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From Mary to the manger, how the Gospels mix faith and history to tell
the Christmas story and make the case for Christ. |
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By Jon Meacham |
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Newsweek |
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Dec. 13 issue - 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
Mary, 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." |
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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?" |
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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 |
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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. |
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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 |
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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 |
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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.) |
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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 |
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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. |
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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." |
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Just how he became flesh is the business of Christmas. If we dissect
the stories 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." |
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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 |
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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." |
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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 stories and
sayings of Jesus, shaping that gospel ("good news" in Greek) and
spreading it to fellow Jews and to Gentiles. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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 that 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.) |
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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 |
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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." |
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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. |
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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 |
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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 |
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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." |
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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. |
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Matthew makes an even more explicit connection with the Jewish past,
stating outright that Jesus is answering ancient expectations. Citing Isaiah |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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 |
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To resolve the problem of Jesus' connection with both |
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Luke does not mention a journey to |
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Luke's conundrum is just the opposite of Matthew's: how to get Mary
and Joseph, who in his Gospel were living in |
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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. |
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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 |
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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 |
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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." |
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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." |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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." |
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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. |
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© 2004 Newsweek, Inc. |
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