Transmission

NATIVITY MYSTERY: THE ELEPHANT IN QUESTION

by j. Snodgrass, December 2007

NARRATOR : Five blind-folded people are put in a room with an animal and asked to identify it, based on their sense of touch. One says it’s a donkey, for it has a donkey’s tail. One says it’s a snake, for what he holds is a long, writhing tube. Another says it’s a bat, not knowing what she holds is actually an ear. Others offer different answers, each is certain they’re right. But when the blindfolds come off, they realize that none were fully correct - they’ve been describing different parts of an elephant.

The elephant in question today is Jesus. More specifically, the birth of Jesus as described, or not described, in the four Canonical Gospels. And we’re very fortunate today to have the Gospel-writers with us. Admittedly, none were actually present at the birth of Jesus, nor did any of them know him personally. But perhaps they can shed some light on the great Nativity Mystery. They’ve asked to be called by their pen-names, since they’ve forgotten who they really were. So please allow me to introduce Mark…

MARK : Shalom.

NARRATOR : Matthew…

MATTHEW : Greetings in the name of Christ the king.

NARRATOR : Luke…

LUKE : Down with the system.

NARRATOR : And John…

JOHN : The Father is known to the Son who is known to the Father.

NARRATOR : Thank you. So, we’ve brought the four of you together today because we’re interested in learning about the birth of Jesus. Two of you have written different accounts of this, and two of you skipped it. To get us going, I’ll re-cap the story we usually use around this time of year. Wise-men were guided by a star to Bethlehem, and beneath the star they found a baby lying in a feeding-trough in a barn. Some shepherds were there with their flocks, and the wise-men gave gifts…

MATTHEW : Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Christ the king…was born in a barn? With shepherds around him? You’ve got to be joking! No. Jesus was born in a house - maybe not a castle, but definitely not a barn. And there were no shepherds. He was greeted by wise-men from afar bearing gifts worthy of a king!

LUKE : What? Get over yourself! Jesus was a prophet. He came to bring good news to the poor - he wasn’t concerned with kings. It was the lowly shepherds who came to honor him. And this nonsense about a star… It was a choir of angels that appeared to the shepherds!

MATTHEW : Sounds like someone here hasn’t been doing their homework. Great kings are ALWAYS born under a star.

LUKE : I didn’t say he was a king. I said he was a prophet sent to overthrow the system.

MATTHEW : But what about his ancestry? Joseph was descended from David, Solomon, Josiah - all the great kings!

LUKE : Says you. I agree that he was related to David, but not Solomon. No, Jesus came down from David’s other son, Nathan, through a line of workers, to Joseph.

NARRATOR : Um, if I may… I thought Joseph wasn’t the father.

MARK : And who cares anyway where he was born? Or who was there? The important thing was what he said. The message.

MATTHEW : Yeah, but he has to have been born. And that’s important to the story.

LUKE : I agree. The birth of a great man tells us a lot about who he’ll grow up to be.

MARK : It might, IF we actually knew anything about his birth. Which we don’t.

JOHN : You’re all fools.

NARRATOR : …Would you care to elaborate on that?

JOHN : Christ is the Word. THE WORD!

NARRATOR : The word..?

JOHN : The Word, who in the beginning was with God, and was God. Through the Word, the Christ, all things did come into being. You can ramble on about the earthly birth of some child, but you miss the whole point. The Christ is eternal, from beginning to end. His brief appearance in the flesh was just to clear up some of the confusion between people like you.

MARK : …You’re crazy.

JOHN : The end of time shall prove me right.

MARK : Yeah. In the meantime, if anybody sees some bananas lying around, I think they must have fell out of his tree.

NARRATOR : And so the confusion continues. There were many gospels circulating in the early years of Christianity. Manuscripts of about twenty have been found, and early Christian writers make references to others which are completely lost to us. Four were chosen for Canonization, probably by Irenaeus, who explained, as there are four corners of the Earth, so there shall be four gospels, no more and no less. The four he selected were chosen based on his belief that they were most likely eye-witness accounts, written by followers of Jesus.

Recent geographical studies have proven that the Earth does not, in fact, have four corners - it seems to be some sort of revolving ball. Recent scholarship has proven that none of the Gospels were written by first-hand witnesses of Jesus. In all likelihood, the earliest Gospel- the Gospel of Mark - was written over a generation later, meaning that everyone who’d been alive in Jesus’ time was dead, and everyone who had known them was getting old too, so it was time to set down some of the stories before they passed out of existence. Matthew and Luke were based on Mark, adding sayings from another source. The Gospel of John was probably set down a hundred years or more after the death of Jesus - three generations later, in a time when most people only lived to be thirty.

This does not mean, however, that there is no truth in the Gospels. We live in an age of facts and figures, which can make it difficult to find meaning in Truths from another time. But it’s important to remember that numbers can mislead, photographs have a point of view, and even eye-witness testimony won’t always tell what really went down. Five blindfolded people describing the elephant. The Gospels give us a view into the hopes and dreams, the glorious expectations of the early Christian community, as they took on the sacred task of putting the miraculous into words.

Posted in: uncategorized