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12/23/2002 Entry: "Nativity Stories"

There has been some controversy over film the BBC has made about the Virgin Mary. I saw part of it and wondered what the fuss was about - there certainly wasn't anything in it that a 17yr old student of religious studies should have been unaware of. "Old hat" about sums it up. We learned that Mary may not have dressed in the traditional blue. Big deal. Her arranged marriage to Joseph might not have been for love. Hold the front page! I turned over to watch Blazing Saddles instead. Don't tell me the camp fire scene is crude and loutish. I know - and I still laughed like a drain.

I do worry about the way that some (most?) Christians treat the Nativity stories, as though if anyone asks if the events were not exactly as they're portrayed in the countless school plays that somehow the integrity and truth of the Bible is being questioned. "Biblical criticism" is used as a dirty phrase, and it shouldn't be.

A serious look at the stories told by Matthew and Luke reveals some puzzles, but that's only a problem if you're determined that they are telling the same story. For example, Matthew clearly implies that Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem - they only go to Nazareth after their flight to Egypt. It is Luke who has them travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem and back again. Only Matthew mentions the star, and he doesn't say anything about how bright it was. Whatever, the carol may say, there is no mention of the shepherds (they're in Luke) having seen it. If you put the two stories together as witnesses of "events", what they agree about is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth - and not much else. But that isn't a problem. It's a glory! The early church had ample opportunity to harmonise these accounts, and it didn't happen. It didn't happen because both accounts are essentially true.

What, after all, is the purpose of these nativity stories? They're a sort of preview of the good news that follows. They reveal what their authors believed to be the truth about Jesus. But they are not, absolutley not, biographies in any modern sense of the word. We are not dealing with objective, dispassionate writing. This is from the faithful for the faithful. Asking questions of these texts is not to deny their authority and truthfulness. It is about seeking the message that Matthew and Luke have for us by reading what they actually say, rather than reading their accounts through a filter of Primary School drama.

I'll do some more about this tomorrow. Leaving it here leaves me wide open to flaming and a risk of being misunderstood, but I'm tired and my bed seems more important than my blog! So hold back those flames!