Objection Answered

The Christmas story told in Matthew and, especially, Luke, certainly meant a lot more and was more transparent to people who lived in a rural, pre-industrial world than it does to someone who doesn't have a daily interaction with farm animals or even urban horses kept for transportation.  Someone who grew up on a farm, with farm animals, knowing just how unsanitary and smelly even a well-kept barn is, even with an abundant supply of new bedding and someone who changes it regularly, probably doesn't really get it very often, either.  Though the meaning of God being born in human form in a barn probably has more access to the meaning of the story than someone who doesn't.  Especially if they're the one who does the cleaning in one.   I pointed out one year that at the time of Jesus there would almost certainly not have been abundant bedding material for the animals in the stable he was reportedly born in.  And such a stable might have been in a cave instead of a drafty shed and likely in warmer weather when flies would be everywhere.  I don't know if they've got horseflies there but that's what I think about when I'm trying to understand what it meant.

To the people who would have first heard the story it must have been far more shocking and scandalous than it did to people who came to believe in Jesus and who, through the decades and centuries of repetition of the story, became accustomed to a romantic, unrealistic view of what was being said.   The cleanliness of the clothes of Mary, Joseph and the baby are entirely unrealistic, even the clothes of the shepherds, the first witnesses to the birth, are closer to the costume departments of Hollywood westerns than they are to reality.  I would guess that the unwashed clothes of some of the most impoverished of today's herdsmen would be closer to what it was.  Mary, Joseph, the shepherds didn't use a deodorant stick.  Water for washing was not exactly easy to come by either.  Maybe that's one of the sources of Jesus discounting the spiritual value of ritual baths.

I would like to see, for once, a manger scene with shit in it, with flies, with filth, with Mary in the rags she would have worn as her only clothes, Joseph too, and the shepherds looking as in need of clean clothes and a bath as they certainly would have been.  Those were the people in the story. Those kings in Matthew were the outsiders.

The claim of Jewish peasants of no status, especially to the Greeks and Romans, that God was incarnated to a poor couple, married in shot-gun style, in a stable not even their own must have been considered quite hilarious.  I can imagine the wise-guys and smart asses among them made quite the commentary on it.   Probably not much different from what a latter day George Carlin would say about it.  If it weren't for the absolutely radical rejection of putting a valuation on people contained in the Gospel, the narrative would be incomprehensible to us, today.  And it's only sensible even among Christians today if they take that radical leveling of people seriously and as a commandment.

I got some comment over my posting of Luigi Dallapiccola's setting of texts from the 13th century follower of Francis, Jocopone da Todi that Ottorino Respighi also set, in his far more popular, neo-classical style.  I listened to Respighi's work, thinking I might post it, as well, but, good as music as it was, I couldn't do it because it seemed so false to me.  Dallapiccola's 12-tone work - which at least one person interpreted as irreligious - seems to me to be more honest.  The text of the Lauda gives this as the Angel's announcement:

As a sign of this,
in a humble stable the
poor baby was born,
and he does not mind
lying between the ox
and the ass.
His mother, very poorly clad,
has laid him
in the manger.
Of hay is all his coverlet,

The Shepherds are given these lines

Shepherd
Lord, you have descended
from heaven to earth,
as the Angel says,
and our hearts burn
to find you in such
a lowly cattle-shed;
guide us to the place,
so that we may see you clothed
in human flesh.

The Shepherds at the Manger
Lo, here is the little stable,
and we see in it the poor baby.
The blessed Virgin
has neither food nor clothes
in which to swaddle him,
Joseph cannot help her,
for he is old and feeble.
He accustoms himself to poverty,
he who, though Lord,
seems to have nothing.

How can you set that in a neo-classical style and tell the truth of what it says?   Go look at a horrible place where the animal rescue people find horses or donkeys or other animals who were criminally neglected, I have a feeling that's more like what the stable would have been like.  That's what it really means.  The Holy Family were the kind of people who had to stay there instead of getting even a Motel 6 room or beds in a homeless shelter.  They'd never have even seen the inside of one of Trump's joints.

That said, the tradition that Joseph was an old man is medieval invention, it doesn't say that in the story.  He was probably a scared kid, more like an unwed father who had a sense of decency but unable to take care of a wife and baby.  They'd have been street people.  Try setting their story neo-classically and see what the results would be like.  Not realistic, I'm betting.  Not even listenable.


Update:  Could't care less what Duncan's cash-cow coral of compulsive clickers comment.  They don't even read what he says so why should I?  Only crazy people take it seriously, anymore.

Update 2;  Anyone who thinks Dallapiccola wrote "academic serialism" either doesn't know what the term means or has any familiarity with his music. Or maybe both.  I knew Stupy doesn't know either but I thought that other jackass was supposed to know something about music.