THE OTHER DAY RMJ posted a piece in which he said the shepherds who were the first people who the birth of Jesus as the Messiah was announced to would have been people of the lowest class, lower probably than the blue collar worker class or at the same level. As John Dominic Crossan said, the workers like Joseph were considered about the lowest rung of society under the Roman empire, perhaps lower than the agricultural workers like the Shepherds. No doubt if this happened today the Holy Family would be the "trailer trash" class of people, the shepherds might have been even lower than they were.
They were almost certainly illiterate and uneducated, probably considered disposable people like the real cowboys were, probably pretty rough characters and anyone Jews as well as gentiles who first heard the outrageous claim that such uncouth people and their probably dirty, maybe diseased sheep were not only among the first but the first to whom ANGELS, FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE, told about this most significant event and who were the first to go see this baby of the lowest class born in a barn, lying in a cattle trough who they were told BY ANGELS was your Savior . . . Christ the Lord!
If, as I conjecture, they may have seen themselves as slightly higher in the social scale than a carpenter (or as Crossan has it, stone cutter) and if anyone is conscious of who is just below and just higher than them, it is the nearly destitute, that they would have accepted this baby as that would be miraculous, especially when they found out the mother hadn't been married long enough for the kid to not certainly not be a bastard born to a tramp. Don't forget that Luke's description of things has given many a scoffer the chance to say that. I'm not making it up.
The scene as described in Luke was certainly not something that would have been what they or anyone would have expected. We're told these days that anyone who was expecting the Messiah expected him to be higher class than that, respectable at the very least, certainly not born to trailer trash and first attested to by dirty, ignorant, disreputable sheep herders. I would bet that if you'd told any of those same shepherds they would see an angel who would talk to them they'd probably have said the equivalent of, you're shittin' me. Never mind that they'd be the first to be told about the birth of the Messiah. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were deeply impious skeptics and crude cynics. Maybe some of them still were, thinking they'd lost their minds or that they'd all eaten some bad rye or some weed they'd mistaken for something edible. Or that the sheep they got milk from had.
Like so much else in old writing, in and outside of Scripture, we have to imagine it in terms of our own experience. I could name you the foul-mouthed, disreputable farm boys I imagine in those roles - at least one or two of them relatives of mine. Maybe they were pious in their poverty, I've known some but fewer of those kind, too. But I'll bet that most of the upper working class and middle class and affluent early converts as well as a lot of the poor ones would have imagined shepherds similarly to this.
For that matter I'll bet that going to see if what they were told was true was a dare taken on a bet.
When the angels went away from them back into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us.
Like the genealogy in Matthew which names some pretty dicey and unsavory characters from the Bible, at least one prostitute, Rahab, Tamar a widow who tricked her father in law to fathering another person in the line of Jesus, by dressing up as a prostitute among the women, and including Judah the dirty old goat who had sex with her as a temple prostitute, some of the most dicey and unsavory characters who cheated and tricked and connived their way into advantage and power among the men, those characters we imagine in their cleaned up, Renaissance and Baroque painting, As Made For TV Movie figures would not have been imagined to be clean and pure when the Gospels were written. The ones who knew the Scriptures would have known that this was not a cast of the best and brightest, nor the nicest and most respectable. And they were being asked to accept that out of that background God became flesh and extended The Law and the Prophets, not only to Jews but to the entirety of humanity and, on top of that, saved them and many if not all. And that they were expected to convince other people of it. It says that "all they told it to were amazed."
And it still is pretty amazing. Especially among professed Christians who despise that class of people, now.
This is an answer to a snarky comment. Figured I'd post it today.
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