Matthew Byrne focuses on the biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus and the leading personalities involved – not just Joseph and Mary, but Zachariah and Elizabeth, the shepherds, the wise men, Simeon and Anna, and, of course, Herod. Each has a great human interest.
176 pp, Columba press, 2004. To purchase this book online, go to www.columba.ie.
CONTENTS
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Zacharias
3. The Annunciation
4. Joseph’s Dilemma
5. Journey to Juttah
6. With Elizabeth
7. Elizabeth’s son
8. The Birth
9. The Shepherds
10. The Wise Men
11. Rites and Ceremonies
12. Flight
13. Murder
14. Return
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1. INTRODUCTION
Jesus of Nazareth is, on any count, an important figure in history.
Categorising him, however, in order to compare him with some other outstanding world personality, is difficult. Once you begin to try, the list of his achievements grows till it starts to look like the old ‘tinker, tailor’ rhyme – thinker, teacher, healer, preacher, wit, raconteur, politician, controversialist, religionist, historian, theologian, messiah. . .
He has to rank amongst the leading philosophers of the world. His philosophy is expounded simply and explicitly in the famous Sermon on the Mount. It is, and has been for almost two thousand years, the basis of a worldwide way of life, eagerly accepted by some, held in contempt by others, and stubbornly debated by all, lived in love and serenity, fought over and died for.
As a teacher, Jesus seemed able to establish immediate rapport with his audience. He had a facility for taking the ordinary concerns and interests of everyday life, and turning them into vehicles that conveyed to ordinary people the deep things of his teaching. Yet he never laid down hard and fast rules. He seems to have preferred establishing great principles. Not the least of his characteristics as a teacher was the fact that he not only taught the virtue pf love, he lived it. His life was the centre and illustration of his teaching.
He was an unashamed entertainer. And while no part of his life history records that he ever smiled, let alone laughed, there is enough to suggest that he enjoyed the laughter of others, for example, the parable of the friend at midnight or the illustration of the camel going through the eye of a needle, which are enough to make anybody laugh.
That his laughter has no mention in the record does not mean that he knew nothing of true human emotion. He knew it all, anger, grief, love, wonder, joy, sighing, sorrow and weeping.
His humour, however, was part of the stock-in-trade of his preacher’s art. He had also sarcasm and subtle innuendo. He could be vitriolic when the occasion demanded, and loosed his invective on individuals and groups alike.
As a controversialist he was a master. At times he allowed his opponents to grind their own arguments into the ground. At others he cut the legs from under them with cold logic. And there were occasions when he found it hard to suffer fools gladly, even when they were numbered amongst his own close followers.
In the field of literature he has few equals. His short story of the ‘Prodigal Son,’ is accepted as the perfect short story.
His life is marked by an almost obsessive religious devotion. The enthusiasm that characterised his childhood, appears in adulthood as a rounded, well-versed, well-educated grasp of the literature, theology, history and tradition of his religion. His loyalty to the religion of his nation often enough brought him into conflict with its guardians, whom he considered neglectful in their care of it, where they were not blatently misrepresenting it, and abusing their position of authority.
From the emphasis put on Jesus’s work as a healer, it would be easy to gain the impression that he spent every waking moment healing the sick. That he healed people is beyond question. It was, however, only part of his mission. A fundamental and inevitable part, indeed, but a part that must be kept in careful perspective, as the New Testament writers suggest by offering a total of only twenty-five healings by Jesus, with a few mentions of the healing missions he conducted. At the same time, though, it ought to be borne in mind that Jesus did not consider his being a healer as marking him as unique. He himself recognised, and reminded others that healing the sick was a ministry already long established and practised in Israel.
Jesus arrived on the scene when Israel’s political expectations and ambitions were smouldering dangerously.
As a boy he cannot fail to have known of the rebellion led by Judas the Galilean, and heard the battle-cry of the gangs he headed in insurrection against Rome’s assuming direct government in Judaea and Samaria – ‘We have no Lord and Master but God.’
The nation still smarted from Judas’s defeat, and its fermenting hate of the conqueror was carefully nurtured by the political party known as the Zealots.
Jesus finished his last days on earth in the same prison as Barabbas, a popular participant in yet another insurrection.
Between the two – Judas and Barabbas – there were countless unnamed individuals who set themselves up as messiahs in Israel, and kept alive the Jewish confidence that Rome’s eventual defeat by a Jewish army, under a Bethlehem-born messiah, at Arbela, to the west of the Sea of Galilee. Jewish legend called it Armageddon.
Jesus made no bones about his being, not just a messiah, but The Messiah in Israel. All other claimants he contemptuously dismissed as ‘false messiahs’.
He so obviously had the makings of a national political leader. He had the charisma of the greatest of the Old Testament heroes and prophets. His grip on the ordinary people, and his effortless success in exciting them, disturbed those in authority in Israel who viewed him as a constant threat to the uneasy balance they had managed to manipulate for the nation with conquering Rome.
Had he been so minded, he might have been made king by popular acclaim. As it was, however, Jesus set himself to disabuse his followers of the messianic ideas they harboured, arguing the wrongness of their conception of things. His messiahship did not mean the redemption of Israel through an all-out military conquest. The messiahship for Jesus meant setting men free through his own death. It was a truth which hardly dawned on his followers during his lifetime, and took long enough to dawn even after he had endured the death he had prophesied for himself.
The evangelists were the first to make any serious attempt at ‘publishing’ any kind of record of the life and work of Jesus.
Their finished product, on the face of it, looks like the biography of any other historical figure – beginning at the birth, and finishing with the completion of his life’s work.
A slightly closer look, though, reveals that these ‘writers use up most of their space in recording his death. Indeed, it is this interest in his death that motivates them into making the record in the first place. And while they appear to deal with his life in some sort of chronological order, they are, in fact, writing with hindsight, and an agenda.
Their whole approach to the record is coloured by the significance they attach to his death. And more than that, they write with the conviction that he is risen from the dead.
This resurrection is important for them, for, so far as they judge it, the resurrection gives meaning to the death of Jesus, and is a seal that what he came to do, he accomplished. If he came as God in the flesh to ‘give his life a ransom for many,’ the resurrection is proof of the reality of his work.
So that while the evangelists appear to begin at the beginning, they are really working back. Even their record of his birth is presented with the conviction that Jesus was the supernatural being making an entry as mortal man amongst mortal men ‘God hath visited his people.’ This is for them the basic reason for writing of the birth of Jesus Christ.
St Matthew and St Luke had no idea, when they wrote about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, that their account would still be being read two thousand years later. Had they had the slightest inkling, it is fairly certain they’d have done things differently.
What they did was fine in the circumstances, when it’s remembered they were writing for the people of their own day. For people who were aware of the customs and prejudices and attitudes of the time. For people who breathed the spiritual and religious atmosphere of the day, and could appreciate angels and visions and dreams, and the prevailing hope that Messiah would come.
Because they were living in a land where little changed over the long years, they would be familiar with the matters the evangelists wrote of – betrothal, marriage, divorce, the social and religious customs attached to pregnancy and childbirth.
This familiarity meant that they did not need everything spelled-out in fine detail.
In these circumstances, the evangelists could naturally assume that their readers would see the account against a familiar backdrop. What was already so much part and parcel of their way of life as to be part of their subconscious would, almost automatically, fill in the background.
St Matthew and St Luke could afford, then, to write their account briefly. In shorthand, almost.
As the years passed, however, and the church spread beyond Palestine and the Jewish environment. Christians could no longer be expected to have so intimate and easy an understanding of the background.
It was inevitable that later Christians should try to enhance what the evangelists had written briefly, filling in the gaps in their knowledge, and answering the questions of their minds with the pious fictions of their imagination.
The unhappy result of their pious, well-intentioned efforts make God look like a master magician, and Jesus something of a boy-wonder.
The process was well established by the middle of the second century. And the next six hundred years saw the appearance of documents like A Gospel of the Infancy, The history of Joseph the Carpenter, A Gospel of the Infancy of Blessed Mary.
These writings later gained the title Apocryphal Gospels. They never became part of the canonical New Testament. They disappeared from circulation for centuries, but came into vogue again in Europe in the Middle Ages.
The poets and ballad-makers of those times used them as the bases for their literary works. The painters and artists of the age gave lasting substance to the legends in their works of art.
The results appealed to pious, uncritical minds, but, in reality,had little or no obvious warrant in the New Testament.
The effect of all this was that the views and sentiments of these Apocryphal Gospels had enormous influence on the reading and interpretation of the New Testament record of the birth of Jesus. So enormous, in fact, that when the New Testament was translated into English, the presentation of the birth narrative was coloured by the outlook of these Apocryphal Gospels.
And the influence has hardly lessened over the centuries. It is so strong, even today, that interpretations are foisted on the evangelists’ account that are hard to support from the text.
For the most part, we have adapted the narrative of the birth of Jesus to suit our taste. We have turned the record into a folk tale, littered with sacred cows which are so much part of our traditional Christmas scene, that any attempt at contradicting them looks like a threat to fundamental truth.
The fact that the traditional tale finds no support in the evangelists’ original hardly seems to matter. Indeed, it is woe betide anybody who dares to tamper with what is solemnly misunderstood from the time we could first remember. And had our misconceptions reinforced by ‘Once in royal David’s city,’ , Away in a manger,’ ‘We three kings of Orient are,’ and a host of other carols which, while beautifully sentimental, misrepresent the evangelists’ history of the event.
Books are still written as though their authors were unaware that they are purveying the myth more than the truth. And every year countless nativity plays re-enact and reinforce the apocryphal stories so pausibly that young, unformed minds are grossly ill-informed. And even older, otherwise critical, minds are dulled into accepting the fiction for the fact.
Pious imagination is one thing. Pious fiction is another. Pious imagination can help us grasp something of the miracle in the event. Pious fiction degrades the miraculous, and smothers the uniqueness of the happening in a froth of sentimentality. And it makes a nonsense of the care St Matthew and St Luke took in presenting the record in the first place.
St Matthew and St Luke are the only gospel writers who deal with the birth of Jesus in any detail.
St Mark and St John do not mention it. This does not mean, though, that they were not aware of it or did not appreciate the special circumstances that surrounded it. If they do not spell out the intimate details, it is because they are not necessary to their presentation of the ministry of Jesus.
St Mark bursts into his presentation of things with ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ And then, with the breathless economy of a man who would tell everything all at once, he bounds along, retailing episodes from the ministry of Jesus, with the single purpose of leading his readers to the conviction that Jesus, on earth, was the Son of God. The Incarnation.
But he knows about the birth. And he knows that Jesus’s listeners knew about the birth. But for them there was nothing of the miraculous in it. It was, as they reckoned, more the frailty of human nature, and ‘the ways of a man with a maid.’ Is not this ‘the son of Mary?’ they jibed when they were rejecting him for the second time in Nazareth. And they meant it offensively because, as St Mark explains, ‘they were offended at him’.
St John declares his conviction about Jesus in the banner headline to his gospel- ‘The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.’
He cannot have been unaware of the peculiar circumstances of Jesus’s birth. He was, after all, his cousin, son of Salome, the Virgin Mary’s younger sister.
He uniquely records two intimate episodes involving the mother of Jesus and her son.
The first, the marriage at Cana. He reports a conversation between Jesus and his mother that is reminiscent of their conversation during their visit to the Temple in his early boyhood. The second episode was at Calvary, when St John allows us to overhear the concern of a devoted son for his mother who was about to be bereaved.
At the same time, though, he gives clues that the people of our Lord’s day had their own view of his birth. It was no ‘God taking flesh,’ no incarnation for them. They saw no more than the human circumstances of the event. And were not beyond using it as a jibe against him when he asserted his divinity and assumed the divine name.
‘We were not born of fornication,’ is their comment, as St John records it, affording evidence that they were aware enough of the human circumstances surrounding his birth for the barb to be designed to insult and hurt him.
St Matthew and St Luke take pains with their account of the nativity, conscious of the significance of the events they report… St Matthew aware of the relevance of the birth of Jesus to the Jewish people, St Luke alert to its place in world history, and its meaning to all mankind.
Their record, then, is not just the story of the birth of a man named Jesus who ultimately earned the title, ‘The Son of God.’ This is the record of the Incarnation, God coming in flesh amongst men.
With a simplicity that might be misconstrued, both St Matthew and St Luke spell out the intimate details of the act of Incarnation. They bring us as close to the physical scene as human eye, mind and emotion can approach.
St Matthew does it because, for him, the birth of Jesus Christ, like every other detail of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, is the sum, summary and consummation of Old Testament prophecy. St Luke does it because having, as he says himself, ‘gone over the whole course of these events in detail,’ he commits himself to giving his readers ‘a connected narrative… authentic knowledge of the matters about which you have been informed’.
Their painstaking efforts give us, not a homespun tale to be interpreted as whim and fancy and novelty might dictate. But rather a narrative of the Incarnation to be read and marked with no less care, that we might catch some sight of the Supernatural breaking into time and the affairs of mortal men.
