The Birth of Jesus

As the years rolled by and the world endured, however, the Apostles and the first generations of church fathers realized they were not witnesses about to be swept up into heaven but earthly stewards of a message that had to be written down, explained and defended. The construction of Christianity, the early believers gradually discovered, required preserving the stories and sayings of Jesus, shaping that gospel ("good news" in Greek) and spreading it to fellow Jews and to Gentiles.

The evangelists believed the salvation of the world was in the balance. They strove to convince other Jews, to convert pagans and to control rival Christian factions whose views of Jesus differed from their own. To lose on any of these fronts would set back the cause, so when we read and hear the story now, we are reading and hearing some of the original Christian attempts to ensure the survival and success of a religion that began as little more than one sect within first-century Judaism, a milieu of great religious ferment.

To make their case in this congested theological universe, the Gospel writers collected traditions in circulation and told Jesus' story--not in a clinical way but, as John put it, so "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name." The origins of the Nativity stories are much murkier than the accounts of Jesus' adulthood. Where did the details--of miraculous conception, of birth in Bethlehem, of stars in the sky, shepherds in the night and wise men on a journey--come from? Apparently not from Jesus. John P. Meier, a Roman Catholic priest and professor at Notre Dame, the author of a monumental series, "A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus," points out that there is no convincing evidence Jesus himself ever spoke of his birth, and neither Mary nor Joseph (who is not a figure in the years of Jesus' public life) appears to have been a direct source. "The traditions behind the Infancy Narratives," Meier writes, "differ essentially from those of the public ministry and the passion," which were the result of firsthand testimony.

The Gospel authors were thus confronted with a literary problem that had to be solved. They wanted to tell the story of Jesus' birth, but apparently had little to work with. Here, then, is --where tradition and theology came in. In 1965, the Second Vatican Council held that while the Scriptures are ultimately "true," they are not necessarily to be taken as accurate in the sense we might take an Associated Press wire report about what happened at a school-board meeting as accurate. The council focused on the importance of paying attention to "literary forms" in Scripture. The Gospels are such a "literary form," and the accounts of Jesus in the canon are not history or biography in the way we use the terms. Classical biography, however, was a different genre. Writers like Plutarch invented details or embellished traditions when they were reconstructing the lives of the famous, and the Christmas saga features miraculous births, supernatural signs and harbingers of ultimate greatness similar to those found in pagan works. If we examine the Nativity narratives as classical biography, then the evangelists' means and mission--to convey theological truths about salvation, not to record just-the-facts history--become much clearer.

The earliest and sparest Gospel, Mark's (circa A.D. 60), begins at Jesus' baptism by John as an adult, skipping the Nativity altogether. The latest and most philosophical, John's (circa 90), links Jesus with God at the very birth of the universe ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and Word was God") with a grandeur and force that renders the details of Jesus' earthly arrival irrelevant. Though Paul writes that Jesus was "born of a woman, born under the Law," the rest of the New Testament is silent about the Nativity. So we are left with Matthew and Luke, Gospels composed between A.D. 60 and 90. The central events in both Nativity accounts are Mary's virginal conception, which renders her child a truly unique figure, and Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, which makes him the long-expected Davidic Messiah.

Miraculous conceptions have deep roots in Jewish tradition: the aged Sarah bearing Isaac, the barren wife of Manoah bearing Samson, the barren Hannah bearing Samuel (and, according to Luke, Mary's kinswoman Elizabeth, both aged and barren, bearing John the Baptist just before Mary conceived Jesus). What is distinctive about Mary is the Gospels' emphasis on her sexual virtue. The other Biblical examples of God's granting children to the aged or the barren do not involve virgins but ordinary married women living with their husbands.