Merry Christmas Part Two: Exposing more bullshit

The greatest story never told
Peter Ackroyd

Christ’s birth was not virgin, didn’t take place in a stable and no star shone. Peter Ackroyd seeks the Gospel truth in Geza Vermes’s The Nativity

THE NATIVITY: HISTORY AND LEGEND
by Geza Vermes
Penguin, £7.99; 192pp

The divine begets the human. The human becomes divine. For some, it is the simple truth. For others, it is a great and powerful myth. For others, again, it is all pious fraud and delusion. Yet the principal features of the Christmas narrative have become part of the collective consciousness of the West — the birth in a manger, the three kings or wise men, the shepherds with their flocks, the star, all now reside in the human imagination. In his new book The Nativity: History and Legend, Geza Vermes places them in exactly that context, as imagined rather than real.

There is, first of all, a slight uncertainty over the date of the miraculous events. Vermes reminds us that the date of Christmas was not settled until AD334, when December 25 was chosen to supplant the pagan festival of the Unvanquished Sun. The Eastern church celebrates the birth of Jesus on January 6. Vermes then submits the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke to scholarly scrutiny; if they were onions, he could be said to peel them.

It is significant, in any case, that only two of the Gospels bear any reference to the birth of Christ. The two extant accounts also differ in essential matters. In Matthew’s narrative, for example, Jesus is born in a house rather than a stable. It is one of the many “complications, discrepancies and contradictions”, as Vermes puts it, that bedevil any understanding of the scriptures. There is, for example, the discrepancy between the genealogical trees with which Matthew and Luke assert Christ’s pedigree. It was not enough, apparently, to be the Son of God. Over 40 generations, the two chroniclers agree on only three names. In the Hebrew and Aramaic versions of Matthew, too, it is plainly stated that Joseph “begot” Jesus. There is no inkling of a virgin birth.

The notion of virginal conception itself, however, is not so extraordinary. Vermes here recites the early emergence of miraculous or divine births. In the Old Testament there are stories of angels consorting with human females. Many of the most significant figures in pre-Christian history, from Plato to Alexander the Great, have been credited with divine origins. One deity of Palestine, Dusares, was named “the alone begotten of the Lord” and his mother was called “the Virgin”. So there are parallels, all alluding to the possibility that human and divine may be intimately connected.

According to the marital customs of the period, Mary would have been approximately 12 years old at the time Jesus was born. The Hebrew narrative calls the Mother of God “a young woman”, but the Greek translator of this source misinterpreted the word as “virgin”. According to Vermes this is the principal or only reason that Matthew fashioned the narrative of the virgin birth. It was part of a “Hellenistic Gentile-Christian” tradition, to which Matthew wished to appeal. The evidence suggests that “the idea of virginal conception must be seen as a late accretion to the infancy narratives”. There is no reference to virgin birth in Luke.

In fact it seems possible that the entire cult of the Virgin Mary is based upon a fiction or misunderstanding, since Matthew also expressly states that Joseph and Mary had marital intercourse after the birth of Christ.

There is also overwhelming evidence that Christ was born in BC — that is, before Himself. The presumed date of AD1 is based upon a miscalculation. Herod, indisputably king at the time of the birth, actually died in 4BC. Neither is it possible to date the time of the birth by means of the census or “enrolment” recorded by Luke, for the simple reason that no such census took place. In addition Herod’s murder plot, as adumbrated by Matthew, is not historically verifiable.

What of Luke’s shepherds, watching their flocks at night? In that region the shepherd kept their flocks in the fields only between March and November, leading Clement of Alexandria to fix the date of the birth as April 20 or May 20. And what of the three wise men led by a star? Leaving aside the dubious status of these potentates from the East, the star itself is a problem. Some have believed it to be Halley’s comet, or a supernova, or a rare conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. But the real source of the star is to be found in literature rather than the cosmos. In ancient texts “star” is used as a synonym for ruler or messiah. There was in any case a long- established tradition that a star appeared on the occasion of a significant or unusual birth. .

In sum, it becomes evident, from Vermes’s account, that Matthew and Luke manipulated quotations from earlier texts, invented episodes and elaborated upon earlier myths to provide compelling narratives of Christ’s birth. Few people will be surprised or offended by his conclusions.

The “facts”, as we may call them, are not new. German biblical scholarship of the 19th century effectively dismissed the scriptures as documents of unimpeachable accuracy. But they are the next best thing. They are works of genius. They have enshrined the mystery, and the majesty, of Incarnation. There may not have been a star, or a flock, or gold, or frankincense, or myrrh. But they constitute the power of a compelling narrative that remains, for many millions of people, the source of inspiration and of comfort. That, in itself, is perhaps worth celebrating in this period of the year.



Extract from The Nativity: History and Legend by Geza Vermes

On the essential topics of the Nativity tale both Matthew and Luke concur. God’s Holy Spirit is said to have played an essential, though ill-defined, part in Mary’s pregnancy and brought about what is termed in traditional Christian parlance a virginal conception. This doctrine of the virginal conception and birth of Jesus forms an essential part of the teaching of the Church and on a more popular level of the Christmas story: Mary became pregnant and gave birth to a son without ceasing to be a virgin and without the participation of a man . . . This dogma is exclusively based on a few verses of the Infancy Gospels; no other section of the New Testament inside or outside the Gospels makes any reference to it . . .

Though such a virginal conception is unparalleled in the Hebrew Bible or in post-biblical Jewish literature in antiquity, stories implying some kind of miraculous birth circulated in abundance in the various corners of the ancient world, both among Jews and among pagans. It is necessary, therefore, to form an idea of the cultural background . . . of the writers and the readership of the New Testament before tackling the Gospel accounts themselves.

To grasp the import of the imagery associated with miraculous births, we must bear in mind that in the age and in the civilisation of Jesus the knowledge of physiology was fairly rudimentary and the mystery of fertility was steeped in religious awe. In pagan antiquity fruitfulness was thought to depend on special gods or goddesses and in biblical Judaism on the one God of Israel. According to the colourful language of the Hebrew Bible, this God had the power to close the womb or to open it. If he closed it, the woman remained sterile. If he opened the womb, she became fertile. In short, in some sense every pregnancy was seen as mediated by God, as a divine gift, but some more so than others. However, in the Jewish view, even a miraculous, ie, heavenly assisted, conception presupposed prior sexual intercourse. The spouses were expected to play their part . . .

Original article posted here.