Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (14 page)

It is important to realize that a book of good news is not the same as straightforward reported news, or its more aged and academically respectable relative, history. The writer Jan Morris once recalled being advised by the Sudanese Minister of National Guidance, soon after the Second World War, that as a foreign correspondent she should try to report 'thrilling, attractive and good news, corresponding, where possible, with the truth'. That might sound cynical, but Ms Morris felt that the minister, an austere man, spoke more wisely than might at first appear, and she fruitfully bore it in mind in her career in journalism.
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The minister's words provide a model of how we might approach the Gospels in a spirit which goes beyond cynicism. We may pare away the non-historical from the probably historical elements in Christian sacred literature, but that is in order better to understand the motives and preoccupations which led to the shape of the good news constructed by the first generations of Christians. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the stories of the birth of Jesus.

Only two out of four Gospels, Matthew and Luke, have narratives of this birth in Bethlehem at the end of the reign of King Herod the Great (73-4 BCE), and outside those narratives, there is much to direct the alert reader to a contrary story. John's Gospel is most explicit when it records arguments among people in Jerusalem, once Jesus had grown up and his teaching was making a stir: some sceptics pointed out that Jesus came from the northern district of Galilee, whereas the prophet Micah had foretold that the Jews' Anointed One, the Messiah, would come from Bethlehem in Judaea, in the south.
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The other three Gospels - even the Gospels with stories of his birth in Bethlehem - repeatedly refer to Jesus as coming from Galilee, or more precisely from the village of Nazareth in Galilee. In fact outside the text of the two birth narratives, the Gospels do not refer to Jesus being born in Bethlehem, nor does any other book of the New Testament.

Luke's birth narrative, the more elaborate, explains that Jesus's parents travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem at the time of Jesus's birth because they had to comply with the residence terms of a Roman imperial census for tax purposes, 'because he was of the house and lineage of David'.
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This does not ring true: the idea is based on Luke's ancestor list for Jesus, designed to show that he was linked to King David a thousand years before, which was a matter of no concern whatsoever to Roman bureaucrats. Implausibilities multiply: the Roman authorities would not have held a census in a client kingdom of the empire such as Herod's, and in any case there is no record elsewhere of such an empire-wide census, which would certainly have left traces around the Mediterranean. The story seems to embody a confusion with a well-attested Roman imperial census which certainly did happen, but in 6 CE, far too late for the birth of Jesus, and long remembered as a traumatic event because it was the first real taste of what direct Roman rule meant for Judaea.
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The suspicion therefore arises that someone writing a good deal later, rather hazy about the chronology of decades before, has been fairly cavalier with the story of Jesus's birth, for reasons other than retrieving events as they actually happened. This suspicion grows when one observes how little the birth and infancy narratives have to do with the later story of Jesus's public ministry, death and resurrection, which occupies all four Gospels; nowhere do these Gospels refer back to the tales of birth and infancy, which suggests that the bulk of their texts were written before these particular stories. We must conclude that beside the likelihood that Christmas did not happen at Christmas, it did not happen in Bethlehem.

Why, then, were the stories created? One motive for locating the birth in Bethlehem might be precisely to settle the argument noted in John's Gospel about Jesus's status as Messiah of his people Israel: it answered the sceptics who pointed out the problem with Micah's prophecy. But there is much else to these stories, all reflecting the deepening conviction among followers of Christ that this particular birth had profound cosmic importance. Matthew's and Luke's preoccupations diverge - one would not realize from listening to the harmonization of fragments of them in Christian Christmas celebrations that the Gospels agree in hardly any detail about Jesus's infancy. The narrators intend to recall more ancient stories in the minds of the hearers by applying them to the coming of Jesus the Christ. So Matthew raises an echo of Moses by sending Jesus and his parents in flight to Egypt from the murderous King Herod: once more, a birth is imperilled, innocent children are killed by a worldly ruler, and yet the one child survives in Egypt to be a deliverer for Israel.

Matthew and Luke provide two ancestor lists for Jesus which agree very little in the personnel involved and whose distinct patterns seem to have different preoccupations.
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Christians quickly felt uncomfortable about these divergent families, producing explanations which, as recorded by the early-third-century scholar Julius Africanus ('the African'), are masterpieces of far-fetched genealogical speculation.
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Matthew's list unconventionally includes descent through women, unlike Luke's; a strange bunch those women are, all associated with eyebrow-raising sexual circumstances and also, Jesus's mother, Mary, excepted, with non-Jews. The messages here seem to be that Jesus (and maybe also the circumstances of his birth) transcends petty conventions of behaviour in Jewish society, and also that even while he is a Jew, his destiny is confirmed as a universal one, not simply for the benefit of Jews.
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The same thoughts run through the whole Gospel narrative which is given Matthew's name: of all the Gospel writers, he is the most concerned to define how far and in what ways the Christian community for whom he is writing can depart from Jewish tradition while still observing its spirit. His Jesus says that he has come to 'fulfil' Jewish Law, not 'abolish' it, and piles up quotations from the Law, only to plunge far beyond them in rigour, punctuating his thrusts with the repeated phrase 'But I say to you . . .'
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Whoever added Matthew's infancy narrative shared the agenda of the main creator of the Gospel. The messages would be understood and appreciated by the Christian congregation which first heard Matthew's text recited or chanted in its worship.

Furthermore, Matthew's and Luke's ancestor lists are in their present form pointless. They claim to show that Jesus could be described as the Son of David; in fact Luke goes further, taking Jesus back to Adam, the first man. Yet they do this by tracing David's line down to Jesus's father, Joseph. Both then defeat their purpose by implying that Joseph was not actually the father of Jesus. Matthew does it by abruptly ending the genealogical mantra 'father of' after the generation of 'Jacob the father of Joseph', continuing 'Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born'. Luke is more directly indecorous by calling Jesus 'the son (as was supposed) of Joseph'.
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These rather lame phrases cannot be other than emendations of the rival texts, designed to accommodate the rapidly growing conviction of Christians that Jesus's mother, Mary, was a virgin in human terms and became with child by the Holy Spirit. Matthew describes the announcement of the miraculous birth as being made to Joseph, but Luke gives the experience to Mary, and it is striking that Christian devotion and Christian art have overwhelmingly concentrated on Luke's account of an 'Annunciation' to Mary and have ignored Joseph's equal revelation. It is a surprising reversal of the normal priority offered to men's experience in the ancient world, and it reflects the early growth of a complex of Christian emotional and devotional needs attached to Mary and her role in Christ's story. In the centuries which followed, Christians went further, coming to insist that Jesus's mother remained a virgin throughout her life. A proclamation of Mary's perpetual virginity meant commentators clumsily making the best that they could of clear references in the biblical text to Jesus's brothers and sisters, who were certainly not conceived by the Holy Spirit (see p. 597).

This tangle of preoccupations with Mary's virginity centres on Matthew's quotation from a Greek version of words of the prophet Isaiah in the Septuagint (see p. 69): 'Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel'. This alters or refines the meaning of Isaiah's original Hebrew: where the prophet had talked only of 'a young woman' conceiving and bearing a son, the Septuagint projected 'young woman' into the Greek word for 'virgin' (
parthenos
).
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This Christian use of the Septuagint was either cause or result of changing perspectives on Jesus, which emerged out of what is likely to have been a cacophony of opinions and assertions among his first followers, trying to make sense of the extraordinary impact of this Jewish teacher. Most of the cacophony is lost to us because it does not survive in written form, but we can glimpse in the biblical text one view of Jesus as the coming Messiah from David's line, or as another Moses, the ancient Deliverer. These perspectives were not lost, but voices emerged to acclaim Jesus as having a Father who was divinity itself, and these voices are now those overwhelmingly dominant in the New Testament.

The Tanakh had on rare occasions referred to Israel's God as Father, but the idea sprouts mightily within the New Testament, where Jesus is portrayed as constantly referring to God as Father. He actually produces one of his most remarkable innovations by calling God '
abba
', an Aramaic word equivalent to 'Dad', which had never been used to address God before in Jewish tradition, and whose peculiar novelty was attested by being kept in its Aramaic form in the Greek text of the New Testament. There is further proof that this notion of an intimate Fatherhood between God and humanity is a basic layer of Jesus's message: he goes beyond self-reference. In 'The Lord's Prayer', which lies at the heart of Christian approaches to God, he tells his disciples to pray to
their
Father in Heaven - though the followers address God not as
abba
but by the ordinary Greek word for 'father',
patr
.
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The birth and infancy narratives in the Gospels therefore provide an excellent example of the way in which those biblical accounts which are hardly historical in themselves reveal a great deal about the historical circumstances in which they were created. But much of the history of the Gospels themselves is history of the time after the life of Jesus himself. What can we know of Jesus's life, death and original message? There is some shakiness even about dating, but that might be expected for a man who came from an obscure corner of the ancient world and whose death seemed at first a matter of little consequence amid the great affairs of the empire. Nearly two centuries later, Julius Africanus, one of the first great scholars of the ancient world to be a Christian, tried to piece together a coherent chronology for Christian events. He placed the Saviour's birth in a year which he reckoned as the 5,500th from Creation; this calculation became embedded in the work of later historians, such as the sixth-century Dionysius Exiguus ('the Short'), who has often wrongly stolen credit from Julius for fixing the first Year of the Lord (
annus Domini
). Alas, Julius's figures were themselves wrong, because they were based on a misdating of the death of King Herod the Great, making it three years too late.
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The significance of this is that both Matthew's and Luke's infancy narratives place Jesus's birth in the final year or so of Herod's reign, and Herod's death actually took place in 4 BCE.
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Assuming (although it is a large and even illogical assumption) that we can place more faith in the infancy narratives' chronological fix on Jesus's birth than in their general claims for a birth in Bethlehem, it is likely that Jesus was born in that same year, 4 BCE.

THE ADULT JESUS: A PUBLIC CAMPAIGN

Once we leave the birth and childhood stories and leap over the almost total silence in all four Gospel narratives about Jesus's next two decades of life, we reach the brief but crowded action of his campaign or 'ministry' of public preaching, teaching and healing, and we find much more circumstantial narratives. This story of good news nevertheless still bristles with problems of historical interpretation. One date alone looks fairly secure: Luke's Gospel carefully places the beginning of a parallel ministry by John 'the Baptist', said to be a cousin of Jesus, in the year 28-9 CE; Jesus himself underwent a baptism in the River Jordan at the hands of John.
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This immediately preceded Jesus's own independent appearance on the public stage; Jesus's campaign may have been something of a rival movement, given the vigorous assertions of Jesus's superiority to John to be found in all the Gospels.
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Luke asserts that Jesus was about thirty when he began his public ministry: this indicates that the death of Jesus took place some time between 29 and 32 CE, depending on how many years he was engaged in his proclamation, and assuming his birth some time around 4 BCE.
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The Gospels do not give a definite answer as to whether Jesus's ministry lasted for one year (John) or three (Matthew, Mark and Luke), or where its main focus lay within the Holy Land. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke speak of a ministry spent mostly in Galilee in the north, with a final southward journey to Jerusalem; the evangelist John, by contrast, deals mostly with activity in the south, Judaea, focusing especially on the city and the Temple.

Scholars from a Western Christian or Enlightenment background have now spent more than two centuries trying to reach through the filters of the four Gospels and the letters of Paul to find a 'real' Jesus and an 'authentic' version of what he actually said: it has been perhaps the most thoroughgoing and sophisticated analysis of any set of texts in the history of human thought. Many Christians have found the accumulation of this scholarly activity distressing and destructive, but after all that sifting, there is much that we can say about what Jesus preached. Naturally we are inclined to ask what was 'new' or 'original' in what he said, but that question may be misguided and distort what was important in his teaching; not only were there a good many wandering teachers like him at the time, but it may have been precisely the ideas he shared with his contemporaries and predecessors which were most significant at the time and first won a hearing through their familiarity. One of his central commands is a commonplace of ancient philosophy, and is a conclusion at which most world religions eventually arrive: 'whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them' - what has come to be known as the Golden Rule.
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