Now that the shopping and baking, the scurrying and spending are over and Christmas is here, the time has come to ask why we do this. What are we celebrating?
Is Christmas an observance of the birthday of Jesus Christ on Dec. 25, 1986 years ago? Are we honoring the arrival on Earth of the Son of God, an arrival heralded by angels and witnessed by shepherds, who found the babe lying in a manger because there was no room at the inn for his mother and her betrothed.
These miraculous events are familiar to Christians from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but recent work by theologians and biblical scholars has undermined the authority of the Gospels as sources of information about Jesus` life.
This de-mythologizing of Christianity, as one scholar calls it, is changing the way clergymen think about religion. But much of their work has not filtered down to laymen, who might be surprised to hear the facts of Jesus` life almost summarily dismissed by the very people who, it would seem, should be defending the faith.
``I think it`s pretty safe to say that no mainstream Catholic or Protestant scholar accepts the story of the Nativity in Matthew and Luke as historical truth,`` said Thomas Sheehan, a philosophy professor at Loyola University. ``But the word hasn`t reached the man or woman in the pews yet.`` To radical scholars such as Sheehan, Christmas is still worth celebrating, but as a yearly reminder of Jesus` teachings that people should be merciful and just to others.
But Raymond Brown, one of the most influential biblical scholars on the subject of Christ`s birth, and other mainstream theologians insist that Christmas still means more.
``The incarnation and birth of God`s Son--that`s what we should celebrate at Christmas,`` Brown said. ``He brings the hope of salvation to the world.`` Probably the easiest fact to accept is that Dec. 25 is not Jesus`
birthday. Not only is the recording of a birthday a relatively modern phenomenon, but the record on how Dec. 25 came to be Christmas is fairly clear. In A.D. 274, the Roman emperor Aurelian dedicated Dec. 25 to the sun. Sometime in the early 4th Century, probably around 336, the Christian church, newly established as the official religion of the Roman Empire, established Dec. 25 as the day for observing Christ`s birth.
``The church has never really suggested that Dec. 25 is the real birthday,`` said Brown, a faculty member of Union Theological Seminary in New York. ``You can`t celebrate something in the abstract. You have to choose a day. The Queen of England`s birthday is celebrated on a day that isn`t her real birthday. It`s just a day the empire chooses to observe her birthday.``
Supernatural elements of the Nativity narrative are impossible to verify
--shepherds, for instance, left no record of a visit by the heavenly host. But some elements that one might expect to be corroborated by other historical accounts also cannot be verified.
For instance, there is no record of a census in Judea, which was supposed to have been the reason for Mary and Joseph`s journey to Bethlehem. University of Chicago theologian Hans Dieter Betz says Roman censuses were not that unusual, but none appears to have been taken in 4 to 6 B.C., when scholars think Jesus was born.
Another dramatic, wide-reaching event should have some echoes in records from the period, but doesn`t. According to the Bible, when Herod, King of the Judea, heard of the birth of Jesus from the Three Wise Men, he ordered that male children under the age of 2 be killed to safeguard his position. Betz thinks this cruel act, known as the Slaughter of the Innocents, could have been ordered by a man of Herod`s evil character, but probably was beyond the capability of an ancient state`s limited bureaucracy. Governments did not keep track of people as closely as they do now.
``About all we can say is that Jesus was a historical person,`` Betz said. ``He was born to Joseph and Mary and probably lived in Nazareth for the early part of his life. Since Joseph was a craftsman, the family was probably what we would call middle class today.``
Betz and other theologians say the Nativity story is one of the least reliable parts of the Gospels because it is one of the last additions to the story of Jesus` life. Scholars believe the books of Matthew and Luke were written no earlier than A.D. 85, about 50 years after Christ`s crucifixion and also many years after the deaths of the supposed authors.
``We don`t know who wrote Matthew and Luke,`` said Sheehan, who recently has published a book on how the early Church transformed Jesus` teaching into an organized religion. ``They`re certainly not eyewitness accounts. We have a good idea of the Christian communities for which they were written and the names Matthew and Luke were probably attached to them to give them added authority.``