The First Christmas

by Marcus J. Borg

  And that is quite mild compared to the later Christian program for that Great Final Battle in the book of Revelation, where “the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles” (14:20).

  Another answer was conversion in a Great Final Feast at the symbolic place of Mt. Zion. All the nations would be converted, not to Judaism, but to the God of justice and peace. Here is that magnificent vision. It is also from Micah, but is repeated verbatim—except for the final verse—in Isaiah 2:2–4:

  In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills. Peoples shall stream to it, and many nations shall come and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. (Mic. 4:1–3)

  Along with that vision of a great divine arbitration among all the nations to establish war no more, there will also be a great feast with the very best food and drink:

  On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. (Isa. 25:6–8)

  There are, in other words, two utterly divergent descriptions of God’s final solution to the existence of imperialism, one violent and the other nonviolent, one extermination in a Great Final Battle and the other conversion at a Great Final Feast. They are both there from one end of the Christian Bible to the other. Which one, do you think, is announced by those Christmas stories? When Luke’s angels announce “peace on earth” to those shepherds at Bethlehem, is it peace through victory or peace through justice?

  THE ADVENT OF THE MESSIAH

  Next comes the second of those two questions given above. Comes that day of the Great Divine Cleanup of the World, would God use some intermediary figure for that transformation of the world? Would God have some Messiah or Christ—that is, some Anointed One—as viceroy or administrator for the establishment on earth of the kingdom of God?

  Here are two examples of that pre-Christian Jewish expectation of such a Messiah. They are deliberately chosen because one speaks of that eschatological viceroy as “Son of David” and “Lord Messiah,” while the other lacks those titles but speaks instead of “Son of God” and “Son of the Most High.” They both date to the final half of the first century BCE.

  The first example is from the Psalms of Solomon. Its matrix is the first direct experience of violent Roman power within the Jewish homeland. Pompey conquered Jerusalem and desecrated its temple in 63 BCE: “A man alien to our race…a lawless one laid waste our land…. He did in Jerusalem all the things that gentiles do for their gods in their cities” (17:7, 11, 14). But in 48 BCE Pompey was assassinated on an Egyptian beach: “His body was carried about on the waves in much shame, and there was no one to bury him” (2:27). So surely soon, surely now, God would,

  raise up for them their king, the Son of David…to smash the arrogance of sinners like a potter’s jar; to shatter all their substance with an iron rod; to destroy the unlawful nations with the word of his mouth…. He will judge peoples and nations in the wisdom of his righteousness…. All shall be holy, and their king shall be the Lord Messiah. (For) he will not rely on horse and rider and bow, nor will he collect gold and silver for war. Nor will he build up hope in a multitude for a day of war. (17:21, 23–24, 29, 32–33)

  On the one hand, this coming Messiah is not exactly a pacifist, and the Romans seem destined for extermination rather than conversion—recall those two eschatological alternatives from above. On the other hand, he is certainly not a military Messiah organizing a rebellion against Rome. Notice that phrase about “the word of his mouth” (17:24) and its later repetition as “the word of his mouth” (17:35) and “the strength of his word” (17:36). That ability to destroy one’s enemies by “word” alone is a transcendental ability akin to the creative word of God in Genesis 1.

  The other example is from a Dead Sea Scroll fragment found in Cave 4 at Qumran—hence its designation 4Q246:

  He will be called Son of God, and they will call him Son of the Most High. Like sparks of a vision, so will their kingdom be; they will rule several years over the earth and crush everything; a people will crush another people, and a city another city. Until the people of God arises [or: until he raises up the people of God] and makes everyone rest from the sword. His kingdom will be an eternal kingdom, and all his paths in truth and uprightness. The earth will be in truth and all will make peace. The sword will cease in the earth, and all the cities will pay him homage. He is a great god among the gods [or: The great God will be his strength]. He will make war with him; he will place the peoples in his hand and cast away everyone before him. His kingdom will be an eternal kingdom…

  You can see in that text, as with the “one like a human being” in Daniel 7 above, that an individual figure, “Son of God” or “Son of the Most High,” has an “eternal kingdom” along with “the people of God.”

  Those two texts serve to emphasize two very complex questions concerning the expectation of an intermediary protagonist for God’s eschatological transformation of the world. First, is this figure to be violent or nonviolent? And, if violent, how will that violence operate? Second, is this figure to be human or transcendent? And, if transcendent, how will that transcendence operate?

  One final point. It is not accurate to distinguish the imperial kingdom of Rome from the eschatological kingdom of God by claiming one is earthly the other heavenly, one is evil the other holy, or one is demonic the other sublime. That is simply name-calling. Both come to us with divine credentials for the good of humanity. They are two alternative transcendental visions. Empire promises peace through violent force. Eschaton promises peace through nonviolent justice. Each requires programs and processes, strategies and tactics, wisdom and patience. If you consider that peace through victory has been a highly successful vision across recorded history, why would you abandon it now? But whether you think it has been successful or not, you should at least know there has always been present an alternative option—peace through justice.

  That clash of visionary programs for our earth is the context and matrix for those Christmas stories, and they proclaim God’s peace through justice over against Rome’s peace through victory. But before we turn to consider them in detail in this book’s Part II, we look one more time at the Roman Empire in the Jewish homeland around the time Jesus was born.

  THE VIEW FROM THE NAZARETH RIDGE

  In scholarship’s best reconstruction, Jesus was born just before the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE. But upon that death, there were uprisings all over the Jewish homeland, and some of them had clearly messianic overtones—violent attempts to replace an unjust and Rome-appointed tyrant with a just and God-appointed ruler. But at that time there were no first-rank legionary forces, only second-rank auxiliary troops stationed in Israel. So, in order to put down those rebellions, the Syrian legions guarding the Euphrates frontier against the Parthian Empire—Rome’s only serious threat—had to strip that protective screen and leave their northern bases. They came, in other words, not only to fight, but to punish as wel
l. When we are finished with you this time, they said, we will not have to return at least for a couple of generations. There was, among those rebellions, one at Sepphoris, capital of the Galilee, just a few miles north of Nazareth. There, according to Josephus’s Jewish War, a rebel named Judas “raised a considerable body of followers, broke open the royal arsenals, and, having armed his companions, attacked the other aspirants to power” (2.56).

  Rome had three legions in Syria; the governor, Varus, sent first one and then two more of them southward to Israel. That meant, as you will recall from above, about eighteen thousand elite troops accompanied by two thousand auxiliary cavalry and fifteen hundred auxiliary infantry. Their staging area was at Ptolemais on the Mediterranean coast due west of Sepphoris. Then, as Varus took his main force south, he “at once sent a detachment of his army into the region of Galilee adjoining Ptolemais, under the command of his friend Gaius; the latter routed all who opposed him, captured and burnt the city of Sepphoris and reduced its inhabitants to slavery” (2.68).

  What do you think happened to small adjacent villages when the legions struck their local city with fire and sword? What do you think happened to Nazareth, a tiny hamlet about four miles, or an hour and a half’s walk, over the Nazareth ridge and across the floor of the Beth Netopha valley?

  Josephus does not give any detailed description of what happened around Sepphoris in 4 BCE, but we can apply to Nazareth what happened when the Syrian legions under Vespasian marched southward against the next rebellion in 67–68 CE. At Gerasa, or Jerash, on the other side of the Jordan from Sepphoris, Lucius Annius “put to the sword a thousand of the youth, who had not already escaped, made prisoners of women and children, gave his soldiers license to plunder the property, and then set fire to the houses and advanced against the surrounding villages. The able-bodied fled, the feeble perished, and everything left was consigned to the flames” (4.488–89).

  For Nazareth, in 4 BCE, either there was timely flight to hiding places well known to the local peasantry, or its males were murdered, its females raped, and its children enslaved. If they escaped, the little they had would be gone when they returned because, as another rebel said, when you had nothing, the Romans took even that. “They make a desert and call it peace.”

  Jesus grew up in Nazareth after 4 BCE, so this is our claim. The major event in his village’s life was the day the Romans came. As he grew up toward Luke’s coming-of-age at twelve, he could not not have heard, again and again and again, about the day of the Romans—who had escaped and who had not, who had lived and who had died. The Romans were not some distant mythological beings; they were soldiers who had devastated Nazareth’s backyard around the time of his birth. So this is how we imagine, as close to history as possible, what his actual coming-of-age might have entailed.

  One day, when he was old enough, Mary took Jesus up to the top of the Nazareth ridge. It was springtime, the breeze had cleared the air, and the wildflowers were already everywhere. Across the valley, Sepphoris gleamed white on its green hill. “We knew they were coming,” Mary said, “but your father had not come home. So we waited after the others were gone. Then we heard the noise, and the earth trembled a little. We did too, but your father had still not come home. Finally, we saw the dust and we had to flee, but your father never came home. I brought you up here today so you will always remember that day we lost him and what little else we had. We lived, yes, but with these questions. Why did God not defend those who defended God? Where was God that day the Romans came?”

  PART II

  GENEALOGY, CONCEPTION, AND BIRTH

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GENEALOGY AS DESTINY

  Most Christians and many non-Christians could tell you the basic story of the conception and birth of Jesus. But they would probably never mention the detailed genealogies given to him in Matthew 1:1–17 and Luke 3:23–38. That may well be wise, because to start with a long list of ancestors may be the best way to kill a story—see Appendix 1. We ourselves are aware of that risk in starting here with those genealogical lists. We do so quite deliberately, because they are a first and most emphatic signal about the nature and purpose of these two nativity stories. Nowhere is it so clear as in these two genealogies that theological metaphor and symbolic parable rather than actual history and factual information create and dominate the Christmas stories of the conception and infancy of Jesus.

  We are willing to make that point in even stronger terms. If you understand properly what minimal history but maximal theology those genealogies contain, you will recognize the similar balance in the Christmas stories as a whole. Understand the purpose of these genealogies, and you will understand the purpose of the parabolic overtures in Matthew and Luke. In fact, just as the overtures are miniatures of the gospels, so are the genealogies miniatures of the overtures.

  Here is the sequence for this chapter. First, we look at the differences and then the similarities between those two genealogies. Next, based on that data, we interpret the separate function of each genealogy—first Matthew’s, then Luke’s—in terms of their specific Christmas stories and succeeding gospels. Finally, returning to that first-century historical context, we ask why genealogies were significant enough for both evangelists to create them quite independently from one another—and quite differently from one another.

  DIFFERENT GENEALOGIES FOR THE SAME JESUS

  We begin with the differences between the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew 1:1–17 and Luke 3:23–38 (you can see their full texts in Appendix 1). The point of emphasizing these differences is not to underline their biographical mistakes or criticize their historical discrepancies, but to understand their religious functions and accept their theological intentions.

  Location. The most striking difference is that Matthew’s genealogy comes at the very start of his Christmas story, while Luke’s genealogy comes at the start of Jesus’s public life—after his baptism, in fact—and therefore outside his Christmas story.

  Direction. There are two rather obvious ways of presenting a genealogical list. One is to list the names down from parents to children, ancestors to descendants. The other is to list them up from children to parents, descendants to ancestors. Matthew’s genealogy follows that former pattern, and Luke’s the latter:

  That choice of direction—forward from Abraham for Matthew or backward to Adam for Luke—does not seem to be based on any significant reason. They are just the two obvious options.

  Format. Neither do the differences in style have any significant purpose. Matthew says, for example, that “Abraham was the father of Isaac” (1:2), and so on, in the New Revised Standard Version’s way of rephrasing the King James Version’s famous “Abraham begat Isaac,” and so on. Luke’s method is even briefer: “Isaac [son] of Abraham” (3:34), so that, in Greek, we have a simple series of names, one after another, in the genitive case.

  Number. Matthew speaks of 14 + 14 + 14, or 42, “generations” from Abraham to Jesus, but that count seems impossible to sustain in any literal sense, as you can see in Appendix 1. If you check it in terms of generations by counting every “x was the father of y,” you obtain 13 + 14 + 13, or 40 generations. And if you focus on individuals by counting every x and y, but each one only once, you get 14 + 14 + 13 names, or 41 individuals. It is wiser, with either count, to presume theological rather than mathematical purpose behind Matthew’s balanced claim of a 14 + 14 + 14 rhythm. But we have more on this below. Luke, on the other hand, has no numerical discrepancies, since he simply presents 77 generations—possibly as 7 × 11?—but never offers any count for either individuals or generations on his list, as you can see in Appendix 1.

  Discrepancy. Even where Matthew and Luke give the same names between Abraham and Jesus, they go their very separate ways (see Appendix 1). They agree on the six names from Abraham to Hezron, on the seven names from Aminadab to David, and on the two names Salathiel/Shealtiel and Zerubbabel. But here are two rather striking differences. One is that Matthew’s list descends from Da
vid through Solomon (a king), but Luke’s descends from David through Nathan (a prophet). The other is that Matthew names Jesus’s grandfather as Jacob, but Luke names him as Heli. Any attempt at reconciling those versions for historical accuracy is love’s labor lost. They are parabolic lists, not historical records, and we return below to consider their separate purposes.

  Granted those many differences, are there any significant agreements between those two genealogies?

  Structure. Both genealogies signal their emphasis with very specific sentences at the beginning and end of their lists:

  Patriarchy. The most striking agreement between the two genealogies is their male emphasis or patriarchal bias. Although they both claim that Jesus’s conception involved a female generating a son without a male, you would almost imagine that all those other generations consisted of males generating sons without females—except, of course, for the four exceptions, Tamar in Matthew 1:3, Rahab and Ruth in 1:5, and the unnamed “wife of Uriah” in 1:6.

  Fathers beget sons in Matthew and sons have fathers in Luke, but mothers are strangely absent in both—except again for those four Matthean exceptions. Even Mary herself is not mentioned in the genealogy of Luke 3:23, although she is in that of Matthew 1:16. Where have all the mothers gone?

  We consider below why Matthew mentioned those four specific mothers despite his general format of fathers begetting sons with mothers unmentioned, but for now we look briefly at one ancient contemporary Jewish context where that same patriarchal bias seems equally evident.

  In the 90s CE, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus describes his own precocious coming-of-age wisdom in his autobiographical Life (see our Appendix 3). And he prefaces that story with his genealogy. He claims that his “family is no ignoble one, tracing its descent far back to priestly ancestors” and that “with us a connection with the priesthood is the hallmark of an illustrious line” (1).