[Dialogue] Spong and Xmas (with an Exodus encore)

[KroegerD@aol.com]

December 22, 2004
The Meaning of the Christmas Myths 

It is a beautiful time of the year. The celebration is in full swing. The 
symbols, some sacred, some quite secular, mingle in the market place: Bethlehem 
and the North Pole, the Angel Gabriel and Rudolf, the Heavenly Host and Santa's 
reindeer, crèche scenes and Christmas trees. It is also a season in which 
light hurls back the darkness of the winter solstice. Christmas captures our 
imaginations as few things ever do. Unfortunately the religious minds of our 
generation believe that these traditions can be protected from erosion only if they 
are literalized. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The deepest meaning 
of this season can never really be understood until literal claims have been 
laid aside. Jesus' birth was not something that occurred on a silent and holy 
night in the little town of Bethlehem. No star announced his birth and no 
angels sang of peace on earth. These mythical details rather embody a beautiful 
and eternal human dream that we enter symbolically year after year. Let me 
briefly analyze the data.
Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus was a late developing part of the Jesus 
story that did not appear until the writing of the Gospel of Matthew in the 
9th decade of the Christian era, when people began to claim that since Jesus was 
the anticipated messiah, he had to be the heir to the 'throne of David.' That 
idea carried with it the assumption that this future leader had to be born in 
the "City of David." The early Christians found scriptural authority for this 
claim in the prophet Micah, an 8th century BCE figure, who had written " But 
you O Bethlehem, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, but from you 
shall come forth from me one who is to be the ruler of Israel, whose origin is 
from of old, from ancient days."
Matthew had the scribes of Herod quote this text to the Wise Men as he 
directed them to Bethlehem. So important to Matthew was Jesus' royal lineage that he 
opened his gospel with a long genealogy, that we call the 'who begat whom' 
chapter, to document this claim. So Matthew tells his readers that Mary and 
Joseph actually lived permanently in a house in Bethlehem. It was such a specific 
house that a star could stop and shine directly on it to guide the wise men to 
their destination. It was a house that Matthew says they had to abandon when 
informed in a dream that their child was at risk from King Herod, who like the 
Pharaoh of old, was destroying Jewish male babies in an attempt to wipe out 
the promised deliverer. It was a house to which this family could return from 
Egypt when they heard that Herod had died. It was a house they abandoned once 
again when they learned that Herod's brother, who was equally dangerous, was 
now on the throne. This time they fled to Galilee and that, Matthew implies, is 
how Jesus just happened to grow up in Nazareth and why he became known as a 
Galilean and a Nazarene. Matthew's myth of Jesus' birth presents him as a new 
Moses, so that as God once led the chosen people out of Egypt, so God could now 
lead the chosen messiah out of Egypt. This narrative so clearly serves 
Matthew's apologetic purpose that it cannot be confused with history. The 
overwhelming probability is that Jesus was born in Nazareth, which is the clear 
assumption in Mark, the earliest gospel. Matthew, who had Mark before him when he 
wrote, is the one who altered the tradition.
Luke, writing near the end of the 9th decade or perhaps even early in the 
10th decade (88-93 CE), treated the developing Bethlehem tradition quite 
differently. Like Mark, Luke is quite clear that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth. 
However, he too must address the growing idea that Jesus, as messiah, is the 
heir to the Royal line of David. So Luke seeks to temper his story of Jesus' 
Nazareth origins (which were becoming too humble a place of birth for so great a 
person) to accommodate the Bethlehem tradition. His literary device for doing 
this was a census that he dates by saying it was ordered by Caesar Augustus 
when Quirinius was governor of Syria. This census, by which "all the world was to 
be enrolled," required, according to Luke, that every male person must return 
to his ancestral home to be registered. This meant, said Luke, that Joseph 
had to go to Bethlehem, a 94-mile journey from Nazareth, for he was of the house 
of David. So Joseph just happened to be in Bethlehem when his wife delivered 
her first-born child. Through this accident of history, Luke argues, the 
scriptures were fulfilled in Jesus. It was a very ingenious solution indeed since 
it enabled Luke to combine Jesus' obvious Nazareth origins with the fantasies 
building around Jesus, proclaiming him the Messiah born in the city of David.
The most preliminary study will reveal, however, that the story is not 
history. Luke and Matthew, for example, both say that Herod was king at the time of 
the birth of Jesus. Since secular records reveal that Herod died in 4 BCE, 
this means that Jesus had to be born before this date. Luke then says that the 
enrollment, ordered by Caesar, came when Quirinius was governor of Syria. 
Secular records, however, reveal that Quirinius became governor of Syria in 6-7 CE, 
by which time Jesus would have been at least 10-11 years old. History begins 
to wobble visibly.
Luke's theory required that this worldwide enrollment had to occur in the 
male person's ancestral home. This was the strangest literary wrinkle of all and 
would have required a massive dislocating migration. David, who had 300 wives, 
died about the year 960 BCE. Luke was asserting that all of the descendents 
of King David, whose number some 960 years later must have been legion, not 
only had to know this ancestral detail about themselves but they also had to make 
their way back to Bethlehem. This was a time in which human longevity made 
three generations a century normative, so we are talking about 27-30 generations 
of keeping family lines alive. To my knowledge no one, in that time when 
there were no birth or death certificates, to say nothing of marriage licenses, 
was that deeply into ancestor worship. It is also of interest that the 
genealogies of Jesus in both Matthew and Luke do not agree in almost any detail, 
including which of King David's sons constituted the royal line: it was Solomon says 
Matthew, Nathan says Luke. No one knows who Nathan is but if a man had as 
many wives as David, certainly one of his sons might have been called Nathan, or 
anything else for that matter. These genealogies also disagree on who Jesus' 
grandfather was: Jacob, says Matthew, Heli, says Luke.
A final note that makes Luke's story clearly not history is that on this 
journey to Bethlehem Joseph was said to have taken his wife, who was "great with 
child." Why? To be enrolled? Women were not counted in a census, or registered 
for tax purposes. Women also did not normally travel. Given the mode of 
transportation available in that day, walking or riding a donkey, what man in his 
right mind would take an eight months plus pregnant woman on a 94 mile walk or 
donkey ride, that would normally take seven to ten days and in a world with no 
restaurants or hotels? One woman biblical scholar, on reading this observed, 
"Only a man who had never had a baby could have written such a story." No, the 
Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus is not history. It is part of the later 
developing mythology that gathered around the origins of Jesus. A person as 
significant as Jesus was believed to be when these later gospels were written could not 
have had an ordinary birth; so Matthew and Luke, 50 to 60 years after the 
crucifixion, freed their imaginations and created these miraculous tales that form 
our Christmas stories.
Once the mythical content of the Bethlehem birthplace is established, all the 
other details of these birth narratives fall as literal history. Ancient 
astrologers did not follow a star announcing the birth of a Jewish king, 
especially one that no one recognized as a king until well after his death. Recall that 
Matthew says later that this king was also a carpenter's son. Nor do angels 
sing to hillside shepherds, propelling them on a similar journey to search for 
a baby. Luke gives the shepherds only two clues. The baby would be wrapped in 
swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. We do both the Bible and human 
scholarship a grave disservice when we try to literalize and make history out of 
these interpretative myths, created by the second or third generation of those 
who were the disciples of this Jesus. No reputable biblical scholar in the world 
today, Catholic or Protestant, treats these narratives of Matthew and Luke as 
history. It is time the church said that publicly. 
Why do we then keep these stories and repeat them every year if they are not 
factually true? That is usually the question of an adult who has had his or 
her fairy tale religion shaken. The answer is simple. Truth is so much bigger 
than literalism. The meaning of Santa Claus, who receives his greatest joy by 
giving gifts to children, is not dependent on there being a literal fat elf 
dressed in red who lives in a place to which we can never go. Some human 
experiences are so large, so real, so life changing and so defining that the words used 
to describe those moments must break open the imagination if they are to 
capture this kind of truth. That is what myth does. That is what the biblical 
stories of Jesus' birth are all about. There was something present in this Jesus, 
they said, that opened human lives to new dimensions of reality. Human beings 
could never have produced what we have experienced in Jesus. In him, they 
exclaimed, we believe that we have met eternity breaking into time, transcendence 
entering the mundane, the divine in the life of the human. If that is our 
experience with the adult Jesus, then his birth must have been marked with 
heavenly signs that drew people to him. 
That is what these stories are trying to say. Our task is not to master the 
details or to pretend that myths are history. It is rather to enter the 
experience that caused the myths surrounding his birth to be born, to be transformed 
by that life and to become a new creation through that experience. If that 
occurs, these early Christians were saying, we too will see the star of 
Bethlehem, hear angels sing, and like the wise men and shepherds of old, begin our 
journey toward the mystery and wonder of God. Bethlehem, the symbolic town where 
God and human life come together, is finally our human destiny. That is the 
meaning of Christmas. 
-- John Shelby Spong
Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Susan via the Internet writes: 
I have read some of your essays and your comments concerning the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ. This leads me to a question: Do you believe Exodus 14:21-23? 
Is it possible that God actually separated the Red Sea and that there was a 
wall of water on the left and the right as the Israelites were led out of 
Egypt? 
Dear Susan, 
In a word, the answer is no. No, the biblical story at the Red Sea is not 
history. But that answer would be too simple to open the story to its real 
meaning so let me amplify.
The first thing you need to be aware of is that the Book of Exodus, part of 
the Torah, was written over a period of time from about 950 to 450 B.C.E. Moses 
lived around 1250 B.C.E. So some 300 years passed at a minimum between the 
life of Moses and the biblical stories written about Moses. Even though the 
first five books of the Bible are called "The Books of Moses," there is no chance 
that he actually wrote them. There is an overwhelming probability that as the 
stories of Moses were retold over that 300-year period of time, they grew in 
their dramatic and miraculous details.
Second, the story depicts God as little more than a tribal deity who rescues 
the Chosen People and drowns the hated Egyptians. That is not a very pleasant 
view of God if you happen to be an Egyptian!
Third, this story presents God as a supernatural external miracle worker who 
invades history to accomplish the divine will and who does not act always in a 
moral manner. Drowning the Egyptians in the Red Sea after having afflicted 
this nation with plague after plague, including the killing of the first-born 
male in every Egyptian household, is hardly God-like behavior. If God is capable 
of acting in this way, then every time God does not intervene in history to 
rescue people in peril, God must be blamed for that peril. This would make God 
responsible for such things as the Holocaust and the AIDS epidemic in Africa. 
A God who has the power to stop evil and who does not do so cannot be called 
moral.
Fourth, we live in a post-Newtonian world that we understand to be ordered by 
precise laws governing nature. This story was written inside a worldview that 
was open ended, filled with magic and miracles.
Fifth, some scholars have suggested that the original kernel of truth behind 
this story was that the escaping slave people crossed the Sea of Reeds rather 
than the Red Sea. The Sea of Reeds was a swampy marsh land that escaping 
slaves might have been able to maneuver on foot but the heavily-armored Egyptians 
with their iron chariots would become hopelessly mired, thus allowing a 
successful escape for the slaves into the wilderness. As the story was told and 
retold, it became more and more miraculous.
Sixth, the Exodus was celebrated annually in the liturgy of the Jews called 
the Passover. Liturgy meets a very different set of needs from those of 
remembered history. This passage from Exodus reflects liturgical shaping.
Finally, if one reads the Bible as history and fact, one will never 
understand its message. Yes, there was an Exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt but 
that is not what the Scriptures are describing. They are telling us the 
heightened story of that moment when they became free, their dependence on God, 
their celebration of their national life and their ongoing worship experience. The 
Bible is the sacred story of a people walking through history with their God, 
seeking to understand who they are and who God is. Literalize it and it dies.
Thank you for asking. I addressed this and hundreds of other similar issues 
in my book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. You might find that book 
helpful if you want to pursue this further.
-- John Shelby Spong

Dick Kroeger
65 Stubbs Bay Road
Maple Plain, MN 55359
952-476-6126