Brent Landau on The Real Christmas Story

Some of our readers Tweeted in with questions. For example, ‘How did Christmas trees get their start?’ ‘What are the origins and differences between Santa Claus, St Nicholas and Father Christmas?’ I thought maybe your first book offered some answers to this.

Wow. Some of these questions end up being quite hard for me to answer, since my specialty is more in the New Testament and early Christian history than the overall history of Christmas, even though it’s something I’m certainly very interested in…

Tell me about the Bruce Forbes book, Christmas: A Candid History. I think it does offer some clues to the things we celebrate and associate with Christmas but are perhaps not quite sure where they come from, such as the idea that Santa Claus lives with elves at the North Pole?

Yes. So this book is relatively short, it’s less than 200 pages, and it is just a very helpful, accessible, overview of the history of Christmas. He is a scholar, and I believe his focus is on religion and American popular culture and those are the parts of the book that are strongest. He traces the 19th- and 20th-century evolution of Christmas, including the idea that Santa Claus is an elf. The thing that I don’t think many people realise about that poem [‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’] is how much that served to invent the mythology of Christmas, in the same way that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol did. It’s not that they were merely responding to practices and beliefs that were well-known at the time. A good analogy to this is from another holiday, the Charlie Brown Halloween special. If you look at it and see the trick or treating that the Peanuts kids are doing, you assume that this was reflecting American popular culture. In fact, in the 1960s, when this came out, trick or treating was still relatively rare. Forbes’s book is especially good for some of these more recent practices and it’s a really good reminder that the modern celebration of Christmas, as we know it today in the US, is relatively recent and very culturally specific.

Yes, my family is Dutch, and Sinterklaas or St Nicholas comes down the chimney as well, but from Spain on December 6.

Yes, different days get celebrated. And in Latin America the feast of Epiphany, the Feast of the Three Kings, is a much bigger deal than it is here. I think Americans tend to assume that Christmas has been celebrated the way it is today for quite some time, and that it is celebrated that way largely throughout the world. In fact neither of those things are true.

This brings to mind another reader question, from Mark Dowe: ‘What date of the year was Christmas really meant to fall?’ Do you know that from your research?

So Christmas ends up being fixed as the celebration of Christ’s birth, but as far as I know, we don’t have much evidence before the fourth century that Christians were celebrating on that precise date. We’ve actually got some variation. There’s a second-century Christian author, for example, who says that Christmas was being celebrated sometime around April 20 or 21. And there’s no indication in the infancy narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that they’re envisioning this event happening in the middle of wintertime. In fact, one observation people often make about Luke’s infancy narrative is that the shepherds are said to be keeping watch over their flocks by night, and if you know a little bit about the shepherds, and the rhythms of their seasons, that is something they would have been doing in the spring. It’s not something they would have been doing in the dead of winter. So you’ll sometimes get people who look at that story in Luke and say, ‘Well, probably Jesus was born sometime in the spring.’ Speaking as an early Christian historian, I don’t think we have any idea whatsoever about what time of year Jesus was actually born. The infancy narratives are relatively late in terms of Christian tradition and they don’t agree very much, and they don’t really seem to have a lot of specific information about the circumstances of Jesus’s birth.

Let alone pin it on December 25.

Exactly. They don’t pin it on any specific date. Then, in the fourth century, it gets fixed on December 25.  I’m not a liturgical historian, but I believe that one of the reasons for this is that the 25th was right around the time of several other prominent pagan festivals, festivals for birthdays of gods. And, just to name two of them, one of them was a Persian god named Mithras who actually seems to have been born in cave, just as some traditions of Jesus have it. I believe his birth was celebrated right around that time. The other god or celebration is ‘Sol Invictus’, which is Latin for ‘Invincible Sun’ and seems to have been a solar deity that was worshipped by some Romans. In fact, well into the reign of Constantine – whom we view as the emperor who really brought Christianity to the Roman Empire and converted to Christianity – there are coins of his that bear the Sol Invictus. So it’s not entirely clear how the decision gets made to fix on December 25, but it probably has something to do with those other holidays and seeking to dampen the enthusiasm or Christianise them in some way. This is something the early church did in reference to other pagan holidays as well – the great example is the Celtic holiday of Samhain, which is the antecedent of our modern Halloween. This is celebrated on November 1, and originally All Saints Day was celebrated in April/May. But, in the sixth century, it was decided that All Saints Day would fall on November 1, as a way of co-opting this pagan holiday. This was standard operating procedure for the ancient church, to take these pagan holidays, and paint them over with Christian trappings. While on a superficial level that would certainly seem to be satisfying – that people are celebrating a Christian rather than a pagan holiday – the end result ends up being that, whether we’re talking about Christmas or Halloween or Easter, these holidays still end up, even today, having some vestiges of pagan celebrations.

What would you say was the main vestige in terms of Christmas?

The yule log. That’s a northern European practice in origin that involved building a bonfire or setting fire to a huge log as a way of warding off the extreme darkness of that time of year in northern Europe. I think the Christmas tree is also… but I don’t know exactly where that comes from.

Tell me about the Raymond Brown book, The Birth of the Messiah.

Raymond Brown’s book is great because it is the only full-length scholarly commentary on the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. For somebody who has grown up listening to the Christmas stories, or has made the effort to read the Gospel stories of Jesus’s birth in Matthew and Luke, but has questions about any of the particular things that are said, questions of historicity, all of that can be found in Brown’s book. Not only is there detailed word-by-word explanation of what every single verse means, but there are also a number of helpful appendices that deal with specific issues that come up in the study of the infancy narratives. For example, the disagreements between Luke and Matthew in terms of Jesus’s genealogy. There’s also the question of the historicity of the census that Luke says was taken while Quirinius was Governor: Luke doesn’t quite seem to be getting his historical information correctly. Also, the question of whether or not Jesus was born in Bethlehem and what the historical arguments for that are. They’re really not very good. Most biblical scholars believe that Jesus was born in Nazareth, in Galilee, and that he was later said to have been born in Bethlehem because that was where the Messiah was believed to have to come from.

According to the Old Testament prophecies, you mean?

Exactly.

But in two of the Gospels it does say he was born in Bethlehem.

Yes, in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, it says he is born in Bethlehem. You would think, since these two infancy narratives agree on it, that that would speak favourably to historical credibility. The problem is that Matthew and Luke have very different ways of explaining why Jesus is born in Bethlehem. In Luke you have the census. The family lives in Nazareth and they only go down to Bethlehem because everybody is required to go back to their home town. Jesus is born while they’re there and then they go back to Nazareth, because that’s where they live. In Matthew, on the other hand, it seems as if Jesus is born in Bethlehem because that’s where his parents live. So when the Magi come and visit Jesus, it says that the star shone over the place where the child was. It doesn’t say it was a manger like in Luke; it says it stood over the house where the child was. Presumably they just lived in Bethlehem and they only left because Herod was trying to kill Jesus and resettled in Nazareth because of that. So Matthew and Luke disagree and Mark never says anything about Jesus being born in Bethlehem. John, interestingly enough, has a scene in chapter 7 where some people are debating whether or not Jesus is the Messiah. And somebody essentially says, ‘He can’t be the Messiah, the Messiah is supposed to come from Bethlehem.’ This is presented in John with no trace of irony, as if John doesn’t even know this tradition that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It’s just stated very bluntly that he wasn’t. So this idea of Jesus being born in Bethlehem, even though that ends up being absolutely central to Christian tradition and the piety surrounding Christmas, there’s not a lot of historical information speaking of it and there’s some very good reasons to doubt that claim.

Brown is looking at sources other than the Gospels themselves? Are there lots of other sources?

He’ll look at the range of available sources. He’ll look at the Gospels, but he’ll also look at later Christian literature, at Jewish literature of the same time, the work of Roman historians, the work of Roman poets. He’s basically taking a very historical approach and trying to understand the infancy narratives as products of the time they were written in the late first century.

Tell me about the Robert Miller book, Born Divine.

I like Born Divine because it covers a decent amount of the same ground that Raymond Brown’s book does, but it does a couple of things differently. First of all, it’s not quite as dense as Raymond Brown. Not that Raymond Brown is difficult to read, but it’s an 800-page book, whereas Born Divine is much less intimidating. The thing that really sets Born Divine apart is that it spends a lot of time on other stories about the births of famous people or divine beings, whether we’re talking about somebody like Alexander the Great or Plato or the Greek god Hermes. It talks a lot about other birth stories of that time. And the thing that it does that I like the most, because it connects up with the research I do, is it spends much more time talking about the stories of Jesus’s birth and childhood that appear outside of the New Testament, in what’s called early Christian apocryphal literature. So it goes through the infancy Gospel of Thomas, which talks about Jesus as a child, and a very badly behaving child. It talks about the infancy Gospel of James, which tells the whole story of Mary’s upbringing, and it goes into even later compositions, which is something Raymond Brown doesn’t spend a lot of time on, because his focus is really on the canonical narratives. In terms of understanding the whole tradition and the whole background of the stories of Jesus’s birth, I think that Miller’s book ends up being more well-rounded.