7/1/2019
by Leonard Swidler, dialogue@temple.edu
About timing: I find Christmas a most enjoyable time of the year—cool but not miserably cold. July, on the other hand, can be miserably hot and humid. So, why not think about Christmas in July?!
About location: Two of the most Christmas-decorated cities I have ever experienced were not New York, Paris, or some other Western city, but Tokyo (a Secular/Buddhist/Shinto city), and Kuala Lumpur, overwhelmingly a Muslim city)—and neither of them had a “White Christmas” while I was there. So, why not enjoy a reflection about cool Christmas in hot Philadelphia in July?
If we are going to talk about a particular subject, probably the first thing we should focus on is the “meaning” of the subject. What we are going to focus on today is Christmas. The first thing to note about Christmas is that the word in English refers to celebration of the “Mass at Christ-mas” time. However, if we look at the name in different European languages, we find that the name used is quite different. For example, in German, the term is Weihnachten, which literally means “Holy Night.” In Latin, the name used is simply, Dies Natalis, “The Birth Day.” Noel in French is derived from Natalis, and hence also simply means “birth.” Looking at all the different names for Christmas, interesting as it may be, nevertheless, does not tell us very much about what we are focusing on.
Of course we are focusing on the celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. We might ask, “What is so important about the birth of anybody? In fact, the birth of a new human being seems to always create a sense of awe, and positive feelings in general. So, in this case, we are dealing with the firstborn child of an unimportant, presumably, very young woman (in that culture girls usually married at 14!). However, even with the birth of such a seemingly unimportant baby, it makes one think of a later saying in Jewish writings, the Talmud, where it is written “Whoever saves a single human life, it is as if he saved a whole universe.” (Mishnah: Aboth Rabbi Nathan 31) It is also interesting to note that the same idea, and almost the very same words, were also many centuries later attributed to Mohammad: “Whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as saving all mankind.” (Qur’an: 5:32). Thus seen: Every person’s birth, and death, are each a whole universe!
What brings us to focus on the birth of Jesus is, of course, what happened with him in his ensuing 30-some years, and even more than that, what has happened in the 2000 years since then.
Jesus grew to adulthood in the area that today we call Galilee, which is a part of present-day Israel. Now we should remember that Galilee was thought of as rather second-class Judaism by the inhabitants of Judea. In any case, he apparently grew to young manhood, and as young boys in the Jewish world at the time, he studied the Scriptures. He seems to have done so in an extraordinarily deep manner.
How do we know this? Because there is a passage in the Gospel of Luke which relates how Jesus along with his mother and father went to Jerusalem for a large celebration, and when his father and mother returned to their home, they walked separately—Mary the mother with the women, and Joseph the father with the men. It is related in Luke’s Gospel that after a day’s journey the mother and father met again, each one assuming that Jesus was with the other one. When they discovered that he was not with either of them, they returned to Jerusalem and spent apparently quite some time searching for him. When they did finally find him, it is recorded in the Gospel that he was discussing deep religious issues with the rabbis. My suspicion is, that among these rabbis were quite possibly the leaders of the two major rabbinical “schools,” namely, Hillel and Shammai. Luke records that the rabbis were extremely impressed with the knowledge of the scriptures on the part of 12-year old Jesus. As one might expect from anxious parents, it is noted that Joseph and Mary scolded Jesus, saying that he caused them a great deal of anxiety. However, Jesus is reported to have said something rather imperious: “I must be about the work of my father.”
Luke also notes at that point that “Mary kept all of these events in her heart and pondered upon them.” This line suggests quite strongly, that Luke as a writer of a Gospel, one way or another had access to these thoughts that Mary pondered in her heart. The chances are that Luke never met Mary herself (Luke’s Gospel was written about 85 C.E.; hence Mary would have been over a hundred!), but somehow had access to things that she may have said to others, who then wrote them down eventually.
Might this “Proto-Evangelist” have been Mary Magdalen (to whom the risen Jesus first appeared and commissioned to “instruct the apostles”), or Mary of Bethany (who “chose the better part and sat at the Master’s feet…. ”)? The chances that Mother Mary could read and write are quite slim. Such was not expected of young girls in that culture, or in hardly any cultures, for that matter!
Of course, Luke must have had access to some of the experiences and thoughts of Mary, for he is the one who most of all writes about them. As I said, we have no idea about how he had access to the sources, whether they were spoken and he just heard them from living persons (who would have been quite elderly), or that they had been written down, and he had access to the written material.
In any case, as we know, Jesus grew to manhood and in the process he must have learned to read and write and studied with the rabbi's, for at one place in the Gospels it is written that he was invited to come to the front and read from the Scriptures at the synagogue service in Galilee, after which it is also recorded that the people spoke among themselves, asking “Where did he get all that knowledge? Is he not the son of Joseph, a Carpenter?”
An interesting question to ask at this point would be, “Who might have been the rabbis that Jesus studied with, there north of Judea, in the province of Galilee? Well, we have evidence elsewhere that both Shammai and Hillel had spent time teaching in Galilee, and that Hillel, the older of the two, died around the year 10. We also know that Jesus probably as born around the year 4 BCE. That would mean that, if the dates are reasonably accurate, Jesus would have been 14 years old when Hillel died. He would certainly have been old enough for him to have been studying with Hillel for two years or more. As far as Shammai is concerned, he lived several decades longer than did Hillel.
Whole libraries have been written about Christmas and about Jesus. May this brief reflection add a few details to the reader’s reflection at Christmas time in July.
