IT'S A CHRISTMAS SEASON EVERGREEN, the inevitable rehashing of the claims that either no one knows the "real" date of the birth of Jesus or that there is "good reason" to believe it happened some other time of year - the only real evidence of that is the presumption that shepherds wouldn't have been out in the field tending their flocks this time of the year. I don't know how well documented the practices of shepherds in the early 1st century Palestine are but I doubt it's anything like something that well founded in the written literature that survives. I officially am skeptical of any claims made by 20th, or 21st, 19st, 18th, . . . century academics and scribblers who make confident claims about such things without there being that kind of contemporaneous documentation as they proclaim we must be about early 4th century claims about Jesus being born on December 25th. I think there's a lot more reason to be skeptical about such claims made millennia after the undocumented fact than there is three centuries after it.
One problem I have is the creation of a "typical" or "normal" life or way of life based on one or two documents or less, especially when you base that from something said centuries before of after the period you're making claims for. If one thing is likely, it was that life and lives were in no way as uniform as that kind of pseudo-scientific anthology and sociology would have it. It wouldn't surprise me if the poorest of the poor among shepherds had no alternative to having their flocks out in the open during the coldest weather.
In passing, I will point out that anything, such as Luke's story about the census, for which there is no corroborating document only means that Luke's account is the only evidence we have of it happening. Many things taken as historically accurate are based in one and only one source and many times those sources come from centuries after, not decades, within possible living memory of what is documented. Much of the documentation we have of things like shepherds in those times COMES FROM WHAT THE SCRIPTURES SAY ABOUT THEM. And such texts do comprise evidence.
I might have caused a couple of brows to raise when, in one of my skimpy Advent posts to say that something claimed in one of the Gospels never having happened having little to do with whether or not it was true - a truth I got from Bishop Gene Robinson. But the writers of the Gospels, including Matthew and Luke, weren't writing history as such, they were proclaiming a deeper truth than that. The truth they were after was deeper than the kind of truth that the best and most serious novelists try to present in their use of fiction instead of expository writing. And they were far more successful. I think for that truth December 25th is a particularly excellent date for the birth of God incarnate, born into our enfleshed condition, not as the empowered royalty that the common conception of the messianic prophecies expected. I will point out that, especially considering how many offspring ancient monarchs produced, there was an excellent chance of Jesus having been of "the house of David" as there is any European having had anyone who had many grandchildren a thousand years ago having them in their ancestry - especially in any group that had tendencies to marry within their own group. There is every reason to believe that claim considering that David lived probably at least nine-hundred to a thousand years before Jesus was born to a Jewish mother.
But that doesn't really interest me. It is that Jesus was born into the lowest of the lower classes of Roman occupied Palestine, his official father a carpenter or stone-worker, his mother certainly not of any economic class above that. At every point in both of the infancy gospels, Jesus is identified as being at risk, at risk due to the irregularity of his mother's situation when she found herself pregnant - what would have happened if Joseph divorced her and it got round that he wasn't the father? As, in fact, the earliest anti-Christian literature claimed. His birth in a barn, as it were, certainly put him at increased risk, as I'd guess they'd realize even back then. Then there's Matthew's story of Herod wanting to kill him and the perils of the Flight Into Egypt, life of the young family as an alien there - though they may have gone to one of the well established Jewish communities in Egypt. Then going back only to have Joseph decide they needed to avoid Herod's son so he set up new in a new town. Even when he was 12 and he stayed behind, lost for days in Jerusalem as a vulnerable child.
I think the idea that Jesus was born during the period of greatest danger to an infant - don't know if was true then but these days the winter months are those with some of the highest infant mortality - has a truth to it that having it verified by a birth certificate showing he was born on December 25th whatever year they'd have called it a 12:17 AM wouldn't enhance.
God becoming like us except in regard to sin is the whole point of the Incarnation. That is sharing our embodied life up to and including our death in the most possibly terrible of ways, is the truth of it. A truth that modern notions of history and the absurd quest for "the historical Jesus" can't start to tell. I say December 25th is the true date even if he was born in April or May.
There's nothing at all that's truer than Mary's song when she went to visit Elizabeth.
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