+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Nativity of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ was not, in its origins, a particularly important feast. It was not even kept by anyone until the fourth century, and originally, it was part of one larger festival celebrating the early life of Christ culminating in his baptism on Theophany, which takes place on January 6th and, in the West, is more typically named by the synonym Epiphany but is dedicated to the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel (Matt 2:1-12). Then that festival was stretched into the Twelve Days we know, beginning with Christ’s birth on December 25th and ending with Theophany. The day of December 25th was selected by ancient Christians because of a common belief that famous men would die the same day they had been conceived, making their lives a perfect circle: and as the 14 Nisan on which Jesus was crucified was held by the ancients to have taken place on the 25th of March, and this was therefore also held to be the date of his conception (hence the placement of the Feast of the Annunciation on that day), Christmas fell nine months later on December 25th. So Jesus joined the ranks of many great demigods, heroes, and other divine men whose births were the occasion of festival in the ancient world.
So, Christmas is really a feast of Christian Rome more than of the earliest Jesus Movement, which was comparatively uninterested in the details of Jesus’s birth. We have in the New Testament six separate sources for the life of Jesus: Paul, Q, Mark, M (the material unique to Matthew), L (the material unique to Luke), and John. Of them, Paul, Q, and Mark are the earliest, M and L the middling, John the latest; only M and L have anything to say about Jesus’s birth that is distinctive or extraordinary. It is important to say that this has very little to do with the grade of their various Christologies. Paul believes that Jesus is a divine being who has come down from heaven into human form and returned to heaven after his crucifixion to receive hyper-exaltation by God. Mark has an adoptionist Christology in which Jesus becomes the Son of God, a divine being, at his baptism. So does John, though John ups the stakes: John’s Jesus becomes the Logos made flesh at his baptism. This is an interesting observation, because we are so accustomed to reading the Johannine Prologue with the Christmas story, and seeing Christmas as the festival of the incarnation, the day the Word was made flesh, that we typically miss the fact that John says nothing about Jesus’s birth from a virgin or his birth in Bethlehem: John’s Prologue empties out like a stream into the river Jordan. So, virgin birth is not the only way to give Jesus an exalted messianic identity. M and L are certainly trying to make Christological points with their nativity stories that are unique by comparison to those of their peers—that Jesus is Son of David born in David’s city, Bethlehem; that Jesus has been Son of God from his conception and that he fulfills patterns of divine conception and birth from Jewish scripture that would also have been recognized tropes of famous men among pagans—but they do so in a wide marketplace of ideas about Jesus that do not all require these stories for their architecture.
By the early second century, though, as Matthew and Luke were being received alongside Mark and John in certain communities as authoritative, the nativity story became an established aspect of the kerygma, one useful to proto-orthodox Christians in their battles with docetists, Marcionites, varieties of gnostic schools, Manichaeans, and eventually, one another in the early Christological Controversy during the Councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451. All along the way, the Gospels’ nativity stories, aided by some of the material in John’s Gospel, were giving rise to a burgeoning devotion to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in literature, cult, and popular conversation. The Protoevangelium of James, authored in the early second century, suggests that Mary, too, had a special conception, that she was led into the Temple by the high priest as a girl, when she was consecrated as a Temple virgin for life, and that Joseph was her elder kinsman who married her out of duty, not lust, and who had already raised children from a previous marriage. The popularity of this text among Early Christians influenced the liturgical calendar—the Feasts of Mary’s Conception, Nativity, and Presentation in particular—and also the belief in Mary’s Ever-Virginity. Maria aeiparthenos created problems for Early Christians in interpreting the Gospels, of course, because they preserve memories of Jesus’s adelphoi, his brothers and sisters, many of whom were the Desposynoi, the rulers of the Jerusalem Church in the days after his exodos, and chief among whom in the New Testament and the literature of the Early Church was James the Just, who is also mentioned briefly by Josephus, to note that he was admired by the people but surreptitiously murdered by the high priest Ananus in 62 CE, which triggered Ananus’s deposition from the post. So, the Protoevangelium offered a way of reading such texts—revising Jesus’s adelphoi as stepsiblings or even cousins, a possible but very awkward reading of the Greek—in support of popular belief. Mary was also increasingly the site of passionate Christological dispute about the relation of divinity and humanity in Christ: the virginal conception and birth likely achieve their status as hard historia in the Christian Tradition in part because the boundaries they provided constituted something like a “fence around the Torah” for the more essential teaching of Christ’s deity. Christians could, and did, believe that Christ was divine without reference to the virgin birth, but one was much more likely to believe that Christ was divine if one already believed he was virginally born. The virgin birth also came to resolve, for Western Christians, the self-inflicted problem of Original Sin, insofar as one had to assert Jesus’s true humanity without imputing sin to him: if sin is a sexually transmitted disease, as Augustine suggests, then Jesus is in the clear.
I am afraid, though, that history does not favor the virgin birth—not because of some prejudicial attitude about the impossibility of the miraculous, but entirely because our sources are so few, so late, and so disunified with one another, and easily contextualized in the concentric circles of Christian rhetorical needs, Jewish literary traditions, and Greco-Roman myth. The historian has no choice but to observe that Matthew and Luke do not agree on why Jesus was born in Bethlehem: Matthew thinks that the Holy Family already lived there, while Luke has them relocate nonsensically in response to a census. Luke also has his dates wrong with respect to the census: while Luke agrees that Jesus was born when Herod was king, there is no record of Augustus ordering an empire-wide census, the year Quirinius became governor of Syria was in fact 6 CE, some ten years after Herod’s death in 4 BCE, and the reason that Quirinius included Judea in the census was its inferior provincial status and the recent deposition of its client ruler Archelaus, son of Herod, for his incompetence. So in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is born somewhere between 6 and 4 BCE, while in Luke’s, Jesus is either born around the same time, in which case Luke has misremembered the census he thinks explains the cause of his birth in Bethlehem, or Jesus is born ten years later, in 6 CE, and Luke is confused about Herod’s lifespan. (It can’t be any other Herod than the Great, by the way: only he and his grandson, Herod Agrippa, held the title “king,” and it cannot be Archelaus because Archelaus was out when Quirinius was in; nor could it be Antipas, who was tetrarch of Galilee.) Luke’s belief that the census required returning to one’s hometown of ancestral family lineage is also incredible: this would basically have destroyed the economy Quirinius was trying to take measure of. Of the two, there is probably more reason to favor Matthew’s chronology, because a Jesus born between 6 and 4 BCE would be around thirty when Pontius Pilate began his tenure as prefect of Judea in 26; a Jesus born in 6 CE, by contrast, would turn thirty right as Pilate was recalled in 36. Of course, this also requires taking seriously Luke’s other chronological note that Jesus was around thirty at the time of his public ministry (Lk 3:23), but this observation works as a datum if we assume Luke just has his dates wrong about the nativity.
Neither account, though, is fully credible. If Luke has constructed a convoluted reason to get Jesus to Bethlehem, Matthew has basically written a midrash, a riff on a biblical story that involves elements of what we might call myth, legend, fable, or fiction to make a deeper point. That point for Matthew is rather obviously that Jesus is like Moses. Like Moses, Jesus is born under the reign of a tyrannical king who kills children (in Herod’s case, most often his own, leading to Augustus’s famous observation that “It is better to be Herod’s pig than his son”—since at least Herod, as a Jew, wouldn’t kill a pig!); like Moses, Jesus goes down into and comes up out of Egypt. Jesus’s human stepfather, Joseph, is rather obviously patterned after the biblical Joseph: he has dreams in which divine communication is given to him about how to save his family by going down to Egypt and coming back out again. And, last, Matthew’s Mary is patterned after a number of biblical heroines who appear in the genealogy as Jesus’s ancestors—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba—as women who were of publicly questionable character as regarded their sexual circumstances but who were, in truth, righteous matriarchs of Israel in God’s eyes. Mary herself “will conceive and give birth to a son,” a formula that matches nearly exactly not only the Isaiah 7:14 oracle that Matthew quotes about a nameless wife of Hezekiah whose son will be a sign of divine favor, but also Yhwh’s prediction that Sarah will conceive and give birth to Isaac. Matthew 1-2 is like a finely woven tapestry of biblical allusions, expansions, and remixes, and it makes for a great read; so does Luke’s infancy gospel, which also includes great biblical allusions: the appearance of Gabriel from the Book of Daniel to Zechariah while he is serving in the Temple, just like Isaiah seeing God in the Temple; oracles about John and Jesus that evoke Elijah and David; Mary’s construction as Hannah and Ark of the Covenant; the list goes on. The problem is, of course, history as a discipline is inclined to regard such narratives with a skeptical eye, and for good reason. Real life can echo literary traditions (cue the great debate about whether life imitates art or vice versa), but more often than not a finely crafted narrative in which so many callbacks come together into one place reflects authorial intent. Moreover, divine birth was a literary trope of the ancient world, in which famous men thought to have been or become divine were given miraculous birth stories regularly in Greco-Roman biographies. Could this be the hand of Providence, orchestrating what CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien liked to call “myth made fact,” God arranging so that themes from Jewish scripture and pagan myth might be given visible display in a real, concrete historical event? Perhaps. History is agnostic about such things, though, and insofar as this theological instinct is still insisting on the Christmas stories as history, it runs headlong into the problem that even admitting the possibility of the miraculous our sources for the Christmas story are late, few, and disagreeable. They also seem motivated by a rather thinly veiled desire to front two ideas about Jesus: that he is Son of David (hence Bethlehem), and that he is Son of God (hence his pneumatic conception and virginal birth).
History is not simply the past, and so, it must be admitted, perhaps this is one of many places where good history cannot affirm what theology knows to be true, regardless of whether history can come with it. But even if we take this line, I am afraid that the virgin birth does not leave the same singularity, the same event horizon beyond which history cannot see, as, say, the resurrection of Jesus does. History cannot be marshaled to “prove” Jesus’s resurrection, either, but history can acknowledge in our sources about Jesus’s resurrection the evidence of a real experience of the risen Jesus that can be fairly argued to have been caused by an actual event, multiply attested, without which it is harder to explain why the Jesus Movement endured at all (whatever we understand resurrection to be, by whatever model). We do not have the same kind of multiple attestation to Jesus’s virgin birth, nor the same kind of data. One could take away Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 and not only still have a fairly complete narrative in either Gospel but also a basically intact New Testament. Here, we will have to be content to observe that the virgin birth stories are triumphs of theology, of devotion, and of literature, which have radiated in Christian cultures across time and space in all kinds of ways, but they are not history, strictly speaking, however we might privately think about their facticity as records of the past.
This is actually freeing, because it allows us to focus on what really matters about Christmas in a way that the historical fetish does not permit. Consider with me for a moment that the historical assertion of the virgin birth ends up being a kind of fixation on an anomaly of the past that is somehow indicative of Jesus’s significance: effectively, a human instance of parthenogenesis that we could perhaps speculate on and reproduce in a laboratory with the right technology; an astronomical event that we can try to pinpoint with our current slate of passing comets or previous supernovae, as some scientists and theologians sometimes try to do with the Bethlehem star (but Dale Allison is surely right that the star in Matthew is simply an angel; that’s why it moves). To the very simple-minded, such things serve as proofs of faith: scientific data that support the truthfulness of Christianity. There’s nothing per se wrong about being simple-minded, and in many instances the purity of a simple faith is far superior to an erudite one: but when it comes to this sort of apologetics-based believing, the problem is in the (figgy) pudding, because weak foundations will make for a weak house, weak causae for weak argumenta. I’ve ultimately seen more people lose their Christian faith because it was built on simplistic and stupid arguments, easily dismantled, than I have seen people who lost their faith because they went through the furnace of critical deconstruction and came out the other side wiser and less certain, but more committed to God at the same time; much of the time, the wisdom of uncertainty, as Alan Watts once called it, deepens faith rather than kills it. But never be confused: a faith that can die must die, so the faith that cannot die may be born.
The historical fetish, as I’ve called it, also does not match the way that we typically celebrate the mystery of Christmas, liturgically and culturally. In every other way we very much celebrate the miracle of the feast the same way ancient people celebrated myths attached to their local sanctuaries or ethnic observances: that is, as a sacred story whose true significance is in some deeper, allegorical truth hidden beneath the literal sense of the story. Perhaps that allegorical meaning is the typology and theology I mentioned above: in the end of things, details aside, Christmas is meant to preach to us that Jesus is Son of David and Son of God: heir to the throne of Israel, the allegiance of the nations, and uniter of divinity and humanity. One can believe such things about Jesus regardless of how one feels about the historicity of the Christmas stories; and separating the two allows us to see those stories, so to speak, as verbal icons of these truths.
Perhaps the deeper meaning of the stories is moral: cue the long and deep tradition of moral theology around Christmas that is, arguably, much more powerful than the discourse of virtue that other seasons of the liturgical year encourage us to embody. Partly, this is because while our culture is never more commercial and greedy than at Christmas, it is also never more open to the very Christian idea that giving is more blessed than receiving (Acts 20:35). My favorite Christmas carol, for example, has long been “Good King Wenceslaus” (and my favorite rendition of it, to which I listen every year, is a three-man performance by Stephen Colbert, Mandy Patinkin, and Michael Stipe, during the days when Stipe was sat upon the shelves of The Colbert Report as one of his many trophies). Set on the Feast of St. Stephen, the second day of Christmas, the carol retells a story of the saintly monarch looking out and beholding a pauper gathering twigs to burns as kindling; upon inquiring and learning his identity, Wenceslaus bids his page to “bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither,” and join him on a mission to feast with the man and his family. The journey is cold, and arduous: “Page and monarch forth they went, forth they went together: through the rude wind’s wild lament, and the bitter weather.” The page is near overcome by the tempest: “Sire the night is colder now / and the wind grows stronger: / fails my heart I know not how / I can go no longer,” to which the reply: “Mark my footsteps my good page, / tread thou in them boldly: / thou wilt find the winter’s rage / freeze thy blood less coldly.” So the page does: “In his master’s steps he trod / where the snow lay dinted / heat was in the very sod / which the saint had printed.” We can assume, but are not told, that the two make it to their destination, because this is where the so-what of the carol is clarified: “Therefore Christian men be sure / wealth or rank possessing / ye who now will bless the poor / shall yourselves find blessing.”
The moral of John Mason Neale’s 1853 song could hardly be more obvious: Christmas is about giving, especially to bless the poor. After all, were not the Holy Family refugees fleeing the terror of Herod? Did they not fail to find room in the house for the birth of Jesus, being forced to deliver him in the inferior level of the home where the animals were kept? Were not shepherds the first men to venerate the newborn king? Did not the Magi bring him gifts? Was not the infant Jesus wrapped and placed in the manger, to be food for the world? If one is fixated on the historicity of these stories but fails to take from them the lesson that the giving of alms, without hesitation and without pretense, but from a deep and roaring fire of love, warmer and brighter than any of Hestia’s daughters (and perhaps warmer than any of winter hearth ever need be again given our warming world), is what God desires of us, then one has not adored the Christ child in a way that God accepts.
There is also in this carol a hint of what I would call the anagogical meaning of Christmas. It is in the fiery heat that emanates from Duke Wenceslaus’s footprints—the so-called “warmth of the saints,” of which there are many hagiographical stories, about saints that shine, who “become all flame,” whose presence can warm even a cold winter prison meant to freeze inmates to death, and so on. Such women and men are as human burning bushes, alight with the fire of God and yet unconsumed: they are already living in the world to come, bright with the radiance of God that warms the frigid entropy of this world with life-creating power even in the midst of death. How does one cultivate this fire—what does it mean to have it? Every fire needs tended to; how does one tend the fire of God in the soul?
Perhaps here our spiritual goal of becoming alight with the fire of God and our epistemic quest for the meaning of the Christmas stories might be resolved by the same method. Any fire requires, essentially, a combination of kindling, tinder, and logs to light and grow; surely it is the literal sense of our texts that first catches flame, the allegorical and moral that keep the fire burning and make it rise in size and heat. But what are those logs that will keep it burning for the long haul—what is the fuel that can keep the presence of God within the soul and this feast, which is so omnipresent in our cultural consciousness in ways that we now lament in predictable ways each year, meaningful for us?
The astute hearer may see that I have progressed through the first three of the four usual “senses” of scripture, at least in the Western Middle Ages; the earlier form of this scheme was three, with Origen’s model of scripture’s body, soul, and spirit, and in Judaism, the PaRDeS method of interpretation acknowledges a similar plurality of meanings in the text at all levels. Traditionally the fourth sense of scripture for Christians, the anagogical, concerns our own eschatological destiny, the simultaneous revelation of our formal causality, who and what we most truly are, with our final causality, what we shall finally be. What does Christmas tell us about this?
We could take many paths here. After all, M’s nativity story has the Magi come to prostrate to Jesus as King of the Jews to signal early that the gentile nations will turn to him in obedience, as the risen Jesus commands in Matthew 28:19. L’s nativity story has the shepherds come to venerate the infant Jesus to emphasize the theme of all three of the Canticles derived from his infancy story—the Magnificat, Benedictus, and Nunc Dimittis, which Christians traditionally sing at different parts of the liturgical day—that Jesus’s birth signals God’s vindication of the poor and weak over the rich and the mighty. So, perhaps the anagogical meaning of the nativity stories is the early seeding of the ethos of the Christian Church, as an assembly of nations gathered around Israel’s God and messianic king, newly born in humility, teaching we gentiles to embrace humility and charity as well. Fair enough.
But there is a deeper, more mystical meaning beyond this one too, one that returns us to Mary and to Christ in the most intimate way. Recall what I said before about Mary’s role in the formation of Early Christology. In Matthew’s nativity story, Mary is mainly passive, and we can largely pass by this portrait as a result. But in Luke, she is directly compared both to Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel whose fervent prayer brought him into the world despite her barrenness, and to the Ark of the Covenant, over both of whom the divine spirit “overshadows” (episkeuazō; Lk 1:35), both of whom go out into the Judean hills, and before both of whom an important prophetic figure dances (David in 1 Samuel, the prenatal John the Baptist in Luke; 1:41). Mary is a contemplative in the Lukan infancy story: she ponders all things in her heart, and the sword of grief is destined to pierce her heart at Jesus’s death (2:35). In John, the beloved disciple—both a historical person and a stand-in for the ideal follower of Jesus—is entrusted with Jesus’s mother from the cross: “from that day he took her into his own” (19:27), and so, theoretically, we are charged to do so also if we would be ideal disciples of Jesus. For the early Fathers, Mary’s consent to become the mother of the messiah is a grand reversal in the history of humanity: she is New Eve to Jesus, the New Adam, for her cooperation with God in the virginal conception and birth reverses Eve’s sin of seizing the fruit of knowledge, in both cases incited by an angelic messenger (one nefarious, one good). In later generations, what one says about Mary, one says about Jesus’s humanity, and in a roundabout way also about his divinity, insofar as what Mary contributes is what is human in Jesus and what she does not is what is divine in Jesus. Yet it is also the case that the true disciple of Jesus among third and fourth century Christians should be the ultimate imitator of Mary as Theotokos: just as she gave birth to God the Word in the flesh, so, too, is the saint to give birth to the Word in her own flesh, through ascetical and liturgical living. It is of deep interest, for example, that Athanasius, who wrote On the Incarnation, also wrote as its sequel the Life of Antony the Great, the direct implication being that the incarnation has repeated, or continued, in the life of Antony, not being confined to the life of the historical Jesus as though it were reducible merely to the event of Christmas (which is not Athanasius’s interest in On the Incarnation anyway!).
Thus Mary connects us to Jesus twice over, for in mystically becoming Mary, according to the anagogical reading of Christmas, we are also mystically to become Christ—or, rather, Christ is to be born not only among us but within us, God’s son is to be revealed in us (). Paul—who again, does not know of a virgin birth, making one paltry reference to Jesus’s birth “of a woman” (Gal 4:4)—compares all creation to a woman in childbirth, groaning to give birth to the sons of God (Rom 8). In the Johannine Apocalypse the heavenly woman, crowned with the Zodiac, clothed with the sun, standing on the Moon, struggles to give birth to a male son who will rule the nations with a rod of iron—a destiny predicated of Christ, but also, crucially, one that Christ promises “the conqueror” will share with him (Rev 1:26-29; 12). If the point of the Nativity stories is that Jesus is Son of David and Son of God, then the point of Christmas is surely that as Christians we come to share in Christ’s messianic identity, tasks, and divine sonship. If we read with Nicene eyes and see Christmas as the Feast of the Incarnation, then the logic extends: we are the ongoing mystery of the Word made flesh today, not exclusively—in different ways, all humanity and all creation share in this mystery—but by participation in Jesus.
I will close with the observation that the senses of scripture, like Empedoclean elements, are always dying into and being born from each other. It seems to me that we do not progress to the finality of the mystery that Christ must be born in us and thereby leave behind interest in the literal, allegorical, and moral senses: instead, like Moses, we descend the mountain again with faces illumined by the beatific vision. For once we realize that this is the ultimate spiritual goal we also realize that we have an ethical compulsion to make it happen: Christ must be born in us for as saints we may do far greater good for the world. Morally we must also realize that God’s clothing in the flesh of a human infant and self-revelation in the form of ultimate vulnerability, and the Word’s willingness to be born in us as well, commits us to the protection and advocacy of those victimized by the mighty, whoever they may be. Theologically, at the allegorical or typological level, Christmas invites us to see what Maximus the Confessor called the “mystery of the Word’s embodiment” as the primary divine activity in the creation, providence, and consummation of the universe, and already at work in the saga of Israel, Judah, and the Jewish people; as the late Orthodox Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod suggested, the main difference between Jews and Christians concerning the incarnation is that where Christians locate the crux of the mystery in the person of Jesus, Jews see the kedushah of Israel itself as the divine embodiment in the world, just as biblical authors saw various kinds of divine embodiment in Tabernacle, Temple, king, and high priest. This invites us more deeply into the language of M and L about Jesus as divine embodiment and locus of the divine presence, as Emmanuel and as holy, Son of the Most High, and in the process, invites us to read their texts comparatively with other stories of divinely born heroes. Biblical scholars already do this when they read the nativity stories in comparison with Jewish and Greco-Roman literature, but these are not our only options. Francis X. Clooney, the Jesuit scholar of Hinduism, has engaged in comparative reading between the stories of Jesus’s birth and those of the avatars Rama and Krishna, not only to highlight differences but also to find illuminating similarities and opportunities of exchange. In the Hindu traditions c the divine descends into the world periodically to rectify adharma, injustice, and reassert the divine rule of the cosmos in accordance with goodness over both demonic and human evil. Surely this might give us new, fruitful ways to read M and L’s nativity stories at the literal level, and from there, to continually progress up into the higher meanings again, only to descend once more—ascending and descending the ladder of Christ like the angels who today proclaim “Peace on earth to men of goodwill” (Lk 2:14).
Merry Christmas.
Beautiful, especially the last part regarding our participation in the Christ event and his ongoing participation in us to be born each day. Well done and Merry Christmas. Christ is born - glorify him!
I picture Palestrina teaching farmers about four part counterpoint by adding explanatory lyrics in with Missa brevis. What another welcome simultaneous explanation and example of anagoge. I’d like to print it onto every church bulletin and pew in TN this Christmastide. As for my house, there were no dry eyes in the room after such a proclamation. Many thanks. Merry thanks