Those With Nothing To Lose Saw It All

UNTO HIS OWN

(Luke 2:7-16)

Homeless that first night --
one more statistic
to add to the census,
one more mouth to feed.

Only the shepherds,
with nothing to lose
except a little sleep,
came to see. 

Sr. Irene Zimmerman, SSF

OF THE TWO CANONICAL BIRTH NARRATIVES I prefer Luke's though I have nothing against Matthew's,  as RMJ points out, they had different reasons for focusing on what they did.     I'm enough of a thought criminal I don't see any reason that some version of both couldn't have happened and been reported on in some version.   Which, by the way, has little to do with whether or not both of them are truly true.   None of the authors of the New Testament canon were writing history,  the truth they were writing surpasses that pedestrian standard of judgement of what's true.  

There's nothing in Matthew's that would lead anyone to suspect they happened on the same night or even day or even week.  The shepherds' story is the one tied to that specific night.  Here's Luke:

7 She gave birth to her firstborn child, a son, wrapped him snugly, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the guestroom.

8 Nearby shepherds were living in the fields, guarding their sheep at night. 9 The Lord’s angel stood before them, the Lord’s glory shone around them, and they were terrified.

10 The angel said, “Don’t be afraid! Look! I bring good news to you—wonderful, joyous news for all people. 11 Your savior is born today in David’s city. He is Christ the Lord. 12 This is a sign for you: you will find a newborn baby wrapped snugly and lying in a manger.” 13 Suddenly a great assembly of the heavenly forces was with the angel praising God. They said, 14 “Glory to God in heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors.”

15 When the angels returned to heaven, the shepherds said to each other, “Let’s go right now to Bethlehem and see what’s happened. Let’s confirm what the Lord has revealed to us.” 16 They went quickly and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger.

Common English Bible 

You can compare the account in Matthew 2, which has only the time component of what the Magi asked Herod.

2 They asked, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We’ve seen his star in the east, and we’ve come to honor him.”

After consulting his court theologians as to the place the Messiah was to be born, Herod figured he needed to know when they first saw the star to figure out when it happened. 

7 Then Herod secretly called for the magi and found out from them the time when the star had first appeared. 

If I had to guess,  I would think that Matthew implied that Herod, at least, believed the star came into sight when Jesus was born.  Considering the time it probably took the magi* to get to Herod on foot or by camel I don't think Matthew was implying they'd have run into the shepherds the night he was born despite what a 20th century super-deluxe manger scene includes.  The shepherds were working People, not tourists.   Their sheep needed tending.   

I'll point out that the church calendar would tend to emphasize that point of view because while the lectionary has the story of the shepherds at Christmas,  the Magi have to wait till January 6th to get focused on.  We didn't do "petite Noel" on the 6th of January but I heard rumors that some French Canadian families did and we knew our Greek Orthodox cousins' Greek grandparents had a party around then - we weren't ever invited.  

Here's what I get from my thinking about the poem, above. 

Despite the absence of the census for taxation given by Luke as the reason that Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem in the surviving accounts of the reign of Tiberius,**  as in Sr. Irene Zimmerman's poem it sets up two radically opposed views of life.   Luke shows that the official, secular, legal view of the near destitute who could be taxed was as numbers to be used in a scheme of valuation as certainly as the Nazis turned those they meant to kill immediately due to their not being worth working to death as well as those they intended to work to death, extracting the most value from them that they could.   They did the same to those who their propaganda encouraged the German People to think of as "useless eaters" before they turned their mass murders into their pilot program of genocide.   And that is how the modern, secular, disenchanted world sees life.   That is how sociology and the rest of the social sciences tend to see human beings, as data in the form of numbers.   

Our worship of "the data" has reached new heights of unawareness of what that was alleged to show to start with,  it was never a view of reality, it was just a convenient way to make generalizations about reality.    For all of its general value, it has never shown anyone anything about something broader than can be fit into numbers and no living organism, let alone any person has ever been quantifiable.  Modernism, materialist scientism has made Tiberiuses of all of us.   And you can't see the whole thing when you do that. 

*  Three of them in the west, a dozen in the Orthodox tradition.  I wonder how that would figure into the casting of the Sunday School Christmas play.   And there aren't any camels mentioned in Matthew, though I'd guess they'd have wanted someone to carry their treasure chests.   That they were ye three kings seems to be European medieval or later embroidery.   I'd have guessed they'd have a donkey to do that.  They weren't carrying Fort Knox with them. 

** Anyone who thinks we have any such detailed view of any of the Roman emperors and their official actions is silly in the extreme.  We have nothing like that of even the major figures who show up in what were regarded as "histories."   That goes many times over for someone like Herod and his family.   Both the census and the slaughter of the Holy Innocents could be accurate reportage and there is no reason to expect that any corroborating evidence would have survived.  In the case of Herod commanding the slaughter of peasant babies,  there's no reason to believe the command would have even been written down at the time.   We tend to imagine that time and those people and places through our modern bureaucratic concepts.   That any modern scholar or academic or even popular debunker wouldn't realize that should discredit them.