Christmas

The Sacred to Santa

Tara Moore

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780233871
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Black Friday. The War on Christmas. Miracle on 34th Street and Elf. From shopping malls and Fox News to movie theaters, Christmas no longer solely celebrates to the birth of Christ. Considering the holiday in its global context, Christmas journeys from its historical origins to its modern incarnation as a global commercial event, stopping along the way to look at the controversies and traditions of the celebratory day.Delving into the long story of this unifying but also divisive holiday, Tara Moore describes the evolution of Christmas and the deep traditions that bind a culture to its version of it. She probes the debates that have long accompanied the season—from questions of the actual date of Christ's birth to frictions between the sacred and the secular—and discusses the characters associated with the holiday's celebration, including Saint Nicholas, the Magi, Scrooge, and Krampus. She also explores how customs such as Christmas trees, feasting, and gift giving first emerged and became central facets of the holiday, while also examining how Christmas has been portrayed in culture—from the literary works of Charles Dickens to the yearly bout of holiday films, television specials, traditional carols, and modern tracks. Ultimately, Moore reveals, Christmas's longevity has depended on its ability to evolve. Packed with illustrations, Christmas is a fascinating look at the holiday we only think we know.

ONE

The Original Christmas

Christmas falls on 25 December with faithful inevitability. Indeed, our entire Western system of time and dating is based on this event. It seems as though it has always been this way but, like many facets of the holiday’s history, the date of Christmas contains a complex story wrapped in controversy. Pope Benedict XVI’s book Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives rekindled interest in the mistaken dating of Christmas. As the former pope explains, no one recorded for posterity the exact date of Christ’s arrival, so by the sixth century monks and church officials were working to confirm a possible day and year for the world-changing birth.

Exactly what year that birth took place remains a bit of a mystery. Luke’s gospel offers certain specific facts at the opening of the Christmas story: ‘In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census would be taken of the entire Roman world. [This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.] And everyone went to his own town to register’ (Luke 2:1–3). Such a clear statement of facts has sent scholars scurrying to corroborate what year this was, but zeroing in on the year is not as simple as one might hope. Just about the only thing all theologians can agree on is the fact that Dionysius Exiguus calculated the wrong date for Christ’s birth when he established the concept of the year AD 1. In AD 525 Exiguus created what has become known as the Anno Domini system, which translates to ‘in the year of the Lord’. If given the chance, the Roman monk might have cause to defend himself, since he only set out to chart 95 years’ worth of the movable feast of Easter, and would be shocked to discover that his Easter charts were used to found time for much of the modern world.¹

Before Christ’s birth, dates in the Roman Empire were reckoned from the supposed founding of Rome, which happened in 753 BC, also known to Latin scholars as 753 AUC for Anno Urbis Conditae, or in the year of the city, meaning Rome. Christianity kept a low profile for some time after Jesus’ death, but eventually scholars sought to link history to the birth in the stable. When Dionysius Exiguus came along, he set Christ’s birth at 753 AUC according to the Roman calendar. There was now a new starting date, one believed to be the year Christ was born. This belief continued into the sixteenth century, when historians began to suspect that Exiguus had been a bit hasty. He had not accounted for the fact that Jesus was certainly born before the death of Herod the Great, which is usually dated to 4 BC but occasionally to 1 BC. Jesus was possibly two at the time of the Murder of the Innocents, when Herod, still very much alive, ordered male infants in Bethlehem to be slaughtered, so Jesus’ birth would therefore fit somewhere between 6 and 4 BC.²

Archaeological evidence also points to an earlier date. In Ankara, Turkey, a temple wall is inscribed with evidence of Caesar Augustus’ census. The inscription, discovered in 1553, is in both Latin and Greek, and has been the destination of many scholars for centuries. In 1861 Napoleon III sent scholars to view the inscription.³ It is part of Caesar Augustus’s autobiography, which appeared on his mausoleum and which the Roman senate ordered ‘cut into the walls of every temple of Augustus throughout the Empire’.⁴ The inscription includes the details of Caesar Augustus’s victories and programmes, including three censuses. He must have been fairly proud of these people-counting endeavours, since the censuses were number eight in his list of 35 memorable ‘Acts of Augustus’.⁵ During the second census mentioned on the inscription, Caesar claimed that some 4.2 million Roman citizens were listed.⁶ Some scholars have dated this particular census to 8 BC. It is likely that it took several years for word to spread and for people to migrate home, so Joseph might well have been on his way to Bethlehem, the ancestral home of his tribe, from 8 BC to 4 BC.⁷

This Nativity scene by the Umbrian painter Pietro Perugino was once used on an altarpiece. It has been dated to c. 1500–1523.

The two dates that rise to the top of the argument concerning the birth of Christ are 4 BC and AD 6. The latter is a favourite because it is known that Quirinius oversaw a census for the purpose of taxation shortly after being installed as provincial legate of Syria in AD 6.⁸ Historians who prefer the earlier dating explain that Quirinius held other high positions and had a hand in an earlier census even if he was not yet technically governor. Others explain Luke’s Quirinius passage differently, translating the word protos in 2:2 not as the ‘first’ census overseen by Quirinius, but rather as the other possible meaning – ‘before’, which would mean that this was the census taken before the established one Quirinius oversaw as governor.⁹

Evidence of a Roman edict in AD 104 shows that residents in Egypt were compelled to return to their original homes for a census,¹⁰ and there are other records of conquered peoples being forced to return home to take oaths of allegiance to Rome. Evidence does exist for a regular census every fourteen years. Counting back from the known census in AD 6, the previous one would have taken place in 8 BC. But such empire-wide movements lacked efficiency, and so censuses took several years to complete. At any rate, Luke offers an account that is plausible, although it has not yet been successfully explained. As one scholar stated, ‘Luke’s report is astonishingly precise for an ancient historian.’¹¹ I recommend we leave it at that.

Though ignorant of the exact year of Christ’s birth, millions celebrate it. In many churches, scripture readings during Advent begin with Matthew 1:18: ‘This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.’ The importance of the virgin birth is enormous and entirely without non-biblical verification. What is known is that Jewish custom of the time took an arranged betrothal very seriously, such that any breaking of the contract required a divorce. A betrothed couple were considered married but could not yet live together. If the man died during betrothal his fiancée would be considered a widow.¹² The betrothal ceremony took place in front of the parents and was sealed with a taste of wine. The culture expected a groom to be at least 25 years old, but the bride would be married just after reaching puberty.¹³

A 20th-century sculpture in wood, Mary and Child, on display in Oslo Cathedral.

Ironically the idea of a broken home entered the birth narrative even before the main character arrived on the scene. According to Matthew 1:19, Mary’s pregnancy forced Joseph to plan a quiet divorce, an action he did not contemplate lightly. The law of the Jews as well as that of the Roman Empire required that Joseph divorce an adulterous wife. Joseph also needed to take this drastic step to protect his reputation in his community, since it might otherwise appear that he had overstepped the boundaries of betrothal.¹⁴ A vindictive man might have gone to the court of village elders and scribes about Mary’s apparent infidelity. This more public option would have allowed him to keep the dowry he obtained from her family and recoup any bride price he might have paid. Instead, the righteous Joseph planned simply to hand her a certificate of divorce in front of two sympathetic witnesses, a plan that would allow her to keep her dowry.¹⁵

Before the quiet divorce, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and laid out the plan for Christ’s birth. As a result, Joseph decided to continue with the marriage but to refrain from sexual relations with Mary until after the birth of her son. This decision had repercussions for both of them, and for Jesus. In Mark 6:3 Jesus is preaching in Nazareth, his home town, but the reception is grim. Three decades have not wiped way the shame of his seeming illegitimacy: ‘“Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offence at him.’ Typically a man would be known by his father’s name, but his childhood associates may have been especially spiteful when they degraded him with their assumptions about his mother’s adultery. Knowing something like this lay in wait for her and her son, Mary must have found the escape of a trip to Bethlehem something of a relief.

The 80-mile journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem could not have been comfortable for a heavily pregnant woman. Such a trip would have taken four or five days. Women were not expected to travel for census or oath-taking requirements but, as one historian has suggested, the young couple must have seen the benefit of having the child while they were away and delaying their return so as to keep the birth date vague.¹⁶ Perhaps Mary did not want to be left on her own in a town hostile to her pregnancy while her husband was far away. Also, in Bethlehem they would be much closer to Jerusalem, where they would be expected to travel for religious rites following the birth of a child. And so, on to Bethlehem.

In the first century BC Bethlehem was a minor blip on the map of the Roman Empire. The Romans were drawn into the area when they involved themselves in the dynastic rivalry that weakened the ruling Hasmonean dynasty. The Romans conquered Judea in 63 BC after besieging Jerusalem, and they later supported the Herodian dynasty to replace the Hasmoneans. This area was divided into three ethnic regions: Samaria, Idumaea and Judea proper. When the Parthians invaded the region, they killed Herod’s brother, with whom he had shared the role of tetrarch, and they forced out Herod, who fled to Rome. There the Roman senate installed the half-Jewish, Idumaean Herod as the region’s client ruler, although he had to fight for two years and besiege Jerusalem in order to establish himself in that role.¹⁷ By 37 BC he had settled himself back into power in the region, now designated as a ‘client kingdom’, meaning that Judea was a puppet state, funnelling taxes to Rome. These client rulers were ‘a temporary arrangement, preparing the way to full Romanization’. That next step happened in AD 6.¹⁸ As a Roman province, a Roman governor then controlled the region. During the time of Herod, there would have been a light Roman military presence in Judea, and Bethlehem most likely had no Roman soldiers in residence.¹⁹

Bethlehem figures in many books of the Old Testament. In the book of Ruth, Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth return to Bethlehem together hoping to find a way to survive without a male protector; of course, Ruth finds a husband and gives birth to a child who would become the grandfather of King David. As a boy, David was anointed in Bethlehem by the prophet Samuel, and the town is referred to as the City of David to this day. Centuries later, when David’s descendants were dealing with the aggressive Assyrian Empire, the prophet Micah prophesied: ‘But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to Me the One to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting’ (Micah 5:2).

This monument, titled Mary and Child, stands guard over a small chapel in St Petri’s Church, Malmö, Sweden.

During the period of Christ’s birth, Bethlehem sat just east of a main north–south thoroughfare called ‘The Way of the Patriarchs’ associated with Old Testament journeys. The city benefited from its location between a farming zone in the hill country and the pasture lands to the east of the city.²⁰ This was a tertiary town, not of vital importance and certainly overshadowed by Jerusalem five miles away.²¹ Caesar Augustus’s Palestine was located ‘between 31° and 33° north latitude, in the same parallel as Georgia, Arizona, Nagasaki, and Shanghai’, but the Mediterranean moderates the climate of this region.²²

The Palestinian climate had long supported herds of domesticated sheep. The shepherds that attended the s...