Tuesday After The Second Sunday In Advent

This week's liturgy in the Catholic church contains the story of the birth of Jesus, as I mentioned the other day two of the Gospels leave it out entirely, only Luke and Matthew have accounts of it.  Any surprise in that isn't that they include it, it's that they didn't leave it out.   Even if they did believe that Jesus was born of an unmarried woman other than her fiance, then husband, the authors of those Gospels certainly knew the scoffing and derision that the story would evoke from the start.  And as told in Luke, all anyone would have had to go on was the word of a girl, probably in her early to middle teens that the angel Gabriel came to her and told her that the baby she was carrying was the Son of God.  Something that even in the telling she found hard to believe.

But Mary said to the angel,“How can this be,
since I have no relations with a man?”
And the angel said to her in reply,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God.

I think it's significant that they're asking an audience which would certainly have been culturally unprepared to accept the word of a, maybe, fourteen or fifteen year old girl of the lowest classes, especially difficult considering Luke was writing in an educated Greek idiom, very likely to a population who would have been more likely to look askance at Mary on the basis of her ethnicity as well as her sex and her age. Being asked to believe such a thing happened to that girl of no status as opposed to pretending that Augustus was the product of his mother falling asleep at some shrine in the milieu of the Roman imperial regime must have been an easier sell.  Especially as the consequences of believing in the divine incarnation of Augustus carried no special significance for his entirely earthly, thuggish, gangster rule. 

It's one of those instances when I think the unlikelihood of the story being believed by the first hearers, that the claims were obvious fodder for the mockers, scoffers and wits and dirty joke tellers around them might make a persuasive argument that they really did believe it.  And they did, from the start scoff and mock and satirize the story, they still do, idiots all over the place online will every year.  

We don't know how the men who came to write those two Gospels would have come to believe it, what their pre-indisposition to believe what isn't that easy a story to believe might have been.  Maybe it was a belief adopted after they had experienced something like what converted Paul or something they saw.  The available documents don't provide us with an answer.

It would have been a lot less trouble for the early Jesus movement if they were in the business of inventing Jesus to have left that part of the story out.   The Mark Gospel more or less has the story of the approval or, perhaps, commissioning of Jesus happening when he is baptized by John and John's Gospel has a metaphysical assertion of the eternal nature of the Christ whose involvement with humans and human affairs somewhat asserted as a fact, somewhat in line with other observed phenomena not immediately apparent.  

I think they included the claim of the Virgin Birth  because they believed it was true, they would have had to take the word of a young girl of low birth and probably no education and whose word probably few would have believed to start with.  Maybe that counts as something of a miracle.

Looking into the matter in response to Richard Dawkins' attention getting claims of the possibility of science dealing with the matter was one of the earliest things I posted about the atheist fad of the 00s online.   I see from looking up that link that the old huckster is taking that out again, using something the atheists' favorite Bible Scholar Bart Ehrman said about Matthew mistranslating Isaiah's passage about a "young woman" to "virgin."  If that is, in fact, a mistranslation of the idea or not I'm not competent in either Hebrew or Greek or in what Isaiah understood his prophesy to mean to pretend to know.  From what I understand that's one of the passages in Matthew for which it is widely believed he, as an educated writer of Greek, probably relied on the Greek translation contained in the Septuagint.  There was an interesting conflict about just that passage that goes back to the early second century when the Septuagint was cited by the early Christians as proof that the word in the original was "virgin" and not "young woman."   There were even accusations that the Hebrew text had been adulterated to "young woman," not only by non-Christians who wanted to do with the passage what Dawkins and Ehrman want to do with it, but by some Christians such as the Ebionites who denied that Jesus was in any way a part of God. Given how Dawkins depends on Ehrman and Ehrman's claim to something like fame is noting discrepancies in the earliest manuscripts we've got of things, I'd say that matter is no more discernible now than it was around 130 AD.  I wonder exactly what the percentage of variation there is in the earliest available texts of any of those Scriptures are, how reliably "authentic" they are, the inconvenient discrepancies in them, Greek and Hebrew,  the stuff that Ehrman has used to get that drug to most academics, popular attention by making himself useful to the more titillating of pop-atheist polemics.

I can't claim that I believe the story of the incarnation as given in the Gospels, they are two quite different stories with different themes involved and with quite different intended meanings. Nor does whether or not Mary was a virgin matter much to my belief which is founded on the teachings of Jesus and in the account of the Resurrection.  But I prefer Luke's because it has the shepherds and has Jesus being born in a dirty old barn among animals and manure and bugs, God among us and in our experience in the most concrete of ways.  and, as I note most years, it inspired one of my favorite pieces of Christmas music, which you'll have to wait for the day to hear.  

That story cuts through the prettied up images, the renaissance paintings, the baroque ones, the even worse neo-baroque ones, the most awful of all, those images of conventional Catholic and, increasingly, Protestant commercial piety and fiction that don't include the dirt, the manure, the flatus, the flies, the filth.  The fear, the heighted fear of the not terribly hygienic Shepherds, not to mention the working-poor parents, the rather disgusting mess that any birth inevitably involves.  My problem with the story isn't as it's written, it's as it's falsified by making it unreal and inhuman.   

The only part of it I imagine was not that would have been the angel and angels are not what those falsifiers present them as.   Rilke presents it as I'd imagine a young girl would have experienced an unexpected angel visitation.

 Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.
And so I force myself, swallow and hold back
the surging call of my dark sobbing.
Oh, to whom can we turn for help?
Not angels, not humans;
and even the knowing animals are aware that we feel
little secure and at home in our interpreted world.

Translation by Albert Earnest Flemming

I don't come to the same conclusion, exactly, that he did but the first of the Duino Elegies had a profound effect on my understanding of the parts of the Bible that talk about angels.