(This is the sixth in my series of Bil’s ideas about ten misconceptions in Christianity today. This post suggests that the institutional church thinks Christmas is about Jesus. It isn’t!)
I loved Christmas as a child! The Christmas worship services were always a spectacle. I enjoyed decorating the tree and the house, but I loved getting presents the most.
No one ever told me the truth about Christmas. Gladly, most churches made a big deal out of it.
Then I learned what most folks don’t know:
- The date of December 25 was set in the fourth century by Constantine to replace a Roman drinking day that signified the beginning of the winter solstice. It has nothing to do with Jesus’s birthday.
- Likewise, we know nothing certain about where he was born. Logic suggests his birth was in Nazareth, a small rural town mainly inhabited by Jews of the Diaspora. But the authors Matthew and Luke, over a hundred years after Jesus was born, stated his birthplace was Bethlehem, the city of King David. Now, Jesus has the credentials to be the Messiah.
- Matthew’s fairy tales are shorter than Luke’s. His stories include
- the virginity of Mary,
- a fictitious Joseph,
- the Magi’s visit (Matthew never states how many Magi there were or that they rode camels.),
- the Maji coming to the house (According to Matthew 2:11, there was no stable.),
- Mary and Jesus living in the house (There was no mention of Joseph.),
- Herod’s temper tantrum,
- the massacre of boys two and under,
- the trip to Egypt, and their return to Nazareth.
All fantasy.
- Luke’s birth stories about Jesus span three chapters and include tales about John the Baptist and his mother Elizabeth, Mary’s annunciation, her visit to Elizabeth, the birth of John, John’s father’s speech issues, a fake census, no room at the inn, Jesus’s birth outdoors, Simon’s important declaration, Jesus’s circumcision, and prophetess Anna’s blessings. When read all at once, these stories can feel long, overwhelming, and boring.
- Because Mary was unwed, two falsehoods were created. The first was that Mary and God had a tryst, so instead of Jesus’s being born a bastard, he was born as God’s son, the Messiah. Next, the writers didn’t want Jesus to be fatherless (a bastard), so they invented a human father named Joseph, a kind older man who resembled the Joseph in the Old Testament, with his many-colored cloak (see Genesis 37).
- A detective once told me that when people tell one lie, they often have to tell many more to support the first. That was the case here. The Old Testament indicated that the Messiah would have to be called out of Egypt (Hosea 11:1), so guess what? Matthew has fictional Joseph take Mary and Jesus on a fictitious journey, a trip to and from Egypt.
- The New Testament states that Mary was a virgin (Luke 1:27). It’s interesting how she could have been. This has nothing to do with sex, but it’s all about translations. The Hebrew word for young woman translated into Greek means a “young woman who is a virgin.” My take is that Mary, as a young woman, was raped (women were property, and it was okay to rape property) and became pregnant with Jesus. According to some, bastards are not good Messiah candidates.
Here’s the bottom line: Christmas has nothing to do with Jesus and his world-transforming message about agape. The church has made a big deal out of it. It’s a major money maker.
For me, it’s time for the merchants to take over the Christmas season/winter solstice. They should lead the celebration, making sure it stays a time of caring, giving, and buying lots of decorations and presents. Let’s leave Jesus out of it.
Easter is the real thing for Followers of the Way.
What do you think?
PeaceLoveJoyHopeKindness
Bil
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P.S. People often ask me provocative questions about current events, both religious and secular. I have found that some of these questions are being asked universally. I’ll be periodically alternating regular articles with one of those questions and my answer. I invite you to send me your question to bilaulenbach@yahoo.com.
Image by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi from Pixabay
People in the early Jesus Movement had experiences they thought were very important. They wrote material to illustrate how important it was, not to prove but to illustrate. You may find B.B. Scott’s book of interest.
Here is a brief summary & excerpt from the book
The Trouble with Resurrection
From Paul to the Fourth Gospel
By
Bernard Brandon Scott
The author examines the biblical passages that report experiences of the risen “Anointed One” in the order in which those accounts were written. Paul, the earliest writer, provides no detail in his authentic letters, no road to Damascus, no horse, no light, no voice; those are all the product of the author of Acts writing decades after Paul’s death. There is a pattern that appears for Scott. The early records use “seeing” metaphors, not “was seen by”, but rather seen “for the benefit of”, a peculiar Greek grammatical form we do not directly have in customary English usage. We have the word “insight”. The awareness that Jesus is with them is reported as coming in a shared meal several times. The act of being separated from among the dead itself is almost never described. Rather, the text has an empty tomb, a missing body, various messengers with the word that he is no longer among the dead. The later the text is written the more and more literally physical it is. Scott then describes Bultmann’s writing in the 1930’s and 40’s. There Bultmann goes at great and emphatic length into the need to strip away the historically and culturally dependent detail to understand the essence, the heart, the importance of the message of the text we have. He uses the word “demythologize” for this process. Thus he points to the extreme importance of having a metaphorical understanding of the biblical narratives. Scott sees a pattern: Prophets are rejected, martyred, but their message, their life work, is vindicated by what happens then; and the writers of scripture see that vindication as divine action. So Jesus was also viewed as a great prophet, was also martyred, and his teaching, his life work, was also vindicated.
At the end of the concluding chapter Scott writes following which I quote verbatim.
Martin Luther King was a prophet, He was vilified and persecuted; he was a martyr just as much as any prophet of ancient Israel or martyr of the early church. He deserves his place over the west door of Westminster Cathedral with three other modern martyrs: Mother Elizabeth of Russia, Archbishop Oscar Romero and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Just as much as Jesus, King was a martyr. But God raised Jesus from the dead and not Martin Luther King,. Or is that true?
God did raise Martin Luther King from the dead. King’s prophetic words and martyrdom helped raise up a nation to a new standard of God’s justice, helped it live up to its creed. The importance of Bultmann’s program of demythologization is that it de-literalizes the language of resurrection, Once we see that resurrection is not literal language but a metaphor used to explain the experience of God vindicating the martyr, then we can see that King stands foursquare in the tradition inaugurated in Jesus.
…listen to King’s “I have a dream” speech…hear that triumphal shout, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty; we are free at last”. [we are] drawn into the kingdom of God, … raised from the dead, if only for a moment.