As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.
Greeted by red skies this morning, I find myself trying to remember the little poem about sailors and red skies. "Morning" rhymes with "warning", so I'm thinking the fiery vistas along the ridgeline to the north and east are a harbinger of the snow we've been promised, aptly on April Fool's Day.
For it surely doesn't feel like winter has any more power over this place in 2021. I jogged outside yesterday for the first time in months, creaking down the hill and past the cemetery, then back up to the apartment where Peg had arrived home early to begin baking in earnest for the balance of the afternoon. This morning the volume of the birdsong outside led to the discovery that we'd left the windows cracked in the solarium overnight, an unthinkable mistake only a couple weeks ago.
So yesterday I wrote for an audience of two, probably a blessing in light of the rather pugnacious tone of the essay. I referred to my home state as "dumb," and poked humorlessly at those involved in the MAGA spectacle. Perhaps worst of all, this Holy Week, I questioned the virgin birth and the resurrection. Okay, "questioned" is perhaps not an accurate characterization; I called them "whoppers" that helped explain the credulity of their adherents in matters of politics and such. Strong stuff. My former bishop would be aghast.
Let's take the temperature down a bit, and look at both assertions from a perspective of faith tempered by critical thinking. Because you can, after all, profess a Christian faith that questions the propositions that are woven into our religious tradition. There is no Gospel narrative that paints Saint Thomas as a bad guy.
The virgin birth, to address the first "whopper", stands on a thin factual reed; if one were in a trial and tasked with assembling enough circumstantial evidence to deliver the question to a jury, I would predict with confidence the trial would end with a directed verdict, a judicial ruling that because no reasonable jury could conclude it's true, we should just send these nice people home rather than making them deliberate.
Let's start with the origins of the story, with scripture. The earliest writings in the New Testament, Paul's authentic letters, make no mention of a virgin birth. In fairness, however, they say pretty much nothing about Jesus's life and teachings, concentrating on the resurrection and its implications for humanity. The earliest Gospel, attributed to Mark, begins at Jesus's baptism--there is no nativity story here at all. Moreover, Mark suggests that Jesus's divinity arrives at the moment of baptism, that he's just a guy standing in line for John's ritual dunking when the Holy Spirit descends on him. The remainder of the narrative is as much about Jesus figuring out his own identity as it is about letting us all in on this secret and compelling us to proclaim what we've learned to the world.
I could digress further here and talk about how in some of the earliest Christian communities, Jesus's divinity does not actually manifest until the resurrection, a belief now long lost beneath centuries of dogmatic detritus. Too much seminary, or maybe not quite enough.
So, no one had much to say about wise men and shepherds and Mary holding a secret in her heart about a procreative visit from Elohim until, maybe eighty years after Jesus's birth, the stories we all know from Matthew and Luke are first written down (John, like Mark, has no nativity story, but for precisely the opposite christological reason--in John's view, Jesus is eternally divine, crashing the creation story in Genesis, and when we first meet him he's walking around John the Baptizer's camp like he owns the place because he is, after all, God the Son). Why did the authors of the last two synoptics include this story? By this time the brand of messianic Judaism that became Christianity was jostling around with others in the religious marketplace. Those others had their own nativity stories. Perseus, Amenhotep, even Augustus--all had similar demigod origins. Perhaps we just needed our own version, particularly given the nasty, shameful circumstances of our Lord's demise.
Matthew and Luke also seemed to seek a way to make Jesus's life a fulfillment of passages from the Hebrew Bible, as a means perhaps of selling the new revelation to a skeptical Jewish audience. I almost said "prophecies", but the old authors weren't so much describing a distant future as their own present, seen through a religious lens. The census that led Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, or the massacre of the innocents? They probably never happened, based on the complete lack of historical evidence (the Romans were assiduous record keepers), but the census is necessary because of the need for a Davidic messiah, and David's line was from Bethlehem. The massacre narrative seems to arise out of a passage in Jeremiah, and of course echoes in some ways the Passover myth. Then there is the matter of the Gospel writers getting their Old Testament passages in Greek rather than the original Hebrew, leading them to rely on the mistranslation of "almah" in the Book of Isaiah as "parthenos" in Greek, the former meaning "young woman" and the latter meaning, among other possibilities, "virgin", to conclude that this story of pregnancy in some ancient palace was foretelling the birth of a messiah to a virgin.
Then there is the biology. Don't get Peg started on that one, and don't aske me to explain it because my last biology class was in 1979, and I got a "B". I pretend to understand her when she refers to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as the "Holy Haploid". Look it up.
So, the whole Christmas thing? Indefensible nonsense. But we'll still hang decorations at Wyldswood in December, listen to carols, and mist up when Linus recites the nativity story at the end of "Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown". Because as metaphor, if not literal truth, it says something beautiful about our relationship with a divinity that is both immanent and transcendent, a part of us by choice if we are open to the relationship. I don't need a manger in Bethlehem for that.
The resurrection is a little trickier. Like the nativity, it has significant parallels in the resurrected god stories throughout the Near East. Osiris comes to mind, but you could fill Valhalla with a gathering of gods who died and came back to life. There was also the awkward attempt by the later Gospel writers (again not Mark, who ended his story with Mary Magdalene and friends running screaming down the path from the empty tomb, because something very weird had apparently happened the night before) to shoehorn Jesus's death and resurrection into the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible. They have trouble keeping their story straight, and by the time we get to the Gospel of John Jesus is leading beachside fish fries for his former disciples after having been stone dead a few days before. These embellishments call into question at least the details we are told about the events following the crucifixion.
But we cannot just roll our eyes at the resurrection as an invention for rubes. Paul tells us in his First Letter to the Corinthians that there were at that time, maybe two decades after the crucifixion and resurrection, eyewitnesses to those events. There exists no such direct evidence of the nativity story. And consider the behavior of those earliest followers, risking their very lives and wandering the Mediterranean with a story so remarkable it must have seemed risible to many, particularly as it was delivered by a group largely comprised of Galilean bumpkins. Those guys saw something during that first Eastertide. They may have misunderstood, may have polished their memory over the passage of years afterward, but clearly they saw something so remarkable they were all willing to walk away from their everyday lives to proclaim it. And their spiritual successor, that supreme cheerleader and religious thinker Paul, spoke of little else in his writings; indeed, he goes on to state in First Corinthians that without the resurrection his faith is in vain.
So we cannot just brush off the resurrection as a creation of its authors. That is not to say we must all agree on what actually happened, or what meaning we ascribe to it. The latter is the great question of an examined Christian life, and we only fail when we either glibly deem the question answered by our dogma and creeds, or turn away from the challenge as not worth pursuing. As Rilke counseled a century ago, we should love the questions, and perhaps without realizing it we will live into the answers.
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