Christmas, The Original Story

Margaret Barker

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281060504
• eBook ISBN: 9780281067268
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In Christmas the Original Story Margaret Barker explores the nature of the Christmas stories and the nature and use of Old Testament prophecy.

Beginning with John's account, it then goes on to include Luke and Matthew, the apocryphal gospels, and the traditions of the Coptic Church, to throw light upon wise men and their gifts, the character of Herod, Matthew's use of prophecy, the holy family in Egypt.

This book also discusses the stories we get from the Infancy Gospel of Jesus and the development of the Orthodox Christmas icon, as well as the Christmas story and the Mary material in the Koran.

This is an accessible book based on scholarly work.

1

The setting

Our images of Christmas have been shaped by familiar carols and above all by the paintings that appear on traditional Christmas cards. There is a winter scene with a wooden stable, a manger, shepherds, Mary wearing a halo, an ox and an ass sharing the stable, and then maybe the shepherds or the wise men. In the sky, or dancing on the roof of the stable, there may be angels. The emphasis, depending on the preaching needs of the time, may be on the status of Mary as a homeless woman, or as a humble girl who accepted the will of God. Investigating journalists will seek to establish the truth or otherwise of the stories by attempting to identify the Quirinius, governor of Syria mentioned in Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus (Luke 2.2); or to amaze the public with the revelation that Luke’s ‘inn’ was in fact a guest room,¹ and that there is nothing in Luke’s story about Mary and Joseph knocking on many doors to find themselves a place to stay.

The real ‘setting’ for the Christmas stories, however, is the world in which they were first written. For the Jewish people of Palestine in the first century CE, the world was shaped by the temple. Their culture was shaped by its calendar and its taxes, its purity rules and its sacrifices, and especially by the holy books and prophecies that were preserved there. The temple had long been the focus of their politics, since the Romans controlled the country through the high priests. There were, however, many who thought the temple impure and longed to see it replaced – but this was as much a political aspiration as it was religious. The promised Messiah would destroy the temple and rebuild it, they said.

All this, and much more, was the setting for the Christmas stories as they were first told. The truth of the stories will elude us if we substitute our own sense of ‘accuracy’ and wrench the stories from their cultural, political and theological setting.

The world of the temple

The people who wrote the Christmas stories lived in a world filled with angels. They expected angels, and they expected the ancient prophets to reappear. When Jesus asked his disciples what people were saying about him, they said: ‘Some say [you are] John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets’ (Matt. 16.14). Mark records Herod’s fear:

Some said, ‘John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; that is why these powers are at work in him [Jesus].’ But others said, ‘It is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a prophet like one of the prophets of old.’ But when Herod heard it he said: ‘John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.’

(Mark 6.14–15)

Judas Maccabeus, struggling to free his people from their Syrian overlords,² had dreamed about Onias the high priest meeting Jeremiah in the temple. The prophet had given him a golden sword to strike down his enemies (2 Macc. 15.11–16). Angels came to defend the temple when Heliodorus tried to loot its treasures (2 Macc. 3.22–30); angel armies appeared in the sky over Jerusalem just before Antiochus attacked the city (2 Macc. 5.1–4) and before the Romans attacked and destroyed it in 70 CE (Rev. 14.1). John Hyrcanus the high priest, when he was offering incense, heard a voice in the temple saying that his sons had that day been victorious in battle (109 BCE). He emerged and announced this to the waiting people.³ Angels and ancient prophets were woven through the realities of life. Nobody would have questioned that Zechariah conversed with an angel in the temple (Luke 1.11), nor that the shepherds of Bethlehem heard the heavenly host (Luke 2.8–14), nor that John had seen angels coming from heaven and heard their voices, as he recorded in the book of Revelation.

The world view of the first Christians was expressed in, and derived from, the shape and the liturgy of the temple in Jerusalem. Tradition attributes the original temple to Solomon, although the plan for it had been revealed to David (1 Chron. 28.11–19). It had been rebuilt by the exiles who returned from Babylon in the sixth century BCE – the ‘second’ temple – and by Herod the Great, whose temple Jesus knew. The rebuilding is mentioned in the Fourth Gospel, when the Jews disputed what Jesus meant when he said he would rebuild the temple. ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?’ (John 2.20). There were other major restorations, most famously in the time of Josiah, 623 BCE, who purged the temple and the religion of his kingdom (2 Kings 22.1—23.25).

All the temples had the same plan and proportions, or rather, should have had the same plan and proportions; and they were built for one purpose: so that the LORD could dwell in the midst (Exod. 25.8). Any departure from this plan was a sign of disobedience; a distorted temple meant disobedience and distortion elsewhere in society too. In the sixth century BCE, Ezekiel had a vision of the glory of the LORD departing from the temple (Ezek. 10.1—11.25), and later, a vision of an angel instructing him exactly how the temple should be rebuilt after the exile, so that the glory of the LORD could return (Ezek. 43.1–5). The words of the angel show that errors in the temple meant errors in society. ‘You, son of man, describe the temple to the house of Israel, so that they are ashamed of their iniquities/distortions, and measure the measurement/proportion’ (Ezek. 43.10). In Hebrew, ‘iniquity’ and ‘distortion’ derive from the same word, and so wordplay was possible. Ezekiel ended his oration on temple measurements by condemning the rulers of the time: they had to turn away from violence and oppression, restore justice and righteousness, and have a just economic system (Ezek. 45.9–12). The Second Isaiah, his younger contemporary, said the same: if the restored community would amend their ways, ‘then shall your light break forth like the dawn’ (Isa. 58.8). The glory would return. This was the world view of the early Christians. Like so many others, they were longing for the glory to return, and so John described the coming of the Messiah as the return of the glory. ‘We have beheld his glory’ (John 1.14). Jesus drove from the temple the traders who were abusing the holy place (Matt. 21.12–13 and parallels), and the mighty angel commanded John to measure the temple just before the Romans destroyed it (Rev. 11.1–2).

The desert tabernacle described in Exodus 25—40 shows the basic structure of the temple: a rectangle divided into two areas by a curtain – the veil – which separated the holy place from the most holy place (Exod. 26.31–33). The tabernacle and the later temples represented the creation, the most holy place beyond the veil being the invisible creation, the glory of the LORD and the angels; and the outer area the visible, material world. The two areas were also two aspects of time: the visible creation was the state of time and change, and the invisible creation the unchanging state of eternity. ‘Eternity’ and ‘hidden’ in Hebrew are written in the same way. More wordplay. What the temple structure depicted was the hidden glory of God at the heart of the material world, the eternal within the temporal. Thus Paul, thinking in this temple framework, could write: ‘God sent forth his Son ...’ (Gal. 4.4). The Son coming into the world was envisaged as One emerging from the glory into our material world, passing from eternity into time.

The division between the two parts of creation was marked by the veil, and there were detailed instructions as to how it should be woven: ‘blue and purple and scarlet stuff and fine twined linen; in skilled [ḥošeb] work shall it be made, with cherubim’ (Exod. 26.31–33). No explanations were given for the prescriptions for the tabernacle/ temple and its furnishings – or rather, none was made public in the scriptures. The meanings were, apparently, the secrets of the high priesthood; ‘all that concerns the altar and that is within the veil’ were entrusted to the sons of Aaron (Num. 18.7). Even the porters who carried the tabernacle in the desert were not allowed to see the furnishings. The sons of Kohath had to wait until the high priests had wrapped the sacred items, before they could take them up (Num. 4.5–15).

Josephus, a member of the high priestly family and a younger contemporary of Jesus, did reveal the meaning of the temple furnishings. Nobody knows when the explanations he knew originated, but he said the veil represented matter. ‘For the scarlet seemed to represent fire, the fine linen the earth, the blue the air and the purple the sea, the comparison in two cases being suggested by their colour, and in that of the linen and the purple by their origin, since one is produced by the earth and the other by the sea.’⁴ Josephus’ rationalizations about the white and the purple could well have been his own, but the veil as a symbol of matter was widely known. Philo, an older contemporary who lived in Egypt, explained the tabernacle veil in the same way: ‘What is spoken about is the workmanship of the materials woven together, which are four in number and are symbols of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire ...’⁵

Only the high priest was permitted to pass beyond the veil into the holy of holies, and this symbolized his going into the divine presence. He entered the world of the angels, and stood before the throne. There are many descriptions of Jewish mystics making this ‘ascent’, but it is not always possible to date them. Texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, can be dated, and these show that mystical experiences were known when the Christmas stories were written. One text describes an unnamed person who sits in the congregation of the heavenly beings (4Q 491.11); another prays that someone may stand with the angels of the presence (1QSb IV); in another, someone declares he has been cleansed of great sin in order to stand among the holy ones, the sons of heaven (1QH XI). John described his own ascent to stand among the angels. First he saw the risen LORD in the outer part of the temple – the man with the seven lamps (Rev. 1.12) – and then he was summoned: ‘Come up hither’ (Rev. 4.1) and he stood with the angels before the throne. The early Christians knew of the world beyond the veil.

The high priest’s outer vestment was made of the same fabric as the veil: blue, purple, scarlet and linen, interwoven with gold (Exod. 28.5). It represented the created world: ‘Upon his long robe the whole world was depicted’ (Wisdom of Solomon 18.24), and he wore it only when he officiated outside the holy of holies. Within the veil he wore white linen robes like the angels, as he was deemed to be one of them. In other words, those who entered the state of glory became a part of it. The high priests and kings of ancient Jerusalem entered the holy of holies and then emerged as messengers, angels, of the LORD. They had been raised up, that is, resurrected; they were sons of God, that is, angels; and they were anointed ones, that is, messiahs. The robes of the high priest in these two parts of the temple symbolized his passing from the angel state into the material world. He came from the glory, and by putting on a vestment that symbolized matter, he veiled that glory when he was in the world. The first Christians used these images to describe the incarnation. The writer of Hebrews could say, without any explanation, that the curtain of the temple was the flesh of Jesus, the great high priest (Heb. 10.20), and the Gospels record that the temple veil tore when Jesus died (Matt. 27.51; Mark 15.38; Luke 23.45). ‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see’ is one of Charles Wesley’s best-known lines, familiar to anyone who has sung Christmas carols.

The secret rituals of the holy of holies can only be reconstructed from texts in the Old Testament that seem to describe them, but the problem here is the date of the texts. Many parts of the Old Testament were compiled and even edited in the sixth century BCE, and some much later, that is, in the exile or in the troubled years that followed resettlement in Judah. The Davidic monarchy disappeared from history, and the high priests became the rulers in Jerusalem. The history of t...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The setting
• 2. Other voices
• 3. Luke
• 4. Matthew
• 5. The Infancy Gospel of James and translation of the text
• 6. The Qur’an and translation of selected passages
• Primary sources
• Search items of primary sources
• Search items of persons, places and subjects