The First Christmas

by Marcus J. Borg

  Most of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire were illiterate and were not reading Virgil, so that genealogical “flight from Troy” had to be communicated across the empire not in text, but in image. As an analogy, imagine this Christmas scene on fresco, mosaic, sculpture, or bas-relief, on the granite stone of an Irish cross or the stained-glass window of a European cathedral: a woman with a baby on her lap is seated on a donkey led by a man along a road. We would immediately recognize “The Flight into Egypt.” So also with its Roman imperial equivalent, “The Flight from Troy.”

  The ubiquity and uniformity of its imagery indicates an archetypal model in the Forum of Augustus at Rome. In the center is Aeneas. He carries his infirm father, Anchises, on his left shoulder, and Anchises in turn carries their household gods ( penates) on his lap. With his right hand Aeneas holds that of young Julus. It is not only the great image of Augustan genealogical origins; it is the supreme model of Roman patriarchal piety ( pietas), combining both family and religion in one scene. That scene swept across the Roman Empire in the first century—you find it on a tombstone in Italy, a bas-relief in Turkey, an altar in Tunisia, to name just a few almost at random. That bas-relief at Aphrodisias in Turkey, for example, has a fourth figure in the background. Venus’s arms are outstretched protectively around her fleeing family. Indeed—and remember this when you think about another westward-leading star with Matthew’s Magi—it was her guiding light as evening or morning star that showed them their path of destiny ever westward from Troy to Italy.

  One note on the ancient—or modern—difficulties of questioning the historicity of divinely ordered genealogy. When he came to tell that “Flight from Troy” story in his 142-volume Roman history, From the Founding of the City, in the early 20s BCE, the historian Livy stayed wisely careful about the man whom the Julian house claimed, under the name of Julus, as the founder of their name: “I will not discuss the question—for who could speak decisively about a matter of such extreme antiquity?” Who indeed could “speak decisively” when writing under Augustus?

  Still, if you wanted to oppose and replace one Son of God born with a millennium-plus descent from the divinely born Aeneas, you would have to introduce an alternative Son of God with a better than millennium-plus descent from, say, the divinely born Isaac, as in Matthew, or, better, the divinely created Adam, as in Luke. But what is always clear is that ancient genealogy was not about history and poetry, but about prophecy and destiny, not about accuracy, but about advertising.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AN ANGEL COMES TO MARY

  This chapter is about the conception of Jesus, and our title is quite obviously appropriate for that subject. But to Mary—where? Most Christians would probably answer at Nazareth without much hesitation. But you will recall from Chapter 1 that, as their Christmas stories open, Joseph and Mary were living at Bethlehem for Matthew, but they were living at Nazareth for Luke. Afterward they moved from Bethlehem to Nazareth permanently for fear of future persecution in Matthew, but they had moved only temporarily from Nazareth to Bethlehem in Luke.

  First of all, then, the angel’s annunciation took place at Bethlehem for Matthew, but at Nazareth for Luke. That, however, is not the more striking difference in their two conception stories. It is that, for Matthew, the annunciation happened to Joseph, but for Luke, it happened to Mary.

  Think about that for a moment. You probably have no trouble imagining an annunciation scene to Mary from its consistent portrayal in Christian art. Can you recall one painting of an annunciation to Joseph? Why was the golden luminosity of those angelic daytime annunciations to Mary never matched by the mysterious darkness of an angelic nighttime annunciation to Joseph? Luke’s annunciation to Mary has wiped out completely Matthew’s to Joseph in Christian imagination.

  Put more broadly and bluntly, why is Matthew’s entire Christmas story told from Joseph’s viewpoint, while Luke’s is told—as is surely more obviously intuitive—from Mary’s? In simple indication of that divergence, leave aside the genealogies and look at the usage of their names in each overture:

  Name of Joseph

  Name of Mary

  In Matthew 1–2

  8 times

  3 times

  In Luke 1–2

  3 times

  11 times

  Is that emphasis on Joseph over Mary simply patriarchal presumption or male bias on the part of Matthew? And yet, as seen in our previous chapter, although Luke’s genealogy is all about males as sons of males without any females mentioned, Matthew’s version also mentions five females. Matthew’s conception story, therefore, is a first entrance into this question about the emphasis on Joseph over Mary in Matthew.

  Here is our sequence for this chapter. First, we begin—naturally after that question—with the conception story in Matthew 1:18–25. Next, we turn to the parallel version in Luke 1:26–38. Then, we consider the context within which those stories were written and heard in their first-century world. Finally, we widen that preceding section to consider how the ancients understood divine conceptions and whether the ancients took those stories literally or metaphorically.

  “TO EXPOSE HER TO PUBLIC DISGRACE”

  In giving the complete text of Matthew’s conception story, we divide it into a sequence of three successive elements: divorce, revelation, and remarriage. Just notice them for the moment, and we will explain their importance as we proceed.

  Divorce: Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.

  Revelation: But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”

  Remarriage: When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus. (1:18–25)

  One minor note before we turn to our main point. We saw in Chapter 4 that Matthew framed his genealogy of Jesus by calling him the “Messiah” once in 1:1 and twice in 1:16–17. Matthew begins his conception story of Jesus above by repeating that title for the fourth time. Matthew will use the title “Messiah” again in 2:4, and that is five times in his infancy narrative. You will recall from Chapter 2 that Matthew used five dreams and five fulfillments in his overture to prepare for the gospel as the five books of the New Pentateuch. You will also recall from Chapter 4 that—whether deliberately or accidentally—Mathew has five women in his genealogy. So also here—and, again, whether deliberately or accidentally—Matthew’s overture has five mentions of Jesus as the Messiah.

  We raise immediately one major problem in that Matthean narrative. It is the question of Joseph’s presumption that Mary has committed adultery against his exclusive marital rights as already established by their formal “engagement” (1:18), which makes him “her husband Joseph” (1:19).

  Why does Matthew even raise the issue of adultery? Did Mary not tell Joseph what had happened? Did Joseph not believe her? Why did Joseph presume adultery? How did he expect to solve it quietly within the publicity of an arranged small-village marriage? And, since intercourse was at least tolerated for an “engaged” couple, why did he expect anyone to believe his accusation? We ask those questions, by the way, not to investigate Joseph’s intention as history, but Matthew’s intention as parable. They are not about Joseph, but about Matthew. Notice, by the way, that Matthew cauterizes Joseph’s presumption of adult
ery even before he records it. He mentions “from the Holy Spirit” twice—once in 1:18 and again in 1:20, so that those verses frame Joseph’s doubt in 1:19.

  As a counterexample, the problem of possible adultery is never raised in Luke’s account of Jesus’s conception. Luke 1:26—like Matthew 1:18 above—starts with “a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary” (1:26). But when this engaged virgin conceives, Luke never tells us how Joseph finds out or reacts to the fact. When we next meet the couple after the angel Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary, Joseph is going to Bethlehem “to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child” (2:5). There is no hint anywhere in Luke that Joseph had a problem with Mary’s pregnancy, and thoughtful hearers or readers would simply presume that, as soon as Mary met Joseph after Gabriel’s annunciation, she told him the truth and he believed her.

  That is what happened, for example, with the conception of Samson in Judges 13:1–24. His mother was barren and, after a manlike angel announced her miraculous conception, “the woman came and told her husband” (13:6); he immediately believed her and wanted to ask the angel about the child’s upbringing (13:8).

  Even if Matthew wanted to tell the story totally from Joseph’s point of view—unlike Luke from Mary’s—he could have had that angel reveal everything to him before Mary’s conception. And if he wanted to stay patriarchal, Matthew could then have had Joseph tell Mary what would happen to her. The question therefore presses. Within the contextual matrix of Greek, Roman, and Jewish tradition of women who are virginal, sterile, or aged, why does Matthew alone raise the specter of an adulterous rather than a divine conception?

  We are not simply inventing this problem in this book. That accusation of Mary’s adultery was first written down toward the end of the second century ce by the anti-Christian polemicist Celsus in his book On the True Doctrine. (Although that text is no longer extant, we know its contents from the third-century rebuttal by the Christian apologist Origen.) Celsus, and his anti-Christian Jewish source, had read Matthew—specifically Matthew—because he speaks of Mary’s “husband—the carpenter,” a designation for Jesus’s father created by Matthew in 13:55 to avoid accepting it for Jesus himself from his source in Mark 6:3. Here is the prosecuting attorney Celsus grilling Jesus on the witness stand:

  Is it not true, good sir, that you fabricated the story of your birth from a virgin to quiet rumors about the true and unsavory circumstances of your origins? Is it not the case that far from being born in royal David’s city of Bethlehem, you were born in a poor country town, and of a woman who earned her living by spinning? Is it not the case that when her deceit was discovered, to wit, that she was pregnant by a Roman soldier named Panthera she was driven away by her husband—the carpenter—and convicted of adultery?

  The specification of the alleged adulterer as a Roman soldier named Panthera probably derived from, first, the memory of Syrian legionary soldiers suppressing a revolt at Sepphoris near Nazareth around the time Jesus was born and, second, the use of the common legionary name Panthera (“the Panther”) as a derisive play on parthenos, the Greek word for “virgin.”

  In other words, the accusation is that Mary’s conception by the Holy Spirit was created as a Christian cover-up for Mary’s adultery (or rape) by a pagan soldier. To the contrary, we argue in this book that the earlier Christian claim of divine conception led to an anti-Christian accusation of adultery rather than an earlier fact of adultery leading to a Christian claim of divine conception.

  In any case, it was Matthew himself who raised the issue of Mary’s possible adultery. It was Matthew himself who facilitated the anti-Christian response that a divine conception was simply a cover-up for adultery. So, once again, why did Matthew ever raise that specter of adultery (or rape) that has haunted Mary’s integrity and Jesus’s identity for the last two thousand years? This is where the Moses/Jesus parallelism is important for our understanding of Matthew’s composition. This is the first of two major places where that parallelism is constitutive for Matthew—here concerning the conception of Jesus-as-Moses and later concerning the birth of Jesus-as-Moses (which we cover in Chapter 6).

  But here is our major point. For that parallelism, Matthew does not depend on Exodus 1–2 directly, but on popular expansions of that text current in contemporary first-century Jewish tradition. In that tradition a biblical text could be retold with expansions and contractions, interpretations and explanations, in works known as targumim, or translations, and midrashim, or commentaries. Those texts, for example, often filled in answers to questions that intelligent hearers or readers might ask about an ancient text. Why this, why that, or why something else? Those expansions were the Bible retold as sermon. It is to those popular traditions that we turn next.

  FROM MOSAIC MIDRASH TO MATTHEAN PARABLE

  What problems and questions did those popular expansions see concerning the infancy of Moses in Exodus 1–2? There were two main ones. We look at the first one concerning the conception of Moses in this chapter and hold the second, concerning the birth of Moses, until the next chapter.

  According to Exodus 1–2, Pharaoh decided that the Jews resident in Egypt had become too numerous, and he tried to exterminate them first by slave labor and then by killing all newborn males. “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live” (1:22). But the very next verses report that “a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months” (2:1–2).

  Here is the obvious first question. Why did those Jewish parents continue having marital intercourse if newborn male babies were doomed to certain deaths? The answer in those popular expansions is this: Amram and Jochebed, the parents of Moses-to-be, decided to divorce rather than bear children doomed, if male, to death. But they were instructed by a divine revelation to come back together in remarriage, since the predestined child would be their son. We look now at the extant versions of that answer.

  Our basic example is a book once incorrectly attributed to the Jewish philosopher Philo and therefore known in scholarship as Pseudo-Philo’s Book of Biblical Antiquities, or Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum. It consists of an imaginative retelling of the biblical story from Adam to David, and it dates from the land of Israel around the time of Jesus. We focus here on its expansion of the infancy story of Moses as it relates to that first question about his conception.

  It tells how, after Pharaoh’s infanticide decree, married Jewish couples decide to divorce or at least abstain from marital intercourse, lest their newborn sons be killed. But one father, Amram, refuses to join that general decision and advises remarriage for all. Then, in a revelation, God rewards him for his trust by promising that Moses would be his son. Later, his and Jochebed’s daughter, Miriam, gives them a similar revelation from a dream:

  Divorce: Then the elders of the people gathered the people together in mourning [and said]…“Let us set up rules for ourselves that a man should not approach his wife…until we know what God may do.” And Amram answered and said…“I will go and take my wife, and I will not consent to the command of the king; and if it is right in your eyes, let us all act in this way.”

  Revelation 1: And the strategy that Amram thought out was pleasing before God. And God said…“He who will be born from him will serve me forever.”

  Remarriage: And Amram of the tribe of Levi went out and took a wife from his own tribe. When he had taken her, others followed him and took their own wives….

  Revelation 2: And this man had one son and one daughter; their names were Aaron and Miriam. And the spirit of God came upon Miriam one night, and she saw a dream and told it to her parents in the morning, saying: I have seen this night, and behold a man in a linen garment stood and said to me, “Go and say to your parents, ‘Behold he who will be born from you will be cast forth into the water; likewise
through him the water will be dried up. And I will work signs through him and save my people, and he will exercise leadership always.’” And when Miriam told of her dream, her parents did not believe her. (9:1–10)

  We have emphasized those three italicized elements, of course, because Matthew used them, as we noted above, in his parallel story of Jesus’s conception in 1:18–25. That story has all three elements, but our next two examples show how some of them can be given or omitted in other versions of this story.

  First, in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities from the end of the first century CE, there is no mention of divorce and remarriage, but a “perplexed” Amram prays to God for guidance and the revelation ensues:

  Amaram(es), a Hebrew of noble birth, fearing that the whole race would be extinguished through lack of the succeeding generation, and seriously anxious on his own account because his wife was with child, was in grievous perplexity. He accordingly had recourse to prayer to God….

  Revelation: And God had compassion on him and, moved by his supplication, appeared to him in his sleep, exhorted him not to despair of the future, and told him that…“This child, whose birth has filled the Egyptians with such dread that they have condemned to destruction all the offspring of the Israelites, shall indeed be yours; he shall escape those who are watching to destroy him, and, reared in a marvelous way, he shall deliver the Hebrew race from their bondage in Egypt, and be remembered, so long as the universe shall endure, not by Hebrews alone but even by alien nations.” (2.210–11)