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The Trouble with Birth Stories
Reverend Brian J. Kiely,
Unitarian Church of Edmonton, December 9, 2001
In the 1880's Unitarianism and Universalism were thriving in North
America.
It was the Golden Age. Our religious ancestors were busy reshaping
the society in which they lived. They had led the fight against slavery
and won.
They had begun the Red Cross and made great strides in Canada and
the US in treating the insane with compassion. They led in the development
of public education. From our family tree had come the first women
ministers and women physicians in both Canada and the United States.
The magic year of 1900 was approaching, and our foremothers and fathers
were working hard to make that a year for transforming the world.
"Onward and upward forever" was the cry of this age. There
was deep belief that progress in all fields of endeavour was both
our
mission and our destiny. Our faith was solid and bright and rooted
not in the past but in a belief of the future.
But the great transformation did not come in 1900 or 1910, and then
came the Great War of 1914-18. Never had such devastation been
witnessed by North Americans. That so many died was one thing.
That so many died in brutal misery for futile causes was another.
Military ineptitude and outdated tactics defeated the belief in
the dawning golden age. The war was a crushing blow for this spirit
of progress.
In the decades that followed both Unitarianism and Universalism
lost their way , as did many other religions. People began to think
religion was futile, that God had abandoned them...or that maybe
God was dead.
Universalism nearly disappeared and Unitarianism shrank terribly.
We no longer had that bright future in which to believe. So where
could we place our faith?
In the 1930's an answer emerged: if we can no longer depend on God
to work with us to build a perfect world, we will have to depend
on ourselves. Starting with a handful of Unitarian and Universalist
ministers, the Humanist movement was born.
So why begin a sermon on the stories surrounding the birth of Jesus
with this tale from our history. Why, to make a point. Briefly that
point is this: Humans are creatures of hope. In order to hope they
must have faith in something. When that faith is dealt a severe blow,
the flame of hope is diminished, sometimes even extinguished, but
in time it is rekindled, for human beings must have hope.
When our religious ancestors lost faith in God's "glorious
golden city" promised by 19th century optimism, they found,
in time, another way to believe and to be hopeful. They adapted their
theology to a new age. They didn't renounce their faith in progress
completely, they just remodeled the interior. They based their faith
in humanity itself.
The wheel has turned again in the last 70 years, and some of us
are rediscovering a modest faith in a divine power, but not like
our ancestors. Faced with a terrible destruction of belief, Unitarians
and Universalists found a way to rekindle hope and belief.
I suggest that the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke came into
existence in exactly the same way. They were the flints with which
early Christians rekindled their faith. As Jesus seminar scholar
John Shelby Spong wrote, "There was nothing objective about
the Gospel tradition. These were not biographies. They were books
designed to inspire faith."
Like 20th century Unitarians and Universalists, early Christians
faced a faith crisis. The followers of Jesus had been devoted and
passionate. They believed he was going to remake the world, throw
off the Roman yoke and bring religious and political renewal to the
Jewish people.
Then he was arrested and executed like a common criminal. Hope died
in that moment. But a month later, at Pentecost, the disciples regathered
and found the first faint glimmers of faith and hope. They realized
that while Jesus was dead, the message he preached still lived. And
they began to preach.
But early Christians still faced what Archbishop Spong calls the
'scandal of the cross': what do you do when your leader is dead?
Well, the apostles had found new courage in a fresh vision of a
risen Jesus. Did he rise in body or did they just rediscover his
spirit and his message and find the courage to continue in their
own hearts? Well, that's a matter of personal belief, and beyond
the scope of this sermon. I will take that one up closer to Easter.
What did develop in the first years after the Crucifixion was a
belief that Jesus was the Son of God, a new idea emerging after his
death. It wasn't a claim he ever made, but a title given later by
his followers trying to make their case. But Jesus as Son of God
presented a second problem, a second need. If Jesus was the Son of
God, where did he come from? How did he get here? Christians were
claiming that he was a king, but detractors noted he was anything
but royally born. In their world kings had blood lines and ancestry.
Jesus wasn't even from Jerusalem, but from the backwater of Gallilee.
In short he was a nobody.
John Spong writes, "Never, would these birth narratives have
been created had not the experience with the adult Jesus cried out
for an explanation. Who is this man? Whence has he come? It took
years for the birth stories to be formed. They did not appear in
written form until the ninth decade of the Christian era."
About 30 years after the death of Jesus, the first Gospel (Mark's)
appeared. But Mark sidestepped the whole birth problem by starting
his narrative with the baptism of Jesus. What to do?
There are actually two answers, and they are quite different, as
different as the two carols we have already sung today. Our first
song, We Three Kings comes from Matthew's Gospel. The story of the
star, of three wise men coming and bowing down before the child -
not in a stable, but in the family home in Bethlehem, and the flight
into Egypt in order to escape King Herod are all part of Matthew's
account.
Our first verse of second carol, The First Noel, reflects Luke's
account of the birth. Here there is an angelic chorus appearing to
the shepherds. There is the story of the census and the long journey
from Nazareth to Bethlehem and the magical birth in a stable.
In later verses The First Noel mixes in Matthew's story, something
we do commonly today. . Our culture has merged these stories so that
we think the two songs just refer to different scenes in the story.
But that's not true. The narratives differ in significant degree.
You would think the shepherds in their fields as they lay would
have noticed that brilliant moving star against the night sky.You
would think Matthew would have mentioned his wise men arriving in
a stable, and you would think the two of them would have at least
agreed on the name of Jesus's
grandfather. But they don't.
Luke has shepherds and an angel. Matthew does not. Matthew has a
star three wise men and the flight into Egypt. Luke does not. Oh,
and neither of them has kneeling cattle, camels, talking animals
or little drummer boys.
The narratives, while both quite beautiful, are different in many
of the details. In fact the points of agreement are few: Joseph and
Mary are the parents, although Joseph is not the biological father.
Joseph is of the house of David. Angels appear proclaiming the special
nature of Jesus to the parents, although in Matthew Joseph receives
the message, in Luke, Mary does. The birth comes after Mary and Joseph
start living together and he is born in Herod's reign.
All the rest, the Magi, the star, the shepherds, the census, no
room at the inn, the slaughter of the holy innocents by Herod, the
dreams
and visions and perhaps most significantly Jesus's family tree
differ dramatically in the two accounts.
So the obvious question is why?
Well, according to John Shelby Spong, the answer is fairly simple.
Luke and Matthew were both confronted with several problems to solve.
As well they were trying to reach very different audiences. These
two factors meant they would come up with different literary solutions.
The problems they faced were these: one was the question of Jesus'
low birth, already mentioned.
A second is that Mary became pregnant out of wedlock. In Matthew's
account Joseph is planning to quietly divorce her. There is obviously
some point of shame to be managed here. It may even have been that
Jesus was born out of wedlock to an unknown father. But if we make
Jesus the Son of God and make Mary a pure virgin, well, problem solved.
But there is still a third issue whether God was the father or not:
Jesus grew up in Nazareth. In a country where practically every
rock had some major biblical event associated with it, Nazareth
was an absolute nowhere place to be from. If Jesus was the Son
of God, then it would help the cause immeasurably if he was born,
however poor, into a kingly lineage.
So both writers moved the birth to Bethlehem. Why? Because that was
the town where King David had been born, and the place where the
prophet Micah had predicted would be the home of the redeemer.
Matthew just made that his home town allowing Jesus to move to Nazareth
later. Luke devised the idea of the census to get the family to travel
for about five days. Different solutions, but problem solved.
Why were two solutions needed? Well, for one thing, Matthew and
Luke probably did not know each other. They lived in different countries
and moved in different Christian communities. They couldn't get together
on a single narrative.
Second, Matthew and Luke had different audiences to satisfy. Matthew
was likely a Jewish scholar. He wrote for Jewish Christians. In the
years between Jesus's death and his writing there had been a Jewish
revolution, crushed by the Romans. The temple of Jerusalem had been
destroyed and Jews were being scattered.
Matthew constructed his Gospel to show Jesus as the new Emmanuel,
the promised Messiah of the Jewish people. He wrote his events
to make the story to conform to Jewish prophecy, or to echo ancient
Scriptures.
Isaiah wrote "Behold a young woman will conceive a child and
she will give birth to a son and they will name him Emmanuel." Matthew
quotes him. Note Matthew does not call Mary a virgin. When the first
translations of the Old Testament were made into Greek from Hebrew,
the word for young woman was mistranslated into virgin. Since Matthew
the Jew was working with Hebrew
text, he missed that error. (Mt 1:23 and Isa 7:14). For him, Mary
remained a young woman.
By the way, Isaiah's prophecy actually pertained to his own king
a few centuries before and the birth of his son Hezekiah. Isaiah
knew the queen was already pregnant "something unknown to the
public" and he used this coming birth as a way to predict an
end to a war before the child was seven.
The star was likely a reference to the star which ascended in the
sky to mark David's greatness in the book of Numbers.
And, "We three kings" refers to two quotes in Isaiah
where he predicts gifts of gold and frankincense would be brought
by
king and princes.
In short, Matthew's agenda was to convince Jews that Jesus was the
fulfillment of prophecy.
On the other hand, Luke wrote the perfect Greek of a native speaker.
In fact he was the only non-Jew to write anything in the Bible. He
was writing to the non-Jewish audience that had been Christianized
by Paul and other missionaries. True, he also refers at times to
the prophets, but more to move the narrative along than to establish
Jesus's credentials.
Luke copies the errors in the Old Testament translations into Greek,
and that's how Mary becomes a virgin.
Luke has the angels deliver their message to the shepherds, not
kings. He was trying to say Jesus was sent by God to empower the
outcasts and dispossessed. He was more interested in the divine connection
than in setting up Jesus as a new Messiah come to restore the Jewish
nation. The annunciation to shepherds also sets up a later narrative
device where he gives Jesus the role of shepherd of men that is still
so popular today.
So how did we get those troublesome discrepancies in the birth narratives?
We had two authors in different parts of the Roman empire writing
for different audiences and trying to make different but similar
claims for the divinity of Jesus.
Well, here we are, 2000 years later. In popular Christian culture
the stories have been merged. Even the justifications for the discrepancies
are buried in history. I know when I was a boy I always had shepherds
and angels and sheep and cows and three wise men to place carefully
in our stable-like church.
Few people even bother anymore to ask the questions I have been
posing. And that begs one last, "Why?"
I think the answer goes beyond Christianity, and I think it comes
back to the premise with which I began. We humans need hope. The
time of winter solstice has always inspired festivals of hope and
promise in nearly any culture you can name. In the dark of the year
we need something to which we can cling, some belief which inspires
us not to surrender in the darkness or in times of despair, but which
inspires us to carry on.
And can there be anything more inspiring than the difficult birth
of a much wanted miracle child? UU religious educator Sophia Lyon
Fahs writes in my favorite Christmas reading:
Each night a child is born is a holy night--
A time for singing,
A time for wondering
A time for worshipping. (616)
Friends, for 335 days of the year I am a complete skeptic, throwing
my lot in with the scholars and marveling at how so many members
of the human race can be taken in and dare to believe the literal
word of these so obviously contrived Gospels.
Then December arrives, with its dark and cold time. Like the earth
beneath my feet, my soul feels the cold clutch of the dying year.
It is then, when at low ebb and most in need of hope rekindled, that
I forget the scholars and choose to believe in the underlying truth
of the Birth narratives
"
that hope is always available to us. For a time, I choose to believe
in the miracle" or at least a miracle of Christmas.
A child is born in the greatest act of renewal we as a species can
know. That's enough of a miracle for me.
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