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Away in a Manger
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The Episcopal church I attend in Connecticut has a large wooden crèche filled with straw that is brought out during the Advent season leading up to Christmas. Each Sunday children come forward with various plaster figurines from the Nativity scene and add them to the crèche: livestock, shepherds, angels, Mary and Joseph, the baby Jesus and, last of all, the Three Wise Men, who arrive on Epiphany, 12 days after Christmas. The crèche is used to present the “real” story of Christmas, based on biblical narratives of Christ’s birth in the gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, in contrast to the more commercially exploitable version in which Santa Claus and his reindeer figure prominently.
Those inclined to regard religion as fairy tales for adults need look no farther than the Nativity story, which even many Christian theologians dismiss as a pious fabrication. Apart from their inherent implausibility, the accounts given in Matthew and Luke contradict one another on key points and are at odds with verifiable historical and astronomical details. Essential elements, such as the virgin birth of Jesus, are not mentioned at all in the gospel of St. Mark -- the earliest account of his life -- or in the epistles of St. Paul, which predate any of the gospels in the New Testament. It is not hard to make the case that the virgin birth and other supernatural elements of the story are later embellishments intended to buttress claims of Jesus’ divinity.
To insist on the factual accuracy of stories that were never intended as historical narratives is to miss the whole point. It may be helpful to think of them in relation to the Jewish midrash, stories based on the Hebrew Bible that were written during roughly the same period as the gospels. The midrash frequently elaborated on the spare narratives of the Old Testament, fleshing out characters, resolving ambiguities or contradictions and bringing out meanings that may have been latent (or nonexistent) in the original text. The important thing was always the meaning of the story, not whether it actually happened.
It may be a bit of an overstatement to suggest that the gospel stories are Christian midrash, as the heterodox Episcopal bishop John Spong has maintained. The gospels are a distinct literary form. However, it is important to understand that a dozen or more gospels circulated among Christian communities during the first few centuries of the church. Many of them elaborated freely on the basic narrative of Christ’s life, fleshing out characters and describing incidents that are not included in the New Testament canon. The gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, which contain separate versions of the Christmas story, are clearly elaborations of St. Mark, which in turn may have been based on an earlier text, known as the Q document, which has not survived.
Nowadays we tend to regard the birth of Jesus primarily as a children’s story. Certainly, kids are more willing than grownups to suspend their disbelief and to put themselves into the story. The Christmas story touches on one of the most basic questions children ask about their own existence: “Where do I come from?” (Trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home…) They understand instinctively, as their elders do not, who this child is. God’s immanence ceases to be a theological abstraction when we understand that he is born into the world as we are; that he is reborn with every new child that comes into the world; that, in truth, we are the Christ child.
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