THE mysteries about the birth of Jesus are mainly prosaic, where and when he was born. The choice for the first lies between Nazareth in Galilee and Bethlehem in Judea, and for the second between about 6 B.C. or about A.D. 6.1 But certainly from infancy his environment was Galilean.
This child, however, the first-born of a Jewish artisan named Joseph and his wife Miriam, was to prove to be no ordinary boy, for he was destined to play a unique part in history. He drew to himself the dreams and visions of his people, and so clothed his life in them that he procured for himself immortality and gave rise to a faith which identified him among many Jews as the Messiah and among many Gentiles as the Divine Saviour of the world. Within a century of his birth stories relating to the circumstances of his nativity appropriate to the dignity in which he was held were in circulation among his following.
These stories, simply and beautifully told, still have a strong emotional appeal, since they enshrine deep-seated human hopes and longings. They bring us back again and again to that sacred place of childhood's imagination where there is no barrier to the commerce between heaven and earth. In this respect they are a fitting tribute to the man who had so great a faith that he succeeded in lighting up the darkness of mundane experience with the joyous effulgence of fairyland. Here was his genius, and this is how we must understand him, as the one above all others who showed mankind how to make their dreams come true.
With the birth stories of Jesus, and of John the Baptist also, we pass directly from the world of sober reality into the world of fairy-tale. It has the appearance of being the same world with which we are familiar. There are the same kind of people in it and certain matching events take place. But we are instantly aware that we are in a very different atmosphere, and that extraordinary things are going on which everyone seems to accept as perfectly normal. Our minds are confused by the matter of fact manner of narration of the strangest circumstances in which heavenly beings appear to and converse with mortals, and we do not know what to believe.
The presentation of what takes place does not distinguish at all between the factual and the legendary, and no criteria are provided to enable us to separate the one from the other. We feel this to be grossly unfair, an imposition on our credulity. If we entered this other world through any other volume than the Bible we should not have this distress, because we should employ standards of judgement which took account of what was characteristic of the people who produced the literature. But we have been persuaded, quite wrongly and in complete disregard of the nature of spiritual folklore, that what is set down in the Bible is to be received as true in the literal and absolute sense of being the very word of God. We have been induced to credit that it is not we who have entered into a world of imagination in which all things are possible, but that such a world has entered ours and has become one with it to the extent that its miraculous features have operated under our conditions, in our time, space and history. All we need is the application to our eyes of the fairy dust called faith to enable us to see and acknowledge this.
This insistence—and it is Religion which requires it—is not to be rejected as wholly fanciful and devoid of reality. We need to be sensitive to intimations of the existence of much beyond our finite grasp. But we also have to be safeguarded against the follies of the narrow traditionalists. The Bible has to be treated through and through intelligently, by applying to its understanding knowledge of the ways and ideas of those who had a hand in its composition in their various periods. To withhold or ignore vital information is a spiritual crime.
With the nativity stories it should have been taught by the Church that they are deliberate idealisations, that intentionally they mingle the legends of the heroes of Israel and of Hellas, and draw upon these legends for their basic ingredients. How should it be known by the unscholarly that the stories are of the same order as those marvels with which Jews of the time had enriched and expanded the Biblical accounts of the births of Noah, Abraham and Moses?2 And as to the non-Jewish element relating to the divine origin of Jesus, why not refer, as Justin Martyr did in the second century,3 to the divine birth of Perseus from the virgin Danae, and relate what was told of the heavenly nativity of a world ruler like Alexander the Great and of a sage like Apollonius of Tyana?4
What our Gospel stories so engagingly offer is a tribute typical of the thinking and literary expression of the world of nineteen centuries ago, couched in language which Christianity had derived from its Jewish inspiration. This is what the advent of Jesus had come to mean to those who came after him and believed in him; and this is how they suitably adorned and compensated for the meagre facts at their disposal.
There was nothing peculiar about the birth of Jesus. He was not God incarnate and no Virgin Mother bore him. The Church in its ancient zeal fathered a myth and became bound to it as dogma. Since Christians largely continue to suppose that their faith stands or falls by the doctrine of the deity of Christ the dogma goes on being sustained to the detriment of what is really significant about the person and contribution of Jesus. It is pathetic to have theologians, whether orthodox or liberal, trying to save themselves and the credit of the Church's teaching by questing for terms which will enable them to retain what they should have outgrown.
Men in all ages according to their lights have sincerely subscribed to erroneous notions, and no one who has ever lived has been exempt from error. There is no call to perpetuate such notions or to regard them as in some special or mysterious sense true just because they have been conserved by a priesthood, or are found in the Bible, or in any other work held to be sacred or inspired. Neither is it legitimate to employ different standards of judgement in testing validity or veracity because one set of records is regarded with greater reverence than another. In all cases it is incumbent upon us to reach conclusions and get at results in the first instance by the same methods. There must be an honest foundation for the acknowledgment of the presence of factors to which these methods are inapplicable, and we must exercise the utmost care not to mislead ourselves, and not to miss those considerations which suggest that a rational explanation of circumstances exists, even if it is not readily apparent. It is an obligation to quest for and sift all relevant evidence, and by no means to neglect or to suppress what may help to clear up a mystery.
With the consideration of Jesus, it is incumbent upon us before reaching convictions about him to endeavour to dispel, so far as this is practicable, the mists through which his figure much larger than life looms before us in the Gospels. The view of him which we are communicating here has been arrived at by such prior investigation, and is represented in its main essentials in the notes provided and in Part Two of this book. It does not matter if we cannot furnish all the answers, and due to the circumstances brought to the reader's notice it would be quite impossible to do so. The initial word does not lie within the province of the theologian, but of the historian and the psychologist. If what is discoverable should seem to demand an interpretation which the theologian is best qualified to supply he will be placed in a stronger position to make it afterwards for our benefit.
Facing first, then, the origins of Jesus, his advent at such a crucial period may ultimately be regarded as an act of God, if we should believe with the Jews in the movement of God in history. But apprehending both the heroic and the theological intentions of the nativity stories there is no call whatever to suppose that his arrival in this world of ours was in any way exceptional or attended by any supernatural occurrences. He was as completely human as every baby, the eldest child, as we have said, of a Jewish artisan named Joseph and his wife Miriam (Mary), inheriting his form from their stock and his portion of their character and disposition.
The nativity stories add very little of substance to the slender information otherwise at our disposal. They are late introductory compositions, ranking with the poetic prologue to the Fourth Gospel in putting the finishing touches to convictions about Jesus as these had become defined in the various Christian circles.5 We already know from the main stream of Christian tradition that the family to which Jesus belonged was settled in Galilee, and could trace its descent from the house of David from which the Messiah was expected to come. We know the names of the parents of Jesus, and that his father was by trade a carpenter. We know that he was their first-born, and that he had four younger brothers and at least two sisters.6 We can judge that they were pious people, and that the atmosphere of the home was strongly religious.
We do not have to see any peculiar significance in the fact that the eldest child of Joseph and Miriam was named Joshua (Jesus), any more than that they called their other sons Jacob (James), Joseph, Simeon and Judah. All are good Biblical names and were in common use. When Jesus was accepted as Messiah by a Jewish following it did mean much to them that he bore the name of the appointed successor of Moses who led Israel into the Promised Land, a name that spoke of God's salvation, just as those who followed John the Baptist found it fitting that his Hebrew name Johanan should have reference to the Lord's favour.
It is purely speculative whether the parents of Jesus entertained a secret hope that their first-born would prove to be the Messiah, being of the line of David and being born at a time when messianic fervour was rampant. It is equally speculative whether the thought came in childhood to Jesus himself, and if so, whether this was through any external circumstance. We cannot completely dismiss the possibility, conveyed in Luke by the prognostications attributed to the aged Simeon and the prophetess Hannah, that someone who saw the boy in infancy or later made some laudatory remark about his future. Josephus records that when Herod was a child and had no prospect whatever of royal dignity he was encountered one day on his way to school by the Essene Menahem, who clapped him on the bottom and told him that he would become king of the Jews.7
Whether through some such experience, or as the outcome of his own imaginings, the seed of identification of himself with the Messiah was planted in the mind of Jesus, and it is quite possible that he was of tender years when this happened. Children are highly impressionable, and readily see themselves playing the part of heroes. The land in which the boy Jesus lived had rung with the exploits of the patriot leader Judas of Galilee. It was told how he had opposed paying tribute to Caesar, proclaiming that Jews had no ruler but God. It was told how with great daring he and his men had broken into the heavily fortified Galilean city of Sepphoris and had got away with weapons and money belonging to the government. In Galilee there was hatred of the heathen Romans and their Herodian minions who controlled the country, and ostracism of Jews who sold their souls to serve them. Preachers in the synagogues urged the people to repent that God might intervene on their behalf and send the Messiah:8 they expounded the Scriptures of consolation and hope. There was much to make any sensitive Jewish lad conscious of strange and momentous events in store, events with which he might be intimately associated.
Except for a single story, related exclusively by Luke, the Gospels pass over in complete silence the whole life of Jesus prior to the short final period of his public ministry. Of the circumstances of what Luke says was nearly thirty years9 they tell us nothing directly, and evidently tradition had furnished no information. Yet it is about those years that we particularly need to be informed, for they were the years in which Jesus became the man of the brief Gospel history, the years of preparation for the purposeful climax of his career. As we have already pointed out (above p. 44) the major features of what he had to do were clear to Jesus before he went to be baptised by John, and he set himself deliberately to carry out the programme which he believed to be incumbent on him in the character of Messiah. To understand the behaviour of Jesus during his public ministry we have to have some insight into what had gone before. Consequently we have to wrestle with the Gospels to obtain from them not simply those things which they are most concerned to bring to our attention and place so to speak under our noses, things on which interest is commonly concentrated. Rather do we have to labour to extract what they incidentally and unconsciously reveal, information which bears the impress of truth just because it was not felt to be significant. Certain inferences and deductions cannot positively be confirmed, but on the principle that the child is father of the man what is reported of the man can be made to illuminate with the help of external evidences a good deal that has not been narrated about the child.
The one incident cited by Luke is an attempt to break the silence by laying the foundation for the qualities exhibited by Jesus. It is supposed to have occurred when his hero was twelve years of age. According to Luke, Jesus had accompanied his parents, no doubt for the first time, on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. At the close of the celebration, when the party left the city to travel home, the boy quietly absented himself, and when he was missed he was finally discovered by his anxious parents in the Temple listening to the religious teachers and asking them questions. Those present were amazed at his intelligence. His mother said to him: ‘Why have you treated us like this, boy? Here have your father and I been searching anxiously for you.’ To this Jesus is said to have replied: ‘Why did you search for me? Didn't you know I was bound to be occupied with my father's affairs?’ His parents could make no sense of this reply.
Obviously we are meant by Luke to understand that Jesus was referring to his heavenly Father, in accordance with the evangelist's previous statement that he would be called ‘Son of the Most High’.10 We would naturally expect the story to reflect the belief of Christians around the end of the first century A.D. when the Gospel was composed, and there is no need therefore to labour the point that Jesus is made here in childhood to express consciousness of a special relationship to God. Something strangely like this story, without this element, was told by Josephus in his autobiography about his own boyhood, and the author of Luke—Acts was indebted to that contemporary historian in a number of respects.11
Whether the story owed its inspiration to Josephus, with or without some foundation in tradition, Luke at any rate has detected a characteristic of Jesus which comes out in the Gospel records of the ministry. There we find Jesus after his baptism going off quietly into the wilderness to struggle with biddings which come to tempt him. Then at Capernaum, where he has been healing the sick, he rises before dawn and without a word to his disciples goes out to a solitary place to pray. At another time, associated with the feeding of the five thousand, he sends away the people and his disciples and departs by himself to a mountain to pray. Almost at the last, at Gethsemane, he similarly seeks solitude to commune with God.12 So it can be inferred that such wandering off alone was typical of him, and Luke may well be correct in making him act in this way in his youth.
It is a fair deduction about the young Jesus that he was inclined to be introspective, closely guarding his secret thoughts even from those nearest and dearest to him. At times he felt strongly the need to be alone, to meditate and seek guidance in prayer. At others he would seize opportunity to obtain answers from those best qualified to inform him to questions with which his young mind was struggling, and which were of the utmost consequence to him. On these occasions he would quietly disappear without saying where he was going. One of the things he told his followers was that when they prayed they should go to their room, close the door, and pray to their Father who is in secret; and he taught them to pray as he must often have prayed fervently himself.13 It can be seen from the Gospels that it was not uncommon with Jesus to be withdrawn. His disciples became familiar with his spells of silence which they feared to break. They would be walking with him, talking animatedly among themselves, even arguing heatedly, virtually ignoring his presence. Suddenly he would say something, either at the time or later, which showed that he was not wholly inattentive, and had heard at least a part of their conversation. We may assume that he was like this as a child.
So the picture we can form of the young Jesus is of a quiet, dutiful, watchful individual, with an inner life of his own and a deep-seated faith. He had a bright intelligence and was by no means aloof from his surroundings, yet was prone to detach himself from them. He was not at all uncommunicative when it came to finding out what he wished to know; but he was rather a strange boy and something of a puzzle to his parents, not readily drawing attention to himself, and inwardly busy with tremendous imaginings which it was impossible for him to reveal. What some of his cherished thoughts were about we may hazard a confident guess: they were about the world, about God's dealings with Israel, and about the deliverer who had been promised to his people.
1. Jesus was born at Bethlehem according to the nativity stories, because it was the city of David, and because of the prediction in Micah v. 2; but some doubt about this is expressed in Jn. vii. 41–2. On the chronological problem, see Part Two, Chapter 6, Some Gospel Mysteries.
2. In the Genesis Apocryphon found among the Dead Sea Scrolls the lost opening apparently told of the miraculous birth of Noah, and the text begins with the suspicion of his father Lamech that his wife had been made pregnant by an angel and therefore had been unfaithful to him. She repudiates this. (See Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English.) Of Abraham it was told that when he was born a star appeared in the east and moved across the heavens. The wise men went to King Nimrod and informed him that this meant the birth of a child destined to be great. Terror seized the king and he sent for his councillors, who advised him to kill the son of Terah. The king sent his soldiers to slay the child, but God protected him by dispatching the angel Gabriel to conceal him by clouds and mists. Afterwards Terah, fearing for the boy's life, fled secretly from the country. (See Book of Jashar and Maase Ahraham.) Concerning the birth of Moses the legends tell that Pharaoh decreed the death of the Israelite male children because of a dream which the magicians interpreted to mean that by an Israelite child Egypt would be destroyed. Amram, whose wife was pregnant, was alarmed by the decree; but God spoke to him in a dream and told him that the child to be born to him would be the one whom the Egyptians dreaded. He would, however, be concealed from those who would destroy him (Moses) and become the deliverer of the Hebrews. (See Targum of Palestine and Josephus, Antiq. II. ix. 3–4.)
3. Justin Martyr, First Apology, xxi–xxii.
4. According to one story Olympias before her marriage to Philip of Macedon dreamt that a thunderbolt fell from heaven kindling a fire in her belly, thus indicating the heavenly origin of her son Alexander. Another story tells of a serpent which kept company with Olympias while she slept. Philip saw this and consulted the Delphic Oracle, which informed him that the god Jupiter Ammon had consorted with his wife in the form of a serpent. Alexander was the offspring of this union. (See Plutarch, Life of Alexander the Great.) In the case of Apollonius, the famous sage who flourished in the second half of the first century A.D., it was related that the god Proteus appeared to his mother before his birth. She was not afraid, but asked him what sort of child she would bear. ‘Myself,’ he replied. ‘And who are you?’ she inquired. ‘I am Proteus the god of Egypt,’ he told her. (See Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana.)
5. See Part Two, Chapter 5, The Second Phase.
6. Roman Catholics, because of the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, are obliged to hold that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the children of Joseph by a former wife. The Gospels give no warrant for this teaching, since it is stated that Joseph had intercourse with Mary after the birth of Jesus, who was her first-born son (Mt. i. 25). The other children of the family are described as the brothers and sisters of Jesus in the Gospels without any qualification, and nothing is said of Joseph having been previously married.
7. Josephus, Antiq. XV. x. 5.
8. Jesus himself preached frequently in the synagogues of Galilee.
9. See Part Two, Chapter 6, Some Gospel Mysteries.
10. Lk. 1. 32, 35.
11. See Part Two, Chapter 5, The Second Phase. Josephus tells (Life ii) that he was noted as a boy for his learning, and when he was only fourteen was often consulted by the chief priests and doctors of Jerusalem.
12. Mk. i. 12–13, 35, vi. 45–6, xiv. 32–5.
13. Mt. vi. 6–13.