How Much Do You Know About Christmas?
When I was in my senior theology class, around Christmas our teacher gave us a little handout. It contained a list of questions about the first Christmas, and our task was to identify what was actually explicitly stated in Scripture and what was just tradition. I recall being rather embarrassed at how many traditions I said were Scriptural (you can imagine how hard that was on a Presbyterian!). Do a Google search for the Christmas IQ Quiz if you’d like to try for yourself.
Anyway, my Christmas post will be a discussion of what we know about Christmas as opposed to what we have just developed traditionally. I have come to the conclusion that most Christmas traditions, though very probably untrue, are usually innocuous and maybe even helpful. They’re kind of like historical fiction- maybe not literally what happened, but a way of experiencing and appreciating the event in a deeper sense anyway.
First the biggie: when was the first Christmas? The short answer is no one knows for sure. In Back to the Future, Doc Brown gives it as December 25, 0000. Well, we know that’s untrue since the whole A.D. calendar system (which is not actually in Scripture) is in error. Herod the Great died in April of 4 B.C., so the first Christmas could not have happened after that. Also, the A.D. system does not have a Year 0; I think it starts with 1 A.D. following 1 B.C.
We know neither the year nor the date with certainty. I’ll come back to the date in a moment. As for the year, we have that Herod killed the babies in Bethlehem two and under because of what the Magi had told him, and he died in April of 4 B.C., so 6 B.C. is the most straightforward reading. But then we run into problems because the most straightforward reading of Luke is that Jesus began His ministry after 29 A.D. at about thirty years of age, not thirty-five. The problem is not insoluble and has many reasonable solutions. You can pick your own theory you want to ascribe to. It’s an interesting curiosity, but no more than that. Certainly there’s room for argument on all sides such that we don’t have Luke contradicting Matthew or the other histories of the era. One of the more likely explanations is that Herod killed the boys two and under because he wanted a margin of error of several months. He was a paranoid psychopath who didn’t take chances with letting his own children live, let alone someone else’s.
The exact date we’re even shakier on. There’s nothing in Scripture to confirm and probably nothing to deny that it was December 25. Many years ago I read a theory that used Zechariah’s order of the priesthood, the six months between Elizabeth’s conception and Mary’s annunciation, and so on to fix the date of Christ’s birthday at the Festival of Tabernacles. I’m not sure the data is precise enough for that level of exactitude, but it shows you that a very plausible case can be made for something that’s not December 25. The fact that the shepherds were in the fields does not necessarily contraindicate December 25 as is often supposed since we see indications that animals for Jewish sacrifices were kept in the open even during winter. What we do know is that that date was selected during Constantine’s reign to compete with Saturnalia, the Roman festival on December 25. Prior to that, the early Church doesn’t seem to have celebrated Christmas much.
But here’s where the tradition is perfectly helpful. Many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere have major festivals around the Winter Solstice. That’s why it’s the Holiday Season. We get the term Yule from the Germanic festival of the time. I’ll admit my Celtic ancestors were a little peculiar when they celebrated their winter festival on November 1 (starting it the night before- hence we get Halloween), but the point is people have some of their greatest festivals right before or at winter.
When you consider the dire circumstances most cultures found themselves in when they came up with these festivals, it makes sense. These were subsistence farmers and pastoralists, and it would be no unusual thing for them to freeze or starve to death over the winter. Thus they made one last celebration in anticipation of spring’s return and the revival of the earth after the deadness of winter. Does that not accord with the Christmas message of a Savior being born to save those dead in their trespasses? And more explicitly we know that Easter, which celebrates His return from the dead, occurred in the spring, when these cultures were celebrating the return of their flora and fauna (“Easter” actually comes from the pagan goddess Yostre whose festival was celebrated around that time, which is why I’d prefer we call it something like Resurrection Sunday instead).
The snow we associate with Christmas is part and parcel of this effect. “See amid the Winter’s Snow” is one of my two favorite carols (the other being “All My Heart this Night Rejoices”), but there’s nothing in the Bible to say there was snow and nothing to say there wasn’t. Just the same, the snow of white Christmases in the past would have added to the depiction of life from death, which is what the carols mentioning snow try to do.
Unfortunately, the winter- and spring-festival aspects have overshadowed Christmas and Easter. Everyone knows what they commemorated when the festivals started, but they prefer to celebrate things that draw on the old folklore and customs, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Still, for centuries, these great holidays would have resonated with the atmosphere and landscape the celebrants found themselves in, much as the calendar of festivals God gave Israel followed the highlights of their agricultural calendar.
What about the Three Kings? Well, I love the carol “We Three Kings,” but that’s not true either. Basically they were a caravan of Parthian scholars and astronomers the number of which we don’t know. Given the magnitude of the occasion, I suspect there were more than three, even if we know they gave three gifts. And they certainly didn’t rub shoulders with the shepherds. Luke says the shepherds saw Christ in a manger, but Matthew records the Magi coming to a house.
But does this mean it’s wrong to depict royalty and impoverished shepherds together in our nativity scenes? Well, maybe not technically correct, but as a composite it captures the spirit of the Christmas message. Matthew focuses on Christ’s royalty, that is, His descent from David that makes Him the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That’s why he focuses his story on Joseph, the son of David, and the Magi. Luke presents Christ’s humility, which is why he focuses on Jesus’ impoverished mother and the shepherds. The Magi were counselors to kings while the shepherds’ statements weren’t even admissible in court. Jesus is the Savior of both kinds of people, and He makes them all brothers, so I think it’s lovely to put peasants and kings owning Him together, as “What Child Is This?” says.
While we’re on the subject of nativity scenes, it’s by no means certain that Jesus was born in a stable. What we know is He was given a manger for His first bed because He was not allowed in the inn. We can’t be certain why. Either the innkeepers didn’t have room for them, or they didn’t want them there (perhaps they didn’t like that Mary was an unwed mother). It’s equally likely, though, given the customs and geography of the area, that He was born in a cave. Often herders kept their animals in caves. And remember how David hid in one near Bethlehem when the Philistines occupied the town and the Three Mighty Men got him a drink from his old well? It seems to me that a stable is easier to depict in 3-D art than a cave, though, so I have no problem with the stable tradition.
There was no Little Drummer Boy in the story until the Great Depression. That song is a 20th century invention. Again, though, I see very little wrong with it because it showed people at a time when many were in despair and felt like failures that even the humblest gifts to God are accepted.
And then there’s the controversy over how exactly the angels expressed themselves when they glorified God. This one really polarizes people that have thought about it, I’ve found. On the one hand, some of the greatest carols make lovely verses and refrains about the angel choir singing, but on the other hand the critics insist that the word always used for angel proclamations is “saying.” They then conclude that humanity has been given the inestimable privilege of being able to sing praises to God and that angels can’t.
Well, it would take a better Greek scholar than I to answer this question definitively. I just thought you should be aware of the issue. I will say that I’ve read that the Greek word used for “saying” can refer to “singing” and that Revelation 5:9 shows the four living creatures, presumably angels, “singing a new song, saying…” The Greek word for “saying” is the same as that used of the angels in Luke. Whether the angels really sang in melody or shouted in prose, I think the references to them singing in the carols are beautiful and make for good songs for humans to sing.
In art, angels are portrayed an awful lot as beautiful young ladies or winged infants. I’m not sure where the women came from, and the winged infants seem to have more to do with Cupid, but they’re both wrong. Angels take quite a few forms in the Bible, but when they take a human form, it’s invariably that of a man, particularly a young man. Not that angels actually have gender since Jesus said they don’t marry; that’s just the form they take.
Well, this is one tradition I do not support because it obscures rather than opens up the Biblical message. When angels come on the scene, the universal human reaction, with one exception, is one of fear. Usually the first thing the angel says is, “Do not be afraid.” John the Apostle was so moved by the sights of two angels that he tried to worship them. I maintain that Araunah the Jebusite, who kept threshing his grain even with the Angel of Death standing over his threshing floor, was the bravest human to have ever lived, other than Jesus. Anyway, I think depicting angels as women and children is a way of making them less intimidating, and that’s not a good thing. Angels are intimidating because they are holy servants of a holy God and we’re not holy, and that’s not something we should lose sight of or gloss over.
On the whole, Matthew and Luke tell us what we need to know about Christmas, but they don’t tell us everything we think we know about Christmas. Matthew presents the birth of the long-awaited King of Israel and what was the political response to this king, and Luke shows how Jesus came in the world in the most abject humility to be the Savior of all kinds of people, even the lowliest. I really doubt they would have anticipated the much more detailed narrative we’ve woven around their histories. Christmas is one of the two major events in most churches’ calendars, and yet it only gets four chapters in the Gospels. Mark and John don’t even mention it! Anyway, while I think we make much more out of Christmas than the first Christians did, I think most of what we’ve added to the story is on the whole beneficial.