The Birth of Jesus

There is, of course, no way to know whether Luke's story of the heavenly host announcing Jesus' arrival to the shepherds really happened; one has to believe in angels, and explain away the fact that the Gospels fail to note any ensuing communal or individual recollection of this spectacular birth, one witnessed by the rustics (in Luke) and the Magi (in Matthew), in the years of Jesus' public life. Yet the language never fails to captivate. "For unto us a child is born," wrote Isaiah, "unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." So it was that when Luke came to herald the birth of his hero to the shepherds, he struck the same notes: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord."

Such monotheistic theology--a Christian obedience to the Jewish commandment to "have no other gods before me"--was, however, automatically appealing to only a slice of the evangelists' ultimate audience. Christianity was to be preached, as Paul put it in his Epistle to the Romans, "to the Jew first, also to the Greek."

The basic features of the Nativity story were familiar to pagan ears. In Suetonius' second-century biography of Augustus, who ruled as emperor from 27 B.C. to A.D. 14, omens in the natural world had heralded Augustus' birth, which was itself the result of divine intervention. Atia, Augustus' mother, was said to have fallen asleep when Apollo, taking the form of a serpent, impregnated her. That there was physical contact is suggested by Suetonius' assertion that afterward Atia "purified herself, as usual after the embraces of her husband." The baby, Suetonius writes, "was thought to be the son of Apollo"; on the day of his birth a senator in Rome "declared that the world had got a master," and Atia's husband, Octavius, "dreamt that he saw his son under more than human appearance, with thunder and sceptre, and the other insignia of Jupiter... having on his head a radiant crown, mounted upon a chariot decked with laurel."

The parallels to the Jesus story are clear: a deity chooses to send a son from the divine to the temporal world through a woman, the glorious news of the coming of a king is made known to others, and the woman's loyal husband, rather than recoiling, is included in the revelation. But Augustus was not the product of a Christ-like conception as portrayed in the Gospels: the evangelists hewed to the conviction that Mary had no sexual contact of any kind, and scholars of antiquity have yet to find another example that precisely mirrors the Annunciation.

Still, as the Christian Gospels spread through the early centuries of the first millennium, audiences familiar with Virgil would have been receptive to the rhythms and ideas of Matthew's and Luke's stories. In his "Fourth Eclogue," written in 40 B.C., the poet evokes an age of peace presided over by a baby in a cradle of flowers. "Upon the Child now to be born, under whom the race of iron will cease and a golden race will spring up over the whole world, do you, O chaste Lucina [the goddess of childbirth], smile favorably, for your own Apollo is now king." The baby's coming is then hailed with these words: "Behold the world trembles in homage... the expanse of earth and sea, and the reaches of the sky!" Virgil and the evangelists were working in essentially the same literary tradition, and the "Fourth Eclogue" is a sign of how pervasive such birth imagery was before, during and after Jesus' lifetime.

The collision of different factions and different traditions in the world of Christianity's first years was mirrored by civil wars between Jesus' followers. Then as now, Christians tended to disagree sharply with one another, but the essential creed is so familiar to modern ears that it is difficult to recall how many different views of Jesus were circulating among Christian groups during the first two centuries or so. A complex movement popularly known as Gnosticism (from the Greek "gnosis," meaning knowledge) offered an apparently compelling and appealing version of Christianity in which believers sought, in addition to received teaching, "inner knowledge" of God. "Insight, or gnosis, was the experience of searching for the divine, the source of our creation, within oneself," says Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton and the best-selling author of "The Gnostic Gospels" and, most recently, "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas." "Such Christians claimed to go beyond the views of Jesus expressed in the New Testament to seek, in addition, personal perception and transformation."