The Nativity: when theology strikes

December 24, 2014 • 7:00 am

by Grania

Most people who grew up with a Christian background are somewhat familiar with the Nativity story. It is one of the more famous bits thanks in no small part to the runaway commercial success of the Solstice festival it attached itself to, and the rest, so to say, is history. Most people find it somewhat charming: it has plenty of drama, it has gift-giving ceremonies, it has visits from supernatural entities, it has long journeys, and there is even a murderous king.

Most of us are also aware that the four Gospels are very inconsistent in their telling of the Nativity, in fact, only Matthew and Luke even mention it, and they don’t appear to be able to even agree on the year. Moreover, Augustus Caesar did not order a census and even if he had, they certainly didn’t expect people to travel back to their ancestral homes for the sake of being counted.

So it’s not a huge surprise that theologian Rev Ian Paul is reported in The Guardian to be arguing that the well-loved stable scene may in fact not be real either. (TL;DR it was the living area of a normal house, he claims.)

Was it more like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativity_of_Jesus_in_art#mediaviewer/File:BruynAltar01.jpg
Bartholomäus Bruyn Altarpiece, St. Johann Baptist Essen

Or more like this:

Folk painting, 17th century, by Mikael Toppelius

 

The stable scene is a staple part of a thousand school nativity plays, as is the preceding”no room at the Inn” setup. It is also a fundamental part of a thousand Christmas Day sermons that have put much stock in being able to show the holy family to be humble and poor, and therefore somehow a lesson in the virtue of poverty and humility. For these reasons, I don’t expect that what Sophisticated Theologians ™ have to say on the subject is going to make a blind bit of difference to the faithful. Let’s face it, the donkey is probably the highlight of any nativity play, and there is not a lot of mileage to be had from a sermon about a baby being born in the comfort of home (not that there’s anything comfortable about having a baby).

Theologians. Next they’ll be telling us that the angels didn’t have tinsel halos either.

h/t: Ant

166 thoughts on “The Nativity: when theology strikes”

    1. Isn’t all theology “pre-nursery” by definition, being but a (increasingly) thin veneer of pretend rationality over a festering dung heap of badly written fairy tales and snuff porn ?

        1. Do not confuse evidence based rationality for wisdom.

          This is the minimum of good behaviour that we should expect from other human beings.

          Feel free to spend your time agonizing over how many invisible spooks can dance on the head of a pointy object but make no mistake, that is not wisdom.

          What you do in the privacy of your own mind is no business of mine but when you trot your nonsense out in the public marketplace of ideas do not play the offended card as your your best supporting argument for your dearly held delusions and not act hurt and surprised when you encounter some sort of push back.

    2. Oh dear.

      First of all, I am not sure how even sophisticated theology manages to turn “by Grania” into secretly meaning “by Jerry”.

      Secondly, this is not even attempting to be theology. Nor is it in fact disputing anything that Ian Paul says. He’s quite likely correct in his interpretation and nowhere do I dispute that.

      My points are these:
      Point the First: no-one actually knows what parts (if any) of the nativity narrative are even remotely true.
      Point the Second: Christians in general don’t care what Sophisticated Theologians have to say anyway.

      2. Oh dear is right.

        I’m confident shepherds tended to flocks of sheep back in the day, but the story does get a little sketchy once an angel appears to them.

      3. Point the First: no-one actually knows what parts (if any) of the nativity narrative are even remotely true.

        Of everything there is to know about Jesus, one thing’s for certain: the entire Nativity scene is 100% fabricated.

        Jesus is actually a Jewish archangel who first appears in the Old Testament in Zechariah, at least a few centuries BCE. By the time of Paul he had his own cult following. After the Roman conquest of Judaea, he was given an euhemerized biography, the oldest surviving version of which is the Gospel According to Mark. That Gospel has nothing about Jesus’s origins; those first appear in the next Gospel, Matthew’s. And again in radically different from in Luke, but not at all in John. Still others, not in the Bible, have even different origins stories; Marcion, for example, has Jesus beaming down from the heavens like a scene out of Star Trek.

        So…wondering which version of the Nativity is the “real” version is rather like wondering which version of Superman’s origins (original comic book or one of the many “reboots”?) is the “real” one.

        Cheers,

        b&

        1. Jesus = archangel, is this your idea which is yours, or did you read about it somewhere? I am not familiar with this suggestion and I’m pretty well up on most of the better quality writings on the issue, so if there is a source on the webs I could read I’d be grateful for a linky. Got to get into Carrier’s latest as soon as I have the strength too.

          1. Jesus = archangel, is this your idea which is yours, or did you read about it somewhere?

            I first heard of it from Sastra, who heard of it from Richard Carrier. He might be the first in modern history to connect those particular dots…but the dots are bleedin’ obvious once connected.

            The KJV Zachariah 6 works well, with two caveats: “Joshua” is the same name as “Jesus” in the same way that “Lysander” and “Alejandro” are both the same name as “Alexander; and the word the KJV translates as, “the BRANCH,” is also frequently used to mean, “the East,” or, much more relevantly, “the Rising.”

            And, rather than this just being some sort of random Bible Code bunch of coincidences, Philo of Alexandria devotes some commentary to the passage in On the Confusion of Tongues, remarking how peculiar it would be to apply that “Rising” epithet to a mere mortal but how much obvious sense it makes to apply it to the Logos. In other words, the greatest theologian of the First Century saw that passage about the Rising Anointed (Christened, with many crowns) Jesus, Jehovah’s highest priest and the prince of peace and the architect of the One True Church, and saw that it clearly referred to the same “Word” whom John named in the first verse of the first chapter of his Gospel.

            b&

          3. Yes — very highly recommended.

            It’s actually got a significant amount of theological analysis in it…but honest theological analysis, no bullshit, from the perspective of an objective historian. Not, “How do we interpret this passage in light of what dogma tells us today?” but, rather, “What religious beliefs are the author expressing in this passage and how did that fit into the ancient understanding of the world?” And the two approaches are radically different and come up with oftentimes diametrically opposed answers….

            b&

        2. I’m getting the funny feeling that if michaelroberts4004 isn’t preachingn to his choir on his own ecopriestlymountainlake list that he can get frustrated and resort to sarcasm. Just a feeling. I’m sure it can be explained.

        3. And your point is?

          Not much on the reading comprehension, are you? Grania’s third-of-three paragraphs begins with the words, “My points are these.” Those would be, you know? Her points. Which she made. And you could read for yourself…if that’s the sort of thing you’re capable of.

          And, on that last point, the jury is still out….

          b&

    3. I’ve commented on your blog, Michael. I’ll post what I said here also: I have a question: can you explain to me why I shouldn’t take the nativity stories as happening as described? What makes them different from what Christians insist as literal events for the supposed resurrection? It could be that you don’t take the resurrection literally, though that would strain the description you have given yourself as Christian. If you don’t think that the resurrection and its associated events weren’t real (in whole or in part), can you tell me what parts and why?

      I’m a geologist too. 🙂

    1. And .true. from Ms Spingies: so thus, such the delight for me, too, — this — to read.

      Having vaginally birthed three bambinos with zero ( 20th Century ) druuuugs, each one all over the poundage of 8.0, I can say .with evidenced – based certainty. that to these endeavors
      i) there wudn’t a thing “comfortable” about it all, and as well,
      ii) there was — virginally — squat re it all altogether … … either !

      Even as a wee kiddo from the countryside attending various relatives’ so – spendy churchiness on elebenty gazillion 24 Decembers , I .always. (secretly inside my skull and quite not.not verbally OUT LOUD so as not ‘to offend’ any one of those uncles and cousins during their OUT – LOUD back – and – forth recitations of the Matthew or Luke stable – fables) pilloried these patriarchal pontificatin’ prelates for being just so frickin’ … … dumb. And, particularly from up there upon their authoritatively and purposefully raised – over – me pulpits, for lying (to me, a little kid) like they always.always did.

      Hearken thus then to Poet Philip Larkin’s (also, as Mr Hitchens, succumbing in another December to, as well, esophageal CA and inside particularly – remembered – this – month Mr Hitchens’ lovely Portable Atheist compilations — commencing there on page 209) stanza of “Church Going”:

      “ Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
      And always end much at a loss like this,
      Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
      When churches fall completely out of use
      What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
      A few cathedrals chronically on show
      Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
      And let the rest rent – free to rain and sheep.
      Shall we avoid them as unlucky places? ”

      As I myself shall this evening — now on 24 December 2014 — be “avoiding” any such “unlucky place” = and .NO more ever. have any of that so – spendy churchgoing.

      Blue

  5. Perhaps Matthew and Luke don’t agree about the facts of the event because they were cribbing aspects of the tale from different legends.

    You can cobble a very respectable version of the Christian nativity scene from the previously-existing nativity stories of Mithras or Romulus. Or Krishna. Or Dionysus. Or Zoroaster. Or Attis. Or Horus.

    From these you can get a savior son-of-a-god who is the god himself, born in a manger on December 25th to a virgin mother and a carpenter father. The scene includes farm animals, three wise men who traveled a long distance guided by a star, who brought gifts including frankincense.

    But who knows? According to theologians, Jesus mythicists argue like creationists.

        1. The Machar? I’ve just looked it up and done a dance down memory lane. I spent a good chunk of my childhood about a five-minute walk from there. I was too young to register the bar but, judging by the map, it must have been neatly placed for the university Geography Dept., where my mother worked.

          Thanks for the reminder!

      2. Is there a write up of this consilience? It would make a good Xmas present for my Catholic brother-in-law.

  6. Don’t you think in this one case that god would have insured a painless birth. Especially since she was a virgin. He did seem to have some concern for virgins as the stories go.

    1. Given that this god simultaneously raped Mary and cuckolded her husband I suspect that empathy was not even near the top of the list of its attributes.

      1. It’s Catholic doctrine that Mary experienced no pain and suffering during Jesus’s birth. Firstly, painful childbirth is a punishment for Original Sin, and she was conceived without sin, so she didn’t need to be punished the way ordinary women do. Secondly, you don’t think that the Son of God came into the world via a vagina do you? The Church worried that if He did, that this would mean that Mary was not a virgin, and we know that she was a virgin before, during and after the birth. So, how was he born? One theory was that He came out of her side–don’t ask me how, it was a miracle! Oh, and there was no afterbirth either. Isn’t it clever how they figured all this out? And yes, people still believe all this.

          2. I did not know that! Is mistranslation from the Greek involved here? I don’t know if it would be easier for a baby god to emerge from Zeus’s thigh or genitals.

          4. A possible mechanism is suggested by the old Australian Pommie joke (Pommie = English):
            A Pommie walks into a bar with a cane toad on his head.
            The barman says “Where’d you get that?”
            And the cane toad replies: “It started as a wart on me arse”.

          6. Baby Dionysius was not conceived in Zeus’s thigh, only transferred there while a fetus. It’s a long story with plenty of misogyny.

    2. To be sure, God would have made sure that someone stuffed a sock in Mary’s gob to stop any men from hearing the screams. That’s the same as making it painless, yes?

  7. Holy shit, a “misreading of the New Testament”.

    How is that even possible ?

    And I notice that the perennial favourite excuse of apologists, namely mistranslation of the Greek, is being deployed.

    This time it’s the Greek word kataluma being violated, which at least has most likely wreaked less pain and misery on human kind than that other famous mistranslation of the Greek word parthenos resulting in 2 millennia of christian inspired misogyny and perversion of human sexuality.

    But perhaps I’m indulging in “pre-nursery theology”.

    1. And the apologists should be careful with the mistranslation trope: a goodly amount of the Old Testament’s connection to Jesus relies on mistranslations of the Hebrew Torah.

      Regarding the pre-nursery rap, Xtian theologians would have fewer headaches if the bible stayed with the pre-nursery stuff: the post-nursery murder, rape and slaveholding necessitates all kinds of gymnastics and sleight-of-hand to maintain the “god is pure love” assertion.

          1. Umm, on reflection, not sure if I interpreted Ant right. I read those small numbers as superscripts i.e. powers. Could be some other convention…

          4. I’ve just remembered. Ant’s right. That’s ’10 to Base 3′ isn’t it? In which case Ant’s statement is (I think after much mental headscratching) correct.

            Just getting in first before 27 other people point out my mistake.

            🙁

          15. 10 in base 3 (I’m too lazy to subscript this on my phone) is 3 in base 10. 3 in base 1 is technically incoherent as the Base 1 representation of decimal 3 should be III or some other convention for marking numbers with individual tick marks. This here theology is getting really sophisticated now.

    1. I believe in Michigan at the state house they put up a satanic scene so the christians had to run down and put up one as well. I suppose a new competition.

      1. I was going to mention that. There are also another satanist display in Florida to ‘counter’ the nativity scene at the capitol building. They had previously had a Festivus pole, and even a Flying Spaghetti Monster display!

        2. Though I have always thought that the Satanists were as silly as the Moonies & the Mormons, I do appreciate their enthusiasm for putting up public displays and handing out coloring books in schools.
          Hey, pious xtians, you want religion in the public sphere, you got it!

      3. Yes and no. Easter would be the time for that if Jebus was a zombie but Jebus is a lich, not a zombie.

        1. Don’t forget that all the tombs opened up as JC croaked and long-dead people were walking around Jerusalem. Definitely easter = zombies.

    3. Zombieland Rule # 1: Cardio, Zombies lead a very active lifestyle. So should you.

      …

      Rule #32 Enjoy the little things.

  9. On a recent episode of “Thinking Atheist” (with mythicists Carrier, Price and Fitzgerald) someone mentioned that Joseph travelling to Bethlehem for a census *might* be plausible if his family owned property there. But if that’s the case, a stable (because: no room at inns) is a curious location for childbirth. Couldn’t Joe just prevail upon Uncle Ernie for accommodation? 😉

    1. Especially since Matthew seems to imply that Joseph and Mary already live in a house in Bethlehem, they don’t have to travel anywhere for Jesus to be born, and they only go to Nazareth later to protect themselves, and there’s nothing in Matthew to indicate they had ever been in Nazareth before.

      Luke completely reverses everything, possibly because he’s aware of Matthew’s account and is unsatisfied with it.

      1. Look – these people didn’t exist. JFC it’s a made-up story to sell tickets for salvation…..

        1. Yeah, that’s kinda my point. If they feel comfortable just rewriting each others’ stories to suit their whims, then the most reasonable conclusions is that we’re talking about people and events made up of wholecloth. Getting the facts straight just isn’t part of the agenda.

  10. I think it was a Larsen cartoon in which one magi is walking away looking annoyed and the caption says there were actually four magi but one of them was sent away for bringing a fruitcake.

          3. Wasn’t he rather like Waterson in thinking he’d probably exhausted all the tropes he could think of, and didn’t want to keep repeating himself?

            As if we’d mind!

    4. As a kid I got the ‘gold’ part of it, but fankincense and myrrh? These guys brought bath salts and aftershave?

      1. I loved the myrrh verse in We Three Kings, though.

        Myrrh I bring, its bitter perfume
        Breathes a life of gathering doom
        Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying
        Sealed in a stone, cold tomb.

        They had strange baby showers back then.

          3. Did you never sing that? We did, in maybe 3rd grade. Have trouble remembering the real lines. There’s also that great Bizet piece with that tune – l’Arlesienne perhaps?

            We three kings of Orient are
            Tried to smoke a rubber cigar
            It was loaded and exploded
            Now we’re on yonder staaaaarrrr.

          1. No kidding.

            Hmmm. Next time I have to go to a baby shower maybe I’ll give it a cemetery plot.

  11. All I know is in Kindergarten I got to play the angel. I flapped my wings as part of my acting. The most popular girl got to be Mary. Everyone wanted to be Mary – but I thought it was cool to be the angel; you got pretty white wings & you were supernatural!

    Years later, I realized how bad my school was – a public elementary school rife with Christian theology. My dad complained that the Gideons visted us, handing out bibles; he asked how come there were no other religious groups represented – where was the rabbi? Where was the priest? My one teacher agreed but said that the school didn’t allow it. Ugh! They’d never get away with that today!

    1. I was in public elementary school in Southern California in the 1970’s and we had lovely secular “holiday” observances. No mangers, no nativity plays, and the chorus sang no songs which mentioned JC. My catechism class did a nativity play and, being a head taller than the other kids, I was always Joseph – who had no dialogue!

      I think Sam Kinison spoke well for Joseph when he had him telling Mary “And he better be the only ‘son of God,’ if you know what I mean!”

    2. Remember in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany the baby jesus gets a hard-on for Mary and the angels come crashing down from the rafters? IIRC the sheep were played by dogs and some humping was going on…A fun time was had by all🐸

      1. I did read that book once a couple of decades ago, while travelling, but swapped it for some block of pulp (Clancy?) in a Frankfurt youth hostel. Didn’t recall those details…

        1. Maybe I need to get my mind out of the gutter, but I remember laughing SO hard at that nativity scene (probably 25-30 years ago).

      1. No way! If there had been talent scouts present, they would’ve remarked, “look at that acting skill! It’s not so much acting but reacting!”

    4. When I was 9 or 10 I had to sing Silent Night in front of the entire school, and parents. Solo. In German. I don’t know who it was worse on, me or the audience. I was never known, then or ever, for my singing voice.

        1. Somehow doing it in German might make it not quite so bad, unless you were in a German-speaking place??

          Stillllllle Nacht, Heilige Nacht

          If I had been singing it the tomatoes would have come flying (or peanut butter sandwiches…)

    5. Funny, my son also wanted to be an angel in the kindergarten school play, and later he wanted to go as a faerie to a fancy dress birthday party instead of as a boring leprechaun like all the other boys. Why do girls get to have all the fun!

      1. Girls do have nicer costumes sometimes but I think when I was a girl, I mostly went for atypically female costumes like robots or pirates. 🙂

  12. The three kings are also added to the whole ball of nonsense. I did love “Nestor the long eared donkey” Christmas animated show that premiered in 1977.

    I had to run a planetarium show about the ridiculous “star of Bethlehem” nonsense while I was in college. For people who claim that faith is all important, Christians certainly spend huge amounts of time trying to find any scrap of evidence they can to shore up their myths.

    1. Christians certainly spend huge amounts of time trying to find any scrap of evidence they can to shore up their myths

      Yep. Live Science has a not very good article on the topic, “A Christmas Tale: How Much of the Nativity Story Is True?”, which is mainly amusing for watching the much-cited “biblical scholar” desperately trying to salvage as much as he can of the legend. For example, the star wasn’t really a star but some kind of living supernatural, er, thing, so that gets rid of the astronomically-impossible problem, an’ . . .

        1. Neither of those would fit the bill — trying to find the shed that was under the star would be like trying to find the end of the rainbow.

          1. This led-by-a-star worked for a culture where the “firmament” was a tent ceiling a few miles above, suspended from tent poles at “the four corners of the earth.”

            They were about as up-to-date on modern [eg, Egyptian-Greek] astronomy as our 21st Century Kentuckian preachers are on cell biology.

          1. Thanks. I listened to the reading, and liked it until the very end. But– have you read The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut? Very similar in some ways, though it does not end with a belief in a god. I loved that Vonnegut book when I was young and newly atheist. Spoiler alert: it portrays all of human civilization as just a means to get a spare part (something seemingly ordinary like a rusty wrench, I forget what the particular object was) delivered to a stranded robot. The great wall of China was a message the part is on its way, etc. Something that stayed with me my whole life (and it seems the most appropriete thing to say in many situations) is the first utterance by someone upon his emergence from a spaceship: “I am the victim of a series of accidents.” This utterance had been foretold, the waiting crowd knew he was the chosen one, though they didn’t “really” know chosen for what. Decades later, the sound of my bare feet on a yoga mat remind me of the kissing sound made by a sad robot in that book. Sorry to go on so much. I loved that book. A made-up world that seemed as plausible as the biblical version.

          2. P.s. to clarify about the robot’s sound– its feet had suction cups or something that made a kissing sound when it was sad. So hopefully it is not too wierd that I think my feet make a similar sound on a yoga mat. Maybe I’ll luck out and it is so late in the thread no one will read this…

        1. The free planetarium program stellarium.org can be set to show how the constellations appear from Jerusalem, time can be fast forwarded to view a whole nights rotation in a couple of minutes. ( Also possible to set the date as 1st century) Place the cursor to act as a geostationary star like light and it is immediately obvious that a real account would have noted how the bright light moved through the constellations. Job 9v9 mentions Ursa Major, Orion & Pleiades so it should have been possible to say how high the ‘star’ appeared in relation- whether it appeared to pass across them.
          It is also possible to set the viewing location from another planet – see how Earth appears from Mars or Jupiter etc.
          Fun to watch Earth spinning from our Moon.

          Aaron Adair wrote a comprehensive book on the subject,”The star of Bethlehem: a skeptical view”

          Jonathan MS Pearce also has a top notch book,”The nativity: a critical examination”

          Having ruled out all natural astronomical phenomenon what options remain ? Only astrocomical ones ?
          Maybe the star was actually the headlights on Santa’s sleigh, but then why call it a star ?

          1. Thanks for recommending my book! It’s a concise compendium, if that is not an oxymoron!

    2. I’m trying to decide whether the logo on the t-shirt says “Punk Bach” or “Push Back”.

  14. I find it really pointless and weird that there are people who can be bothered to analyze what “really” happened at the “first” Xmas. Even I have a crêche among my decorations, but only because it belonged to my late parents. It’s part of the received lore of the holiday and not any more “real” or significant than angels, Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, The Cricket on the Hearth, or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

    On the other hand, a significant percentage of Americans take the nativity very seriously and “know” that it happened just the way it did in the Little Drummer Boy cartoon. I think the people who claim “no one believes that stuff anymore” are even more deluded and out of touch than the believers are – they should hook up with their relatives and high school friends on Facebook if they have the least curiosity about what “regular people” believe.

    And if we’re really going down the path of what makes “more sense” in a silly bible story based on consistency with other parts of the bible, or whatever the author’s point is, we might as well be talking about what we know did or did not occur based on archeological evidence and Roman records, because we’re pretty much discarding all the “regular people’s” favorite bits anyway. I guess the thing that really irks me about ST’s is they know perfectly well what the scriptures say, what the evidence shows and what people believe, yet they spew their incoherent deepities anyway. Jerry’s right: give me a real believer over an ST any day; at least their ignorance is more likely to be sincere.

        2. Yeah, angels and cherubs are dinosaurs!

          Which solves the problem of how Noah could get all the dinosaurs on the Ark. They weren’t on the Ark at all — they were flutt’ring above!

      2. Yes, I have always wondered what scaly (scales are the precursor to feathers), six limbed vertebrate did those angels descend from?

        1. Don’t Cherubim have six wings, making ten limbs in all? What are they descended from?

  17. I often wonder if the gospels were part of a marketing strategy for the new religion – much like the JW publications? Perhaps they ran an essay competition based on a character sketch of an imaginary person called Jesus – to include quotations from the OT presented as predictions and, of course, miracles to hook the gullible?

    The most convincing essays came down to us as the gospels. Those which did not make the grade were relegated to the non-canonical heap.

    Just speculating. Anyway, it’s a time to party! Happy 2015.

    1. I don’t think there was an essay contest but the gospels are unquestionably propaganda of a kind so absurb only a moron could believe them – and then not for long.

  18. I note that some of the regulars over at the Guardian are treating this “issue” with all the seriousness that it deserves.

    Some of my favourites:

    But it was still a virgin birth though, right? Otherwise I’m going to start questioning the whole thing.

    Well I’m sticking to the old religion by dancing naked around the nearest stone circle. I’d sacrifice a virgin too if I could, but the magistrate last time wasn’t at all understanding, so best not to.

    Christ was born in a B&B. They reportedly gave it one star.

  19. “runaway commercial success of the Solstice festival it attached itself to”

    Another theory I read recently is that December 25 was chosen because of 1) the assumption that Jesus’ day of death and day of birth occurred on the same day, and 2) Jesus’ death occurred around March 25 on the Roman calendar, and 3) December 25 is 9 months after March 25.

    1. Oh, very Sophisticated Greg, well done. Stroke of genius, selecting a birthday nine months after one’s death.

      1. Then the poor little guy was circumcised without anesthetics or antiseptics on New Years Day. And I think I have it rough because I’ve got a bunch of lights to take down. Perspective.

  20. Sorry Grania, I don’t find the silly “nativity” myths charming in the least. Apart from being full of falsehood the very idea that the local king could kill all the male children under two in an effort to derail prophecy is harking back to the disgusting era of Exodus with all its doG-inspired massacres and horrors. No thanks I’ll have a few glasses of good wine and spend the night cuddled up to my lovely wife and Summer-the-stripey-cat. These latter two are what make the solstice for me. A pox on all religionists and their stupid lies and mythologies that hold us back even today.

    God Jul everyone

  21. I may have posted this here sometime in the past, if so, I’ll just do it again. A few years back, there was a documentary on PBS titled, “Digging for Jesus.” The purpose was to present the archeological evidence relating to Bethlehem around the supposed time of Jesus’ birth. What the diggers found was that Bethlehem, back then, was pretty much a ghost town. Not only was there no room at the inn, there was no inn. Sorry, believers, just one more nail in the coffin of your beliefs.

  22. According to an archeologist who conducted digs in Israel over many years, proto-Israelis lived in the foothills of Canaan, not the urban areas, in the centuries before monarchic Israel came about. (These were centuries of great turmoil and many of the cities and towns in the region were devastated.) They were farmers who terraced the hills to raise crops, and raised domestic animals such as cattle, sheep and goats.They built cisterns to collect water and many grain storage facilities, both underground and in large storage pots. They had a characteristic architecture for homes with three or four stone piers on the bottom floor with three or four separate rooms and a common courtyard in between. It was thought probabale that animals were penned on the bottom floor and that the upper floor was for family use, eating, sleeping, etc. If this is so and such homes continued to exist in the time of Jesus (if there was a Jesus), the manger he slept in was probably in the lower floor of one of these houses.

    This type of arrangement for keeping animals on the lower floor of the house with the humans upstairs, or the animals in one “wing” and the humans in another continued in many parts of the world for centuries.It may still exist in some places.

  23. I was a junior in high school the first time I read Robert Graves’ “King Jesus” and I laughed out loud at his spin on Mary’s insemination. King Herod’s son has the hots for her but she’s too piously virtuous to give in to his advances so he enlists a few friends to dust their robes with flourescent fungi and climb over the garden wall, presenting themselves to her as angels where she slept . They tell her that the holy ghost (Herod Jr.) has plans for her whereupon he enters and gets what he was after. The rest is “history”.

  24. Along the lines of the recent discussion on atheism and religiosity at Xmas – I must admit to wilfully, voluntarily, gartuitously and wantonly singing “Mary’s Boy child Jesus Christ was born on Christmas Day”.

    Background – the big family Xmas at the beach, which, other than a ‘grace’ before the conspicuous guzzling of huge quantities of food, was quite devoid of religiosity.
    In the evening they had karaoke (yeah, I know, more crimes against humanity) and all the songs were those 60’s ‘hits’ which I thought were mercifully dead. The ones that go like

    Boo boo a boo boo
    Ba ba ba ba
    Ba ba ba ba
    Ba ba ba ba
    Ba ba ba ba
    Ooh ooh ooh yeah Baby

    (The lyrics to these things look even more inane when written out on a karaoke screen).

    They included (ack!) Feliz Navidad, which I had painful occasion to note consists of just one verse, repeated a grossly excessive number of times.

    So when that song (Mary’s etc) came up I enthusiastically joined in. Which considering my vocal abilities was probably more sabotage than support. Who cares about the words, it was the first tune that didn’t suck. (Google tells me it was by Boney M, which may explain it).

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