The First Christmas

by Marcus J. Borg

  These examples are not meant as a condescending comment about how little people really know about these stories. Rather, they suggest the need to read and hear these stories anew, seeking to see them in their rich distinctiveness.

  It is not impossible to harmonize them. Indeed, they have been harmonized for most of Christian history, their stories combined or their differences set aside or not seen. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with harmonizing, no point in condemning Christmas pageants or artistic or musical renditions that do so. But there is great value in recognizing their differences and reading them as separate stories. Reading each as a separate narrative and paying attention to the details of the texts enriches these stories and adds greatly to their power. Meaning grows larger, not smaller.

  To avoid a possible misunderstanding, recognizing the differences is not about pointing out “contradictions,” as debunkers of the stories often do. In their minds, the differences mean that the stories are fabrications, made-up tales unworthy of serious attention. That is not our point at all. Rather, paying attention to the distinctiveness and details of the nativity stories is how we enter into the possibility of understanding what they meant in the first century and might still mean for communities of faith today.

  Though this approach leads to results that are surprising to some, it is hardly radical. To put it simply, our approach to these stories is: “Read the texts—and pay attention.” Doing so should be the basis for all serious reading of the Bible.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PARABLES AS OVERTURES

  In this chapter, we begin by reporting how the stories of the first Christmas are seen within contemporary biblical scholarship. We then turn to important questions. What kind of stories are theses? What is their purpose, their function? And how is each connected to the gospel that it introduces?

  THE NATIVITY STORIES IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY

  A consensus of mainstream biblical scholarship sees the stories as relatively late in the development of early Christianity. Matthew and Luke were most likely written in the last two decades of the first century, in the 80s or 90s CE. They are not the earliest Christian writings. That honor belongs to the genuine letters of Paul, written in the decade of the 50s, and to the gospel of Mark, written around the year 70.

  In Mark and Paul, there is no mention of an extraordinary birth of Jesus. Mark begins his gospel with Jesus as an adult; his birth is not mentioned at all. Though Paul refers to his birth twice, he does not mention that it was exceptional. In Romans 1:3, Jesus was “descended from David according to the flesh.” In Galatians 4:4, Jesus was “born of a woman, born under the law.” But there is no hint that his birth was unusual. Finally, we note that the gospel of John, though later than both Mark and Paul and probably later than Matthew and Luke, does not have a birth story either.

  From this scholarly consensus about the dating of Matthew and Luke in relation to earlier Christian writings flows an obvious inference: stories of Jesus’s birth were not of major importance to earliest Christianity. Mark wrote a gospel without referring to Jesus’s birth, as John later did. Though the end of Jesus’s life—his crucifixion and resurrection—are utterly central to Paul, he says nothing about how his life began.

  From this inference flows a second highly probable inference: the reason that references to a special birth do not appear in the earliest Christian writings is either because the stories did not yet exist or because they were still in the process of formation. In either case, these stories are relatively late, not part of the earliest Christian tradition about Jesus.

  FACT, FABLE, OR PARABLE?

  We turn now to crucial questions for hearing and interpreting the stories of the first Christmas. What kind of stories are these? What is their purpose? What did their authors intend them to be? What is their literary genre?

  A recent television special on the birth of Jesus posed the question this way: are these stories fact or fable? For many people, Christians and non-Christians alike, these are the two choices. Either these stories report events that happened, or they are no better than fables. For most people today, fables do not matter much. They might be entertaining for children, but need not be taken seriously.

  Thus it is important to realize that there is a third option that moves beyond the choices of fact or fable. This book is based on the third option. We see the nativity stories as neither fact nor fable, but as parables and overtures. Later in this chapter we describe what it means to see them this way. But first we explain how the options of fact or fable arose.

  The issue of the factuality of the birth stories is recent, the product of the last few hundred years. In earlier centuries, their factuality was not a concern for Christians. Rather, the truth of these stories (including their factual truth) was taken for granted. Their truth, and the truth of the Bible as whole, was part of conventional wisdom in Christian areas of the world. It was part of “what everybody knew.” Believing them to be true (including factually true) was effortless. Nobody worried about whether they were factually true. All of the interpretive focus was on their meaning.

  The same was true of the early chapters of Genesis with the stories of creation, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, Noah and the great flood, and the tower of Babel. Premodern Christians saw them as stories of the way things happened. There was no reason for them to think otherwise. It didn’t take faith to believe in them, just as it didn’t take faith to believe in the factuality of the nativity stories.

  Many of us have a childhood memory of hearing the birth stories this way. Most of us who grew up Christian took their factuality for granted when we were young children, just as people in the premodern Christian world did. We heard them in an early childhood state of mind known as “precritical naïveté.” In this stage, we take it for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our life regard as true is indeed true. So it was for both of us. Whether these stories were factual was not an issue. Indeed, Marcus can remember as a child looking for the star of Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, thinking that perhaps it appeared every year on the night of Jesus’s birth.

  THE IMPACT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

  But this precritical way of seeing the birth stories has become impossible in the modern world, for Christians and non-Christians alike. The reason is the impact of the Enlightenment, which began in the seventeenth century with the emergence of modern science and scientific ways of knowing. It generated a new period of Western cultural history commonly called “modernity.” Modernity’s effect on the world has been enormous; its technological achievements are the most obvious result.

  Of greatest importance for our purposes, modernity has pervasively affected how modern people think. It produced what has been called the “modern mind,” a mind-set that shapes all of our thinking. The Enlightenment generated an understanding of truth and reality very different from that in the premodern world. In philosophical terms, it generated a new epistemology and a new ontology. The former focuses on “How do we know?” and “What is true?” The latter focuses on “What is real?” and “What is possible?”

  To begin with the first, the Enlightenment led many people to think that truth and factuality are the same. Its mind-set was (and is) concerned with the distinction between truth and superstition, truth and fable, truth and traditional authority, truth and belief. The primary basis for the distinction is the modern scientific way of knowing, with its emphasis on experimentation and verification.

  In the minds of many people, this has led to the notion that truth is what can be verified—and what can be verified, of course, are “facts.” The contemporary scholar of religion Huston Smith calls this notion “fact fundamentalism,” even as he rejects it. According to this way of thinking, if something isn’t factual, it isn’t true.

  Fact fundamentalism has impacted Christians as well as those who are skeptical of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Many in both groups agree that a statement or story is true only if it is factual.
Among American Christians, this is a major reason why at least half affirm a literal-factual understanding of the Genesis stories of creation and of the Bible as a whole, including the birth stories. In their minds, if these stories aren’t factual, then they are not true, and the Bible itself is not true. Christian biblical literalism is about biblical factuality, and it is rooted in fact fundamentalism. As such, it is not ancient, but a product of the recent past.

  The Enlightenment had an additional effect. The modern mind is shaped not only by fact fundamentalism, but by a worldview—an image of reality, of what is real and what is possible, a big picture of “the way things are.” With the Enlightenment came a worldview very different from premodern worldviews, a new ontology. Within the modern worldview, what is indubitably real is the space-time universe of matter and energy, operating in accord with natural laws of cause and effect.

  This worldview, this vision of what is real and what is possible, has shaped everybody who lives in the modern world, even those who reject it. We internalize it simply by growing up in the modern world; it is what we are socialized into. It affects believers and nonbelievers alike.

  Its view of what is real and what is possible makes the central claims of religion questionable. Within this framework, what happens to claims about a nonmaterial reality, about spiritual reality, about God? Prior to the Enlightenment, the reality of God was taken for granted; it didn’t require “belief.” Indeed, God was seen as “more real” than the world. But the Enlightenment worldview reverses this. This world—the space-time universe of matter and energy—is what seems unmistakably real, and the reality of God has become questionable.

  Thus the modern worldview engenders skepticism about stories of spectacular events such as those narrated in the nativity stories. Do things like this ever happen—supernatural interventions, virgin births, special stars, angelic visitations? At the same time that truth became identified with factuality, the factuality of the birth stories was called into question by the modern worldview.

  In this cultural context, the choice of seeing the birth stories as fact or fable emerged. Many find their factuality difficult and even impossible to believe. Things like those reported in the stories don’t happen. Some may also be aware that stories of divine conceptions are, if not a dime a dozen, relatively common in the ancient world. This is the way ancient people spoke about figures of great importance. And some may also point to the differences in the birth stories as yet another reason to see them as not factual, and thus not true.

  CHRISTIAN RESPONSES

  Christians have responded in more than one way to the impact of the Enlightenment on the stories of the first Christmas. The most publicly visible form of Christianity insists on their factuality, in spite of the doubts generated by the modern worldview. This response, which we call “conscious literalism” or “insistent literalism,” is very different from the taken-for-granted literalism of our premodern ancestors and from the precritical naïveté of childhood. Conscious literalists are aware that the events in these stories are hard to believe and yet insist, with varying degrees of intensity, that they are factual. Conscious literalism is modern, grounded in the fact fundamentalism of the Enlightenment.

  These Christians counter the notion that spectacular events like those in the stories don’t happen by affirming that they are supernatural interventions by God. Often they claim that because God is all-powerful, God can do anything, and that doubting the factuality of these stories is to doubt the power of God. In their judgment, skepticism flows from lack of faith.

  In conservative Christian circles, a fairly common theological orientation reinforces a literal-factual interpretation of the virgin birth: if Jesus wasn’t conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin, then he isn’t really the Son of God. If he had a human father, he’s just like us, not really special. For them, Jesus’s status as divine is at stake. “Do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin?” becomes a test of faith, a test of Christian orthodoxy.

  For some, there is a second theological factor, the notion of “original sin.” One understanding of “original sin” sees it as transmitted from generation to generation through sexual intercourse. Christians who see it this way think that if Jesus was conceived in the normal human way, he would have inherited original sin and thus could not be the sinless sacrifice that atones for the sins of humankind. For them, what is at stake in the virgin birth is nothing less than the saving significance of Jesus’s death.

  For these Christians, the factuality of the virgin birth and the nativity stories matters a great deal. Defending them against the thought that they might be fables is imperative. But note that both biblical literalists and modern skeptics agree: if these stories aren’t factual, they aren’t true. And if they aren’t factual, then the Bible and Christianity aren’t true.

  But there are also many Christians who reject the notion that the truth of Christianity is dependent upon a factual understanding of these stories. Like the skeptics, they wonder whether virginal conceptions ever happen. Some are aware of other problems with understanding the nativity stories factually. But uncertainty about the stories does not lead to a skeptical rejection of the Bible and Christianity. For them, that is not at stake.

  Yet many of these Christians are unsure about what to make of the birth stories. If they’re not factual, what are they? What is the alternative? Are they simply the imaginative product of early Christians, with no more significance than other ancient fables? Or is there an alternative way of seeing them?

  THE BIRTH STORIES AS PARABLE

  To say the obvious, deciding how to read these stories involves an interpretive decision. This is true even when they are read literally and factually; the stories do not come with a footnote that says, “These are factually true stories.” There is no non-interpretive way of reading them. Every way of reading them involves an interpretive decision about the kind of stories they are. Making an interpretive decision means asking: what has each way of interpreting them got going for it? How adequately does it account for what we see when we pay attention to what is in the text?

  To state our interpretive decision, we best understand the nativity stories and their meanings by treating them as neither fact nor fable, but as parable. Parable is a form of speech, just as poetry is a form of speech. It is a way of using language.

  The model for our understanding of the nativity stories as parable is the parables of Jesus. They were his most distinctive style of teaching. More parables are attributed to Jesus than to any other figure in the Jewish tradition. The most famous of them—the prodigal son and the good Samaritan—are as well known among Christians as the nativity stories. Almost as well known are parables like the workers in the vineyard, the unmerciful servant, the wicked tenants, the shepherd and the lost sheep, and the woman and the lost coin.

  Parabolic Truth

  By definition, a parable is a narrative, a story. As in all stories, something happens. This is true even in the shortest of Jesus’s parables: a man discovers buried treasure in a field, a merchant searches for fine pearls, a woman puts leaven in flour, a woman searches for a lost coin. People do things in parables; something happens. But no one worries about whether the events in parabolic narratives are factual. Parable as a form of language is about meaning, not factuality. The meaning of a parable—its parabolic truth—does not depend upon its factuality.

  Parables are thus a form of metaphorical language. The metaphorical meaning of language is its “more-than-literal” meaning, the capacity of language to carry a surplus of meaning. A parable is a narrative metaphor, a metaphorical narrative, whose truth lies in its meaning.

  All Christians agree about this. They see Jesus’s parables as meaning-filled and truth-filled, as meaningful and truthful stories. Yet no Christian we know of worries about whether the parables are factual. Everybody agrees that Jesus made them up. To think that they are reports of factual events or that their truth depends on their factuality is t
o misunderstand them and their purpose.

  Imagine somebody wanting to argue that the parables of Jesus do report factual history and that their truth depends upon that. That person says there really had to have been a Samaritan who compassionately came to the aid of a victim of violent robbery on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, or else the story isn’t true and shouldn’t be taken seriously. If it’s not fact, it’s fable. Everybody would say, “No, that’s not the point.” Suppose our hypothetical factualist were to continue by saying, “But he’s just making this stuff up!” Everybody would say, “You’re just not getting it—you are debating historicity and avoiding the question of meaning,” or, much less politely, in language we would never use, “It’s a parable, dummy.”

  Our point is obvious: the parables of Jesus matter and they are truthful even though they’re not factual, even though they’re “made-up” stories. For those who have ears to hear, they are full of truth. The application to the birth stories is equally obvious. To see these stories as parables means that their meaning and truth do not depend on their factuality. Indeed, being concerned with their factuality risks missing their meaning and truth, just as arguing for a real good Samaritan would miss the point. The truth of parabolic language does not depend on its factuality.

  Jesus told parables about God and the advent of God, the coming of God’s kingdom. His followers told parables about Jesus and his advent, the coming of the bearer of God’s kingdom. In this sense, we see the birth stories as parables about Jesus. We focus on their more-than-literal, more-than-factual meanings. To see these stories as parabolic or metaphorical narratives does not require denying their factuality. It simply sets that question aside. A parabolic approach means, “Believe whatever you want about whether the stories are factual—now, let’s talk about what these stories mean.” Meaning, not factuality, is emphasized.