What could be better for the Christmas spirit than one of those books that tells us Jesus may or may not have been born in Bethlehem, Mary may or may not have been a virgin, the wise men from Babylon following a star is a real stretch, the dates are all wrong, those shepherds are only out in the fields between March and November, and Herod slaughtering the young children (admittedly, not one of our favorite episodes from the Christmas pageant) is not very probable? When the whole thing is written by Geza Vermes, our favorite Hungarian ex-Catholic-priest turned Jewish Oxford professor, you know that Paige Patterson won’t be sending any of these out for gifts this season.
Still, I’m a sucker for “historical Jesus” books like The Nativity: History & Legend (Doubleday, 172 pp., $17.95), even though the arguments are always the same:
1. Here’s what the gospels say.
2. They don’t agree with each other.
3. They don’t agree with other contemporary sources.
4. We don’t have much to go on, but here’s a little tiny bit from Philo and Josephus.
5. Each gospel writer was probably shaping his story for a particular audience.
6. The gospels aren’t history.
Well, yes, we know they aren’t history. Every heresy in the history of the world begins with someone literalizing the message, and now the debunkers are out there literalizing the transmission of the message.
And the Christmas story is child’s play for these guys. Only Matthew and Luke deal with the infancy of Christ at all, and the short passages from which we derive the December 25 tradition were apparently tacked on long after the rest of the gospels were complete.
I won’t go over all the familiar discrepancies, like the date of Jesus’ birth (the calendar was screwed up in the 6th century by a Russian monk, aptly named Dionysius the Small) and the Septuagint’s mistranslation of “young woman” as “virgin,” but I’ll mention two areas where I think Vermes might have come up with something new. He’s an expert on the Talmud, and he says there’s a condition known to the rabbis by which a woman can be called virginal even after having intercourse with a man—and that condition occurs when she’s married at age 12 (the traditional age of the time) but has not yet had her first menstrual period. If something like that happened with Mary and Joseph, and she became pregnant just prior to her first menstruation, then she could have been a technical virgin and yet the birth itself would be less than miraculous. I’m just passing this along, it still seems like a stretch.
The other intriguing part of this little book involves the Bethlehem-vs.-Nazareth debate. Apparently the early gospel writers were determined to place the birth in Bethlehem and were more or less embarrassed by the idea that it could possibly have occurred in Nazareth, which is mentioned nowhere in the Torah, the prophets or the writings. Unfortunately, the reason Luke gives for the family travelling to Bethlehem is not just unlikely, it’s impossible. That particular census, as described by Luke, never happened. The most likely census that did happen occurred after the death of Herod. And even if that one is the census involved in the narrative, there was never any requirement that Jews return to the land of their ancestors for the census. And even if that is not enough for you, there was never any requirement that the wife travel with the husband, or present herself at the census. Mary would need a better reason to walk those 70 miles.
As I say, these books are almost always unsatisfying. But nobody does them more simply and with more clarity than Vermes. He also has a sense of humor, especially when describing things like the efforts in the Talmud to portray Jesus as a bastard, and when making astute observations about how at Christmastime the church almost always chooses the sweet account of Luke instead of the paranoid account of Matthew.
If you wanna know why the story still resonates after so much deconstruction by so many writers, the best thing to do is watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special where Linus recites the story. I defy anybody to mess with that awesome peace in this earth.