The many myths of Christmas
Dan A. Nygaard
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Any story popularly identified with a culture’s origins attracts embellishments and becomes mythic. So it is with Christmas.
In fact, the original story recounting the strange events from two millennia ago hangs entirely on two too-brief accounts in an ancient text. It is a story whose “absence of details,” wrote 19th-century Jewish scholar Alfred Edersheim, “painfully increases” the more it is studied.
The absence of detail helped the ancient story go viral. The lack of particulars gave space to generations of storytellers to incorporate the local embellishments that transformed an incredible story into one that has mesmerized listeners around the world.
The original story is simple enough for a child to tell. Yet it’s so packed that philosophers wrestle with it. The ancient text brilliantly weaves together complexity and mystery with simplicity. In contrast, popular Christmas stories dumb down the ancient account, allowing fantastic fallacies to blur its message.
For example, one Christmas image celebrated by everyone from Crusader knights to the Barenaked Ladies is a bright, fascinating star. However, in the ancient text, the star that’s widely recognized today went mostly unnoticed. Today’s popular star of wonder was recognized only by heretical stargazers “from out of the east.”
And three kings at Jesus’s birthplace? Didn’t happen. Ignoring their absence from the ancient text, medieval Crusaders identified their remains, dragged them back to Germany, then spent 632 years building a cathedral in Cologne around their bones. But the ancient text doesn’t identify the visitors as kings or number them; it doesn’t even include camels. The original account identifies them as Magi, priest-sages whose mysterious research combined facts and observations with speculations and superstition.
Such embellishments, meant to be harmless, were created by local storytellers to add culturally important claims to an attractive story. Yet editing the ancient story to make it appealing crimps and dulls its message. Popular renditions validate cultural norms. In contrast, the original text confronts readers with deep mystery, engaging an indifferent and dangerous world.
Consider the angels. It’s assumed angels are, if they exist, kind and reassuring. But in the ancient text, every time one appears, it first says, “Don’t be afraid.” In the ancient story, angels announce to shepherds “good news that will cause great joy.” And yet the birth about which the angels rejoiced tragically resulted in a local despot ordering the horrific mass murder of Bethlehem’s male infants. Were the angels who sang of peace on earth unaware that innocent children would soon be slaughtered?
According to the ancient text, the visiting Magi, a mesmerizing subplot in the story, find Mary and Joseph in a house, not a stable. But if the Magi had not read the stars, if they had not gone on a quest in search of the newborn king of the Jews, or if only they had avoided consulting the local despot, Bethlehem’s children would not have been slaughtered. How much better if they had stayed in the east. But they came. And death followed.
The ancient Christmas account includes hard truths that popular renditions gloss over. The ancient text includes acts of evil — the belief that killing can be a solution.
Why evil exists is a disturbing mystery. Why Christmas exists is a mystery, too, but one that’s a light in our darkness. Anglican theologian N.T. Wright claims that Christmas begins the story about someone who claimed to do something about evil. What was accomplished remains mysterious to post-modern materialists. But Christians throughout the world believe, by faith, a solution was begun in Bethlehem. And they anticipate that what was begun shall be fulfilled.
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Dan A. Nygaard lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife. He’s a pastor and author of Star Readers from Out of the East.