The Bible: Christmas Fact & Fancy

THE BIBLE

Perhaps it is the holly and the ivy, or the midnight services, or the sight of spotlight creches, but the Christmas leg end each year still moves men’s hearts as no other story can. The Carpenter Joseph, taking his pregnant wife on the hard journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, forced to shiver through the winter cold in the only lodging available —a humble stable. There the Christ Child is born, watched over by lowing oxen and sheep, and worshiped by three kings from the East, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Of course, none of this has much to do with the real birth of Jesus of Nazareth around 7 B.C.* Many Protestant scholars, and even a few Roman Catholics, regard the infancy narratives in Luke and Matthew as too contaminated by myth to be considered reliable history. And even the more conservative scholars who accept these accounts as historically plausible agree that most of the famous Christmas legends are unsupported elaborations of the spare, precise biblical reports. In a new volume of reverent debunking called Born in Bethlehem (Helicon; $3.50), Dutch Theologian H. W. van der Vaart Smit borrows the conclusions of modern scriptural scholars to separate Christmas fact from Christmas fancy.

Better Off in a Stable. Smit, an Evangelical minister turned Roman Catholic, argues that the birth of Christ in dire poverty and in the dead of winter is just pious nonsense. By the standards of his time,Joseph was comfortably middleclass: the reason he went from Nazareth to Bethlehem—probably several months before Jesus’ birth—was that he had property in Bethlehem and owed taxes to the Roman authorities there.

No scholar believes that Jesus was born in December; Smit thinks that the most likely time was the end of August. Not until the 4th century did the early church commemorate the Saviour’s birth—and then it shrewdly but arbitrarily picked a date that coincided with a joyous pagan feast.

Truth & Beauty. The Middle Ages depicted the Magi as three kings, and even gave them sonorous, Eastern-sounding names—Kaspar, Melchior and Balthasar. In fact, the “kings” are as imaginary as their names. The Magi were simply astrologer-priests, possibly from Babylon, and their number is uncertain; early paintings of the Christmas scene show anywhere from two to seven of them. Scholars are divided about the origin and meaning of the star that lured them to Bethlehem. Many critics dismiss Matthew’s account of it as pure myth; Smit believes that the star actually was a major conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that would have been visible in Near Eastern skies from spring through fall of 7 B.C.

Far from destroying the beauty of the Christmas story, Smit says, this kind of careful attention to historical detail produces a right understanding of the great event. When Christmas is stripped of fable, he claims, “a realm of overpowering truth and beauty will then be revealed, a story which is at the same time completely human and yet beyond all measure divine.”

*The 6th century astronomer-monk Dionysius Exiguus tried to find out in what year Jesus was born according to Roman reckoning, misread his sources, and threw the dating of the Christian era out of whack.