What Connects--and Separates--Hanukkah and Christmas II

A Guide for the Perplexed

The Nativity; Russian (early 18th century)

In the last entry in this brief holiday-themed miniseries, I touched on Early Jewish history in the Persian and Hellenistic periods that led to the establishment of the Hasmonean state, the reformulation of Judean identity as “Judaism,” and the establishment of Hanukkah as a festival. I then, briefly, introduced the Christmas stories as, similarly, literature expressing hope for the liberation of the Jewish people from oppressors, while also casting some aspersion on their historical value. Matthew and Luke are the only two canonical authors to tell us about the infant Jesus; they are later than Paul and Mark, and though written before John, John shows no comparable interest in the young Jesus. Their infancy stories bear the mark of an extensive amount of engagement with Jewish Scripture and traditions, as well as knowledge of Greco-Roman mythic historiography, in which gods, demigods, heroes, kings, emperors, philosophers, and other theoi andres have divine parentage and miraculous birth stories.