It’s the Yuletide again. Good time, amid all the red and green festivities, to ask some pertinent questions.
Who was this person who was, Christians believe, both human and divine– God, second person of a mysterious Trinity and known as Jesus Christ?
Who, again I ask, was He?
There IS significant evidence that a man named Jesus Christ exited, a carpenter’s son who himself became a carpenter. But it is a fact that no ancient historian, at least for a very long time, took great note of the purportedly earth-shattering events surrounding his birth, his life as a healer, or execution at age thirty-three (to summerize: birth in Bethlehem, early, mostly hidden life in the backwater Nazareth, execution and death in Jerusalem. And Christians believe he rose from the dead — all this in the first century A.D. — or even prior to that, because certain anomolies in counting up the years suggest Christ was actually born around 6 B.C..)
Let’s stick with his birth, since this is that season. The Resurrection story can wait until Easter.
There are a number of false, pious gospels — called apochrypha — that add spectacle and power to the nativity events. But we’ve come to celebrate, instead, the extremely humble nature of the birth of the God/man regarded by millions to have been –and remain –the Massiah. The ancient Jewish world had been waiting for a messiah for centuries — someone who would right every wrong done to that race of people. There had seemingly been someone claiming to be a messiah on virtually every corner for much of the millenia before that quiet, paradoxical dirt-poor birth among beasts, dung and hay just outside the village of Bethlehem in the Judean hills.
His family — earthly mother and father-were required to travel to Bethlehem because history and scripture record that a decree had gone out from the Emporor Caesar Augustus ordering everyone to respond to a census being taken over the vast Roman Empire , also requiring every citizen to return to their ancestral homes to be counted. That was Bethlehem in the case of the couple named Joseph and Mary. (There was also an ancient prophesy that a future ruler of Israel would be born in Bethlehem. So, as one writer puts it, “external obligation and divine design” were intersecting, acccording to the Christian nativity story.)
Now, wait a minute!
Why a bloody, damn census? Upending everybody’s life, putting them on the roads of the vast continental Empire? Well, for tax purposes, among other things (what else?), and so the powers in Rome could know where to go to fill in the ranks of the Roman Legions. Empires need armies. Fresh young bodies.
(With all those people traveling at the whim of the Roman boss, small wonder there was no room at the inn.)
So far, so good. But –something that’s always intrigued me: where exactly was that famous stable/birthplace? Do we really know?
Multiple spiritual writers and modern scriptural historians, not to mention archiologists, give us the following information:
There is, among other sources, testimonial evidence in the writings of the saint known as Justin Martyr that there was, for a very long time , a site in or around the town of Bethlehem where Jesus Christ was believe to have been born — “a certain cave”.
I don’t just want to take a Catholic saint’s word for anything, but Justin’s evidence is interesting and credible because he was local and nearly a contemporary.
The saint tells us locals venerated that cave from a very early date and apparently preserved it in order to preserve the memory of the nativity. That cave, we’re told, was greatly talked about, even among enemies of the faith. (It is, presumably, the site that now sits under the grand Basilica of the Nativity located in the middle of a Middle Eastern zone of perpetual combat and which itself was beseiged in the year 2002. So much for Peace of Earth in that neck of the woods! But there’s always hope. Christmas is supposed to be all about hope.)
Actually, it must be noted that little of the touching simplicity of the nativity story would seem to have been preserved from that time of the building of that magnificent edifice. I have not had the privilege of visiting it, but I’ve read that you approach it as if it were a fortress. There is a gigantic encircling wall breached by a massive tower. It is Byzantine in the way it conveys a powerful impression of majesty. And, as noted above, it has been the scene of warfare, contemporary as well as in the deep past. Indeed, in 1873 it was the scene of a physical assault by the supporters of the Ordhodox Church on the Catholics. Such virulent divisions among Christians presumably professing faith in the same God are disheartening, and never-ending.
And that cave noted by the saint/witness is now said to be the sacred sight reached by a long and narrow subterranean crypt.
Oh, how , passing down that crypt, I would long for that former, simple cave! But then, they don’t build houses of worship over, say, Paul Revere’s house. This is just the way of religions.
St. Justin speaks not just of “a cave” but of “this cave.” He had in mind a certain cave. Justin himself was born around AD 100 to a pagan family in Flavia Neapolis (today called Nablus), some forty miles north of Bethlehem. ( I told you he was local.) He knew the area and the people quite well. Apparently, a century after that stable birth, the cave was still known and being preserved.
The Church of the Nativity was built over it –presumably they had the right cave — in 326 A.D., at the order of Constantine, the first Christian emporer and, according to some accounts, at the urging of his mother Helena, a devout Christian who obviously had considerable influence on her son.
Some anti-Christians, and also what I would call anti-Christian Christians, like to say Constantine “founded” Christianity. That’s another kind of warfare that gets waged over the body of Christ: historical/theological revisionism.
And for the ancient early Christian apologist and scriptural scholar named Origen, as well as for the evangelists before him, there is a verifiable particularity about the facts of Jesus’s conception and birth in that cave, and His subsequent infancy.
All this, they say, happened, not “once upon a time,” (as in a fable), but “in the days of Herod, King of Judea,” when “a decree went out from Caesar Augustus,” the emporer. The big guy in Rome. (Luke 1:5,2:1).
Herod was the local authority around Bethlehem, Judea — and, from all accounts, an utter monster. He’s part of a Christmas story –a negative part. But the story needed every part, good and bad, to seem true to life. We’ll skip over Herod for now. It suffices to say that you didn’t want to cross him.
So -it all began, in earthly terms, with taxes, the Roman bureacracy, a vile local Roman functionary, and a noisome government decree. It began “upon a midnight clear” and persists and summons our souls and imaginations to this day.
As for all the messy circumstances leading up to — and away — from it: sounds like real life as we know it.
Whatever the case, we know that a pregnant young woman and her spouse, with their donkey, sparse belongings and weary ( ultimately, many believe, saintly and, in Christ’s case, divine) bodies and souls, wound up spending the chilly Judean night among the hay and dung and livestock of a cave — reviled, rejected, alone.
I guess that cave is also the birthplace of what for much of the world remains a supreme, incredible earthly irony: the most important soul in history — according to the beliefs of billions –was born in a cave.
Also born that night: endless wonder. And there was something about a star, too. And shepherds, and choirs of angels.
And Magi. (We’ll talk about them later.)
19 Cent Notebook 