We have no right, no right at all, to celebrate Christmas. It is blasphemous to let drip from our mouths words we never took seriously. We never took seriously any part of the narrative which Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and other forgotten followers took such pains to create. Gathering elements from multiple traditions, oral and written, transforming them into cohesive explanations for why the longed-for revolution had failed. To write it all down. To get it right. To protect it. They told stories of a revolution that failed, but which they still believed would one day triumph.
They had not all heard the same narrative elements. First because they wrote long after Jesus’s birth and death. Second, they were spread around the Roman Empire: Mark possibly in Rome, Matthew and Luke in Syrian Antioch, John in Ephesus. So, we don’t find precisely the same stories, not even among the synoptic gospels.1
Mark is the only one of the four recognized gospel writers who emphasized secrecy.2 We are compelled to ask why? Jesus performed great deeds, i.e. miracles, but cautioned anyone around not to talk about them. Whether demons, witnesses, or disciples, Mark wrote, Jesus said over and over, “don’t talk about it!”
Since Jesus’s mission was to bring down the Roman Empire, and the miracles were evidence of his mission, it stands to reason that Jesus and his followers would want to keep him and his intention a secret. The authorities were well aware that miracles had been the property of the caesars, not of the rebels and brigands of whom Jesus was one. Officially declared a rebel, in four languages, at his crucifixion.
If Jesus were harmless, if he were only about bringing the kind of love we associate with gamboling lambs, harmless women, and heart-warming manger scenes, why the secrecy? Why not go and tell it on the mountain? We, too, keep Jesus a secret but not for counter-imperial reasons.
Of the three synoptic gospel writers, Matthew alone told about the slaughter of the babies in Bethlehem. The number of innocents massacred is said to have been 144,000. Herod, Caesar’s made guy in Judea, was attempting to kill, not the infant, but the future revolutionary. To be on the safe side, he simply ordered the killing of all the babies when he got wind of the Messiah, the Rescuer, having been born there. He wasn’t mean. He wasn’t filled with hatred. He wasn’t a racist. He wasn’t an anti-Semite. Herod was part of Empire’s machinery. It was in his interest to protect it. The slaughter was simply a tactic. As he told himself, the slaughter of babies was justifiable in the larger scheme of things.
The Roman Empire of today is the barbarous, godless syndicate, Israel/the United States. It has killed a minimum of 8,000 innocents since October 7, 2023. Hundreds of others have had limbs amputated without anesthesia.
The other gospel writers, as well as Josephus, the ancient historian never spoke of this incident. Was the silence because it didn’t happen? Or was the silence because Caesar’s media chose not to cover the massacre? Imagine the damage that would have been done to Caesar if it had gotten around that his Jewish made guy had ordered the indiscriminate slaughter of 144,000 babies in Bethlehem?
By the same token, Luke had heard stories Mark and Matthew either hadn’t heard or, having heard them, didn’t think they were important. My guess is, the former is the reason. Luke is the only one of the synoptic gospel writers who wrote of the punishing census of Caesar Augustus, the forced, arduous journey to Bethlehem, the witness of the shepherds. Have you ever thought much about the shepherds?
I once saw an movie called Padre, Padrone. It was based on the autobiography of Gavino Ledda, who grew up a shepherd in Sardinia. I can hardly think of a more brutal narrative: a six year old shepherd, terrified out of his mind, forced to tend sheep alone in the hills at night by his father who is also his master.
I think this pretty much reflects the unforgiving lives of the shepherds who “watched their flocks in the fields by night, sore afraid.” And who were stunned by the announcement that their Deliverer has been born. A revolution was on its way; hold on.
John, convinced the crucifixion had not ended the revolution, wrote in his gospel, said, “see? They only thought they were killing him. But after they had crucified him, he didn’t stay crucified!. And he wasn’t a ghost! He sat at a fire and ate a piece of fish. Ghosts don’t eat fish!”
The gospels writers advised: just hold on. We have experienced a setback. A serious setback. But we are destined to win out.
What the gospel writers didn’t know or, maybe, couldn’t face was that the messiah was no match for empire or empire’s media. Nor was the messiah a match for the endless capacity of his so-called followers to turn his gospels into parody.
It is finished. As of December, 2023, it is finished.
The synoptic gospels are the three that tell much the same stories and often in the same sequences. Mark’s gospel is the oldest, written closest in time to Jesus’s life. Matthew and Luke followed. John’s gospel, not one of the synoptics, has more to do with Jesus’s death and resurrection than do the other three gospels and is in a category by itself in that respect.
I say “recognized” because there other gospels which were not included in the official canon. Among them are the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary.
Finished, unfinished, or unfinishable? Maybe the way we’ve been trying to finish it is finished? Maybe you, and other voices who speak truth to both empire and all who with empire conspire will tell a story we need to hear; one that strips away our pretending and pretension, so that a new beginning, toward a new direction, is not only written, but lived.
That’s what I’m hoping for.