CHRIST MASS

Cer­tain coun­tries cel­e­brate Christ­mas in ways which can only be de­scribed as bizarre (to bor­row a Basque word). In the Czech Re­pub­lic, sin­gle women throw shoes back­wards over their shoul­ders to see if they will get mar­ried soon; in the Nether­lands, Saint Nicholas (Sin­terk­laas) ar­rives on De­cem­ber the 5th, sup­pos­edly from Madrid, sur­rounded by gift-bear­ing pages in black­face; Slo­vaks chuck milk pud­dings onto their ceil­ings; Ukraini­ans hang fake spi­der webs over their Christ­mas trees; and Nor­we­gians hide their brooms to ward off witches. As for Cat­alo­nia, let’s not even go there (or let’s do, for those not in the know: chil­dren beat the liv­ing day­lights out of a log while yelling at it to defe­cate nougat bars and small pre­sents, then sing car­ols in front of na­tiv­ity scenes in which a bare-arsed squat­ting man has been placed - his fae­ces in full and vis­i­ble flow - within drib­bling dis­tance of baby Jesus).

All this is a bit strange, but not half as much as cer­tain (se­ri­ous) the­o­ries about the bib­li­cal Christ which have been pro­pounded over the years by var­i­ous schol­ars. Thomas L. Thom­son, for in­stance in his im­pec­ca­bly doc­u­mented book ’The Mes­siah Myth’ (2005), claims that Jesus never ex­isted at all, but was sim­ply the lat­est ad­di­tion to a line of mes­sian­is­tic fig­ures to be found in the Old Tes­ta­ment: Abra­ham, Moses, Samuel, Eli­jah etc. Ac­cord­ing to Thom­son, one proof of this is that every sin­gle one of Jesus’s mir­a­cles also ex­ists in the Old Tes­ta­ment: there is an Im­mac­u­late Con­cep­tion in Judges, 13; walk­ing on water is in Psalm, 29, 3; the mir­a­cle of the bread and fishes is in 2 Kings, 4, 42, and so on; so this would be in ac­cor­dance with the an­cient He­brew tra­di­tion of using fic­tion to ex­plain the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts; there is no rea­son why it would have oc­curred to the au­thors of the Gospels - work­ing, nat­u­rally enough, in the same tra­di­tion - to have done oth­er­wise.

In the 2nd and 3rd cen­turies after the death (or ’death’) of Christ, Chris­t­ian scribes wished to give greater pro­tag­o­nism to this per­son­age, which is why a pro­lif­er­a­tion of Jesus-boost­ing ’extra’ gospels began to ap­pear, such as those of Peter, Mary, and the In­fancy of Jesus. In the lat­ter, for ex­am­ple, Jesus speaks flu­ently when still in his cra­dle, makes birds out of clay then gives them life, and gives the­ol­ogy lessons to adult rab­bis (this last mir­a­cle ap­pears in Luke). As for his in­fant lan­guage skills and his abil­ity to give life to clay birds, both sur­vived long enough, in writ­ing and orally, to make it into the Quran five cen­turies later.

By the time of the Coun­cil of Nicaea in 325CE - which put paid to all those gospels save the four canon­i­cal ones - Chris­tians had come to take it for granted that Jesus had been a flesh-and-blood being, and so tried to es­tab­lish his­tor­i­cal facts about him, which opened a whole new can of worms. To start with, in 200CE, Cop­tic Chris­tians de­cided he was born on Jan­u­ary 6th, and a cen­tury later the Catholic Church in­sisted it was the 25th of De­cem­ber (thus pur­loin­ing the win­ter sol­stice cel­e­brated by pa­gans for cen­turies). It also re­mains un­clear whether Jesus was born in Nazareth (a vil­lage which was of­fi­cially in­vis­i­ble until 400CE) or Beth­le­hem (the birth­place of King David, con­ve­niently enough). And ac­cord­ing to the Cata­lan the­olo­gian Ar­mand Puig’s es­ti­ma­tion - gen­er­ally agreed upon - Mary would have be­tween 14 and 16 when she gave birth to Jesus. Which nowa­days would be enough to have God the Fa­ther charged with statu­tory rape. Happy Christ­mas!

Opin­ion