Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] 12 Days of Christmas Day 2 the Myth of the First Christmas by Bart Ehrman Here now is the second of my 12 favorite Christmas posts of years gone by in our celebration of the 12 days of Christmas.
[00:00:15] Once more the season has come upon us as it heart Stanton the tale of 2000 year old vintage the Christmas Story. Or perhaps we should say the Christmas Myth.
[00:00:26] When post Enlightenment scholars turned their critical tools on the tales of scripture, the birth of Jesus to a virgin in Bethlehem was one of the first subjected to skeptical scrutiny. Not only was the notion of a virgin birth deemed unhistorical on general principle, the other familiar aspects of the story were also seriously called into question.
[00:00:46] The story comes to us as a conflation of episodes found only in two of our gospels, Matthew and Luke. The Gospels of Mark and John begin with Jesus as an adult and give no information about the unusual circumstances of his birth.
[00:01:00] Combining these accounts into a mega story for an annual Christmas pageant bears a cost, as they are seriously at odds with one another. Matthew alone has the wise men bearing gifts. Luke alone has the shepherds watching over their flocks by night. Matthew alone portrays the wrath of Herod, foiled as an attempt to destroy the child. When Jesus is warned by an angel to flee with the family to Egypt, Luke alone mentions that the whole world is to be taxed by Caesar Augustus, forcing Joseph and the pregnant Mary, both from the town of Nazareth in the northern part of Israel, to return to Joseph's ancestral home in Bethlehem to register.
[00:01:38] It's while they are there that Jesus is born before the three return home a month later.
[00:01:44] These two versions of the events cannot be reconciled. In Matthew, Joseph and Mary actually live in Bethlehem before, during, and after the birth. They leave to escape the king's wrath and only later relocate to Nazareth. Not so for Luke, who introduces the census precisely to take the couple to Bethlehem so that the child can be born where the Hebrew prophet Micah had predicted.
[00:02:08] Moreover, if Matthew is right that the holy family fled to Egypt, Luke can scarcely be right that they returned home just a month after the birth.
[00:02:19] Not only are the accounts at odds, each is problematic on its own terms.
[00:02:24] Matthew introduces the star leading the wise men to Jesus. A star that moves, stops over a city, disappears, reappears, moves again, and finally stops over a small town directly over a particular house.
[00:02:39] This was no star, no comet or supernova, and this is no historical narrative.
[00:02:45] So too was Luke's tax, requiring the whole worldwide census.
[00:02:50] Joseph registered in Bethlehem because his ancestor King David came from there, but David lived a thousand years before Joseph. Are we to believe that everyone in the Roman Empire returned to the home of their ancestors a thousand years earlier. They all knew where to go, and no other ancient source mentions it.
[00:03:12] Then again, none of these stories is mentioned in any other ancient source. But why would they be? They are all part of a complex myth. The myth is designed to show that Jesus really did fulfill prophecy, starting with the very beginning of his life. Both Matthew and Luke told stories to make it happen, so that Mary was a virgin who gave birth in Bethlehem. Even though the accounts cannot be historical, we all have myths, stories that buttress our view of the world and that make our understandings of it appear natural. Myths that are religious, national, cultural, political or economic.
[00:03:48] This is true whether we are Christian or Jewish or Muslim, or Hindu or humanist. Whether we are English, American, French, Cambodian or Chinese. Whether we are capitalists, Marxists or anarchists, or none of the above.
[00:04:03] We should be careful not to denigrate too quickly the myths of others, as those tables are oh so easily turned. But we should also recognize myth for what it is. The myth of Jesus birth contains good news for believers. It maintains that we are not alone. God came into the world to save us from ourselves and from others, from the evil, the pain, the misery and the suffering that is otherwise the lot of mortals here on earth.
[00:04:28] At the same time, it's easy to see the problems with this myth. The Christ child who brought good news to his followers brought very bad news for others. Not just the innocents of Bethlehem who were slaughtered in his wake, but also those Jews who refused to come and worship him in the manger.
[00:04:44] The myth, needless to say, had some very bad aftereffects in the centuries that follow.
[00:04:50] Myths are like that, and not just the Christian ones. They can have a dark underside, often obscured for their devotees.
[00:04:57] Even a myth so seemingly innocent as a babe laid in a manger.
