James version, but the word 'inn' is apparently a very loose translation of the Septuagint's katalemna, which means something more like "temporary shelter". Innkeepers have been getting a lousy rep for countless generations on account of this one.
As for the manger, the word used in was thaten. Depending on context this word could mean an animal's feeding trough, but it could also mean a child's crib. Given the context, it's far more likely that the child was laid in a crib rather than a trough, and that the translator has probably just used the wrong sense of thaten.
All those carols, all that art, all those nativity plays, all those children's crib scenes, all those jokes about Joseph and Mary being in a stable relationship, down to a simple translation error.
Herod, the king, in his raging / Charged he hath this day / His men of might, in his own sight / All young children to slay
At last, something that's definitely in one of the gospels, Matthew. Luke makes no mention of the massacre of the innocents. Some scholars have pointed out that, not only is this story omitted from Luke, but there are no independent records of this atrocity, (for example in Josephus). There is a relatively reasonable counter argument, often used by Christian apologists. These were brutal times and there were probably many atrocities that would seem shocking to us today that contemporaries wouldn't have thought extraordinary enough to mention, (also, history is usually written by the winners, who don't tend to advertise their misdeeds, and countless documents haven't survived the passage of two thousand years).
I could just about buy that, but it's the discrepancy between the two gospels themselves that makes me suspicious. Say you're a a Roman historian and you decide not to record that a paranoid puppet ruler in one of the provinces killed a few local kids. Or maybe you mention it in passing, but the last copy of your account is lost five hundred years later. Both scenarios are quite plausible.
Now imagine that you're Luke, writing an account of Christ's childhood. Your story isn't a general history of Caesars and other celebrities, it's a biography of Jesus. Don't you think that if the king, no less, tried to have the baby Jesus killed, slaughtering innocent children in the process, forcing Jesus' parents to flee and live abroad as refugees, it might be worth a mention? Especially as you've found time to mention unremarkable details like the infant Jesus being circumcised.
You just wouldn't hold the front page to report that Jesus had the snip like any other Jewish kid, but not think it newsworthy that his parents also smuggled the baby hundreds of miles to a foreign country to escape an attempted high-level assassination attempt that resulted in numerous collateral casualties. It sounds as if either the massacre didn't happen, or Luke was the kind of guy you wouldn't want editing a newspaper. No Pulitzer Prize for you, Lukey boy.
The missing massacre underlines the fact that we're being told two separate and incompatible stories. In Matthew, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, then his parents get a tip-off from the wise men and flee to Egypt to keep Jesus safe from Herod. Eventually, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him that Herod's dead and it's safe to go back home. Joseph and Mary have trust in God, so they head back home. But not that much trust, because when they find out that Herod's son is now on the throne in Jueda, they decide not to return to Bethlehem, but divert to Nazareth, just to be on the safe side.
In Luke, Joseph and Mary start off in Nazareth, then we have that odd story about Caesar Augustus telling everybody in the Empire to up sticks and return to their ancestral homes to be counted and taxed (if the Romans really had faffed about like that, ordering everybody to return to their birthplace every time they wanted to raise a few sisterces, their empire would have fallen a damn sight sooner). As a result, they wind up in Bethlehem when the baby's due. From Bethlehem, the couple take Jesus to Jerusalem 'to present him to the Lord'. After that, they go home to Nazareth.
Both versions of Jesus fulfil earlier prophecies by being born in Bethlehem and by being a Nazarene, but there are two conflicting back stories. Matthew's inclusion of the flight to Egypt gives him a chance to throw in another authoritative prophecy, but means that his account and Luke's are irreconcilable,
Lo, he abhors not the Virgin's womb
The virgin birth is there in both accounts, but it's very well-known that the idea of a virgin birth might plausibly just be another simple translation error. In the authoritative Hebrew text, Isiah uses the Hebrew word "almah", which could mean "maiden," "young woman," or "virgin," which was translated into the Greek "parthenos" in the Septuagint. It may well be that Matthew and Luke decided that Jesus had to be born of a virgin, to fulfil Isiah's prophecy, but Isiah never had a virgin birth in mind in the first place. The argument isn't a clincher, but taken together with the other discrepancies, it makes the whole tinsel-covered edifice look a bit wobbly.
At this time of year we're used to hearing clerics telling us to pause and think about the real meaning of Christmas, but it seems to me that if more people looked clearly at what was written in the gospels, rather than the familiar, cosy, soft-focus, fuzzy amalgam of two different accounts that now passes for the Christmas story, their reflections might lead to more sceptical conclusions than the clergy would like. Be careful what you wish for, guys - after all, there are plenty more discrepancies where these came from.
But what's with Doris and Cleopatra? Nothing significant, just a quite interesting factoid I stumbled across when reading round the subject. King Herod the Great , I discovered, was an even more enthusiastic proponent of serial matrimony than Henry VIII. Herod wasn't content with a mere six wives, but seems to have got through nine in his infamous career. According to Wikipedia (and why would anyone lie about it?) his first wife was called Doris and wife number five was called Cleopatra. There's even a rumour that Herod's wife Cleopatra was that Cleopatra, in which case the old girl certainly got around a bit, (sounds more like a case of mistaken identity to me, as it's as hard to reconcile with the other accounts of her life as the two gospels are to reconcile with each other).
I can't help regretting that there's no place for Doris and Cleopatra in the Christmas story. After all, we know to next to nothing about the wise men, not even whether or not they were real, but they've traditionally been given names - Melchior Caspar and Balthasar -and assigned a starring role, which is a tad unfair on some of the other people who were around at the time who unambiguously did exist.
Anyway, however flaky the Christian stuff tacked on to the pagan midwinter festival is, it's still as good an excuse as any to take some time out, get together with friends and family and pop open a bottle of your favourite tipple, so I'll happily drink to that bit:
*As the unspecified number of wise men gave three gifts, or three types of gift, gold frankincense and myrrh, it's not surprising that the tradition of three wise men emerged, but it ain't necessarily so.
0 comments:
Post a Comment