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