Sermon Tone Analysis

\\ \\ | Behind the FirstNOELWho were the wise men?

What about that star?

And is it possible Jesus was born in Nazareth?

How the story of Christ's birth came to be |

\\ | *By DAVID VAN BIEMA* |

\\ | ATIE LARSON IS A LITTLE TOO YOUNG TO GET IT.

HERdad Brian has just slipped a blue-and-white-striped shepherd smock over her head.

"Look at you," he says.

"It's perfect."

But Katie, 2, doesn't think so.

Two years ago she was Baby Jesus, and that costume was much more comfortable.

She begins to cry.

"Do you want to hold this cute little baby sheep?"

Brian asks, waving a stuffed toy before his daugh­ter's beet-red face.

Still no sale.Katie's brother Tyler, 6, is more at ease with all this.

He obligingly pulls on the robe, cord belt and headdress worn by dozens of prede­cessor shepherds over years of Christmas pageants here at the First Presbyterian Church of Arlington Heights, 111.

"Now, what do shep­herds do?" asks pageant director Phyllis Green.

"They protect their sheep," he says promptly.

His older brother Drew, who at 8 has two years more of this particular story under his shepherd's belt, chimes in, "And the angels come."As

if on cue, from a Sunday-school classroom upstairs wafts the sound of 70 angelic young voices rendering a still shaky but clearly heartfelt version of /Away in a Manger./Across the U.S., similar scenes are unfolding, as small children progress from incomprehension to playtime participation to the be­ginnings of actual Christmas understanding, thanks to pageants rang­ing from the most modest cardboard-camel presentations to near professional productions playing to thousands of people a week./The

Adoration of the Shepherds /by Bartolomeo Esteban Murillo |

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\\ \\ No performance, not even those working from the prefabricated scripts and scores provided by Christian entertainment com­panies, will be exactly like another, because no two 6-year-old shepherds are alike.

None will be precisely like the New Testament Gospel accounts, either, a fact that causes concern to almost no one.

For children like Katie and Tyler and Drew, learning about Jesus at this age is like learning that birds have wings: the more complicated parts will be filled in later.

At First Presbyterian, on the makeshift stage at the front of the sanctuary, the really important point for all Christians is being made: that God loved us all and came to earth in the form of a little baby, like our little brother or sister, and it was such a miracle that we shepherds watched and the fifth-grade angels sang.

What more do we need to know?

AND YET HOW MUCH MORE THERE IS TO

learn, and how peculiar it is to find that the actual Gospel Nativities are the part of Jesus' biography about which Bible experts have the greatest sense of uncertainty—even more than the scripture about the miracles Jesus performed or his sacrificial death.

Indeed, the Christmas story that Christians know by heart is actually a collection of mysteries.

Where was Jesus actually born?

Who showed up to celebrate his arrival?

How do the details of the stories reflect the specific outreach agendas of the men who wrote them?

In the debates over the literal truth of the Gospels, just about everyone acknowl­edges that major conclusions about Jesus' life are not based on forensic clues.

There is no specific physical evidence for the key points of the story.

There are the Christian testimonies, which begin with Paul in the 50s A.D. and are supported in part by a 1st century Roman reference to "Jesus, the so-called Christ," a "wise man" who "won over many of the Jews and also many of the Greeks," and who is described as crucified in accounts from the next century.

Beyond such testimony, there are literary tools used to weigh plausibility.

Were the Christian narratives written close after the events?

Were there many talkative eyewitnesses?

Do they agree?

The details of Jesus' birth— in a humble place attended by only a few-are ill suited to the first two criteria.

Mark and John do not tell about the Nativity at all.

And despite agreeing on the big ideas, Matthew and Luke diverge in conspicuous

/TheAnnunciationby// /Rupert Charles Wolston Bunny

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\\ \\ ways on details of the event.

In Matthew's Nativity, the angelic Annunciation is made to Joseph while Luke's is to Mary.

Mat­thew's offers wise men and a star and puts the baby Jesus in a house; Luke's prefers shepherds and a manger.

Both place the birth in Bethlehem, but they disagree to­tally about how it came to be there.

One might be tempted fcTabandon the whole Nativity story as "unhistoric," mere theological backing and filling.

Or one might take a broader view and, like the constandy evolving scholarship, look anew at these sto­ries and what they tell us not just about the birth of Jesus but also about how his message was spread.

"It's virtually impossible to re­duce the accounts to a single core narrative," contends L. Michael White, University of Texas at Austin religious historian and author of /From Jesus to Christianity.

/But that may not be the most important point.

"What jumps out at close readers," he says, "is Matthew's and Luke's different roads to performing the vital theological task of their age: fitting key themes and symbols from Christianity's parent tradition, Judaism, into an emerging belief in Jesus and also working in ideas familiar to the Roman culture that surrounded them."

Thus the Nativity stories provide a fascinating look at how each of the two men who agreed on so much—that Jesus was the Christ come among us and was crucified and resurrected and took away sin—could be inspired to begin his story in similar, yet hardly identical ways.

*THE   ANNUNCIATION*

/ii Behold a virgin shall/

/conceive JJ/

—THE MESSIAH THERE IS NO BETTER INTRODUCTION TO

the differences between Matthew's and Luke's approaches to the Nativity story than their tellings of the first key scene in the drama: the angelic announcement that a very special child will be born.

In Matthews version, an unnamed an­gel brings the news to Joseph in a dream.

Matthew delivers the important informa­tion straightforwardly enough~~"fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost"— but he does so in a few brief lines, making the Annunciation proper just one in a se­quence of such dreams and concentrating less on additional information about the event than on a series of citations regarding the prophecies the birth will fulfill.

Scholars see this as an excellent indicator of Mat-

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\\ | The virginal conception was entering the faith's creeds by the 2nd century |

| /The Virgin and Child in Egypt /by William Blake |

\\ thew's background and audience.

A Jew liv­ing in a primarily Jewish community (either in Galilee or what is now Lebanon), he was brought up, like most of his neighbors, on the Jewish Scriptures (which Christians now know as the Old Testament).

Making some­one called Joseph a recipient of prophetic dreams would evoke an earlier dreamer of the same name: the Joseph whose sleeping visions of fat and lean cows in the /Book of //Genesis /helped pull his people into Egypt and indirectly to their des­tiny at Mount Sinai as re­cipients of God's covenant laws.

Matthew's Joseph too will soon move to Egypt, fleeing there to save the child who, according to Matthew, will both contin­ue and replace God's com­pact with the faithful.

Luke's version of the Annunciation is very dif­ferent.

It is the one we are more familiar with, in which the angel Gabriel greets Mary with the lines Cath­olics have often recited as "Hail, Mary, full of grace."

It continues with a much more com­plete description of what came to be known as the virginal conception, and goes on through Mary's acceptance: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word."

For centuries, Christians expended vast interpretive energies on that last phrase.

Long-standing arguments between Cath­olics and Protestants revolved around whether Mary inherently possessed the grace enabling her to accept the divine will (making her more worthy of Catholic-style reverence) or was granted it on an as-needed basis.

These days, however, some feminist readers like Vanderbilt University's Amy-Jill Levine, editor of the forthcom­ing /Feminist Companion to Mariology, /are more interested in what might be called Mary's feistiness.

After all, Levine points out, the handmaid line does not follow immediately upon the angel's tidings that "thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and call his name Jesus ..." Rather, Mary poses the logical query, "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" Says Levine: "She asks, 'How's that going to hap­pen?'

And when his answer makes sense to her, she in effect gives permission."

Was this what Luke had in mind when he put the scene down on papyrus?

Probably not, but such readings may be an inevitable conse-

\\ quence of his daring decision to write from Mary's point of view.

i Other readers focus on Luke's ornate narrative context for the Annunciation.

Be­fore Mary gets the news, the angel alerts the family of her cousin Elizabeth that she, a barren woman, will bear "a child that will be great in the sight of the Lord"; that is, John the Baptist.

After Mary's Annunciation, she visits Elizabeth, and the fetus in Elizabeth's belly miraculously leaps up in recognition of God's promised Messiah.

Surrounding this and other subplots are a series of stun­ning poems, or canticles, which the church later gave Latin names like the Mag­nificat and the Benedictus.

Later /Luke /will provide a full angelic chorus to ac­company Jesus' birth.

Such filagree, scholars concur, would have been foreign to Matthew, who wrote sometime after A.D. 60, a decade or two before Luke.

"He would have found it very odd, very goyish, perhaps even offensive," says the University of Texas' White.

But that, he contends, is the point.

Unlike Matthew, Luke is thought to have been a pagan rather than a Jewish convert to Christianity, writing in fine Greek for other non-Jews and so using references they would find familiar.

His version's heraldic announcements, parallel pregnancies, an­gelic choirs and shepherd witnesses bear a tantalizing resemblance to another literary form, the reverential "lives" being written about pagan leaders in the same period.

In such sagas, a hero is not a hero unless his birth reflects the magnificence of his later achievements, and such super-nativities, originally attached to great figures from antiquity like Alexander the Great, were at that point bestowed upon Roman leaders within decades of their actual deaths.

Was Luke selling out the Jewish tradition that had helped shape Jesus and Matthew?

Hardly.

He clearly cared about Judaism, paraphrasing frequently from the Scrip­tures and setting scenes of Jesus' later youth in the great Jewish temple.