The Birth of Jesus

In the eyes of competing (and ultimately victorious) Christians, this religious path put too much emphasis on the personal and not enough on Jesus as the incarnate son of God who was crucified for the sins of the world. It was, in other words, "heresy" (interestingly, in Greek "heresy" means "choice"), and the virginal conception was one of the battlefields on which the internecine conflict took place. In the gnostic "Gospel of Philip," Pagels points out, the Gospel author reinterprets Jesus' birth, suggesting that while Jesus was born biologically to Mary and Joseph, he was reborn spiritually as the son of God, his heavenly Father, through the Holy Ghost, who was functioning as a sort of heavenly Mother. To Philip, Jesus was a paradigmatic figure whose rebirth was available to others in the rite of baptism.

Such a view prompted a fierce counterattack from Irenaeus, a late-second-century church father who believed that Jesus was utterly unique that he had been born in a unique way and had been raised from the dead in a unique way. Writing about the virginal conception, Irenaeus said: "In the last times, not by the will of the flesh, nor by the will of man, but by the good pleasure of the Father, his hands formed a living man, in order that Adam might be created [again] after the image and likeness of God." By Nicea, this interpretation of the tradition of the Nativity had largely carried the day--for believers Jesus was in fact, in the reinterpretation of Isaiah by Matthew, Emmanuel, or "God with us."

A man with no human father, a king who died a criminal's death, a God who assures us of everlasting life in a world to come while the world he made is consumed by war and strife: Christianity is a religion of perplexing contradictions. To live an examined faith believers have to acknowledge those complexities and engage them, however frustrating it may be. "We are in a world of mystery, with one bright Light before us, sufficient for our proceeding forward through all difficulties," wrote John Henry Newman, the great Victorian cleric whose intellectual journey led him from the Anglican priesthood to the Roman Curia. "Take away this Light and we are utterly wretched--we know not where we are, how we are sustained, what will become of us, and of all that is dear to us, what we are to believe, and why we are in being." The Christmas star is just one such light; there are others. Whatever our backgrounds, whatever our creeds, many of us are in search of the kind of faith that will lead us through the darkness, toward home. In Luke, the angelic host hails the Lord and then says: "on earth peace, good will toward men"--a promise whose fulfillment is worth our prayers not only in this season, but always.

© 2004