The Dans Ruin Christmas

I think it’s just. It’s just vibes, you know, we. So here it is, the Lamb of God. So you gotta have some shepherds come by and go, yep, that’s the Lamb of God. Okay, well, there’s your problem right there. You left him in the manger. Wait, you can take him out of the manger. Hey Everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Oh, it’s the most wonderful time of.

The year it’s getting to be.

Or so the song says. Not technically for us in our actual timeline, but for the people hearing this. By the time this gets out to the world, it. It will be officially Christmas time.

Yeah, well, the radio stations here in Utah have been playing Christmas music for a few weeks now, so.

And. And I just received a package, or probably my wife received a package with a bunch of candy cane shaped throw pillows. So colored and shaped throw pillows. So yes, it is. It is definitely that time. And it’s not even Thanksgiving yet. Yeah.

Although by the time you’re hearing this, it obviously has been Thanksgiving. If you’re Canadian, it was Thanksgiving like a year and a half ago. So, you know, that’s. But yes, we, we thought this is one of those rare moments where you and I, Dan, the two guys, the two overburdened with ADHD guys, actually planned ahead enough to get a Christmas thing to happen before Christmas. So I’m very proud of us because.

It didn’t work for Halloween. But gosh darn it, every now and.

Then we can make it happen if we’re four weeks ahead of plan or whatever. But I will say this. This is a good one. I have a hunch this is going to be a very shareable episode. Just because we. We are looking down on all the who’s in Whoville and planning to Grinch this thing to death. We. We’re going to ruin Christmas is my guest.

Christmas. Yeah.

Is the goal.

So, so why don’t. Why don’t we launch in? It’s. It’s just one, one subject today. Let’s just launch in and, and sort of. Let’s start with maybe a. Because we’re just talking about, you know, the Nativity, right. The. The birth of Jesus. Let. Why don’t you start by giving us an overview? Overview. A 35,000-foot look at what we’re going to be diving into.

Yeah. Because of turbulence, I might bring it up to 37,000 or 39,000 feet. But, but yeah, in, in short, we’re looking at the accounts in, in Matthew, the end of chapter one, the beginning of chapter two, and then we’re looking at the account in Luke and Luke’s is, is much larger. And this is where we get most of the traditions that are associated with what we think of as the Nativity and actually these two accounts. And then we’ll talk a little bit about it when we get to these details. But some of the things that people associate with the Nativity, for instance, Mary riding on a donkey, Jesus being born in a cave, Joseph being really old traditions like that, if you associate them with the Nativity, that actually comes from a pseudepigraphic text called the Protevangelium of James or the Proto Gospel of James . We can talk about that later. But we have, we have Jesus who probably was born in Nazareth. At least the tradition has Jesus being of Nazareth, but he’s got to be born in Bethlehem if he’s going to be, if he’s going to be the Messiah.

And so the earliest Gospel, Mark and certainly the earliest writings in the New Testament, Paul never talk about Jesus’s birth at all. Because it probably just wasn’t relevant until questions began to arise. As the tradition is circulating, people are like, well, but where did he, where, where was he born? Because it says the Messiah is supposed to be born over here. And so we don’t have nativity accounts in the earliest Gospel. They’re in Matthew and Luke. And traditionally people think of Matthew and Luke as the middle two Gospels. Mark is the first and John is the last, but Luke might be the last. And the two chapters that cover the Nativity might even be secondary additions to Luke. So these are, these are traditions that are being added quite late to the tradition that are trying to cover this gap in where Jesus came from and say Jesus was from Bethlehem because that’s where the Messiah was supposed to be from.

Yeah. If nothing else, it explains why the Luke story is so much better and longer and more fun than the, than the Matthew story.

They’ve had a lot of time to, to revise and edit and everything. Their deadlines were a lot, a lot softer than Matthew. So.

Yeah, yeah. And, and John doesn’t cover it either, does he?

Well, John decides to. So you’ve got kind of a trajectory. So you’ve got kind of a trajectory where Mark starts with the Baptism and then Matthew and Luke are like, we’re gonna go back to his birth. And John’s like, screw you guys, I’m going back to the beginning of creation. And yeah, so the, the scope of Jesus’s mission and identity and everything keep getting pushed further back until yeah, John is like beginning of time. And, and then yeah, just skips over what happened with, with Jesus’s mom and dad and, and Herod. So yeah, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna, I think we’re gonna start in Matthew and then we’ll move on to, to Luke after.

Yeah. And I just went through and just sort of bullet pointed. I just read the, both accounts and I gotta, you gotta say like, as, as we go through this, one of the things that’s going to become very apparent and I don’t know why, you know, growing up, when I heard this story, when this story was told to me, when I would go downtown Salt Lake City to the, the Mormon Temple Square, which at that time every year they would do this, they would light all the trees and light up all, all of the Temple Square so it was pretty to walk through. And you’d go there at night in the cold and everybody would bundle up and then on one of the lawns they had this sort of, they had these life sized plastic image people, statues, Nativity people. And so you know, you’d have the, you’d have shepherds over here and you’d have wise men over here on camels and you’d have, you know, the, the manger and whatever and think, you know, they would have a recording.

And I know the actor, I actually worked with the actor who did the voiceover for the recording.

Robert Peterson’s voice would come over and read these passages to you from the Bible. And you know, the, the different parts would light up as, as they talk. And I, I think most of us could be forgiven for re. For not realizing these are two totally different stories that are just completely unrelated to each other.

Yeah, yeah, there’s, there’s frequently a harmonization that goes on and you got to try and squeeze the different parts in together to tell the story. So you know, when you’re, when everybody gathers around and, and daddy reads the Nativity, it’s, it’s a mashup. It’s, it’s not either one of these stories, but it’s an attempt to try to make them one in the same narrative. And they’re not as we’re gonna discover.

I mean it makes sense to want to harmonize them like that. Like yes. You’re getting. You, you like, if you want this to be true, then you gotta harmonize them because they don’t relate to each other. But, but we’ll, we’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. Let’s just start with, with Matthew in chapter one.

1 through 17, verse 1 through 17 is just genealogy connecting Joseph to David.

So. So we’ll just skip all of that because there’s nothing more boring in the Bible than the begats. All of the begats are the worst thing in the world. Then you get to the birth of Jesus. And that is. So Joseph and Mary are. And help me out with this. You know, I, I grew up with the, the King James. It said that they were betrothed. NRSVue has it, as engaged.

But then, but then a few sentences later, Joseph is going to divorce her. So what is the state of their relationship at the beginning of this?

So betrothal. In the ancient world, betrothal would frequently happen when, when a woman reached puberty shortly after 12, 13, 14, somewhere around there. And for arranged marriages, not all marriages were arranged. If they weren’t arranged, it might happen later. But basically this was a contract and for all intents and purposes, they’re married. So if you, if you wanted to break up a betrothal, that was a divorce. If a man passed away during betrothal, before consummation of the marriage, that woman was now considered a widow. So.

Oh, wow.

So for all intents and purposes, they are married. They haven’t performed the ceremony, they haven’t consummated the marriage. So there is another stage to it. But, but they’re considered married. And this is why, for instance, in Deuteronomy 22 , where we have the, the legislation about what, what’s to be done when, you know, a man is discovered committing adultery or something, and you gotta, you know, they both get killed.

Well, and that is in, in other stories that would be less important. In this story, that’s a very important point that they have not sealed the deal.

Critical.

Every, everybody knows this in this story, Mary just gets pregnant and Joseph, gentleman that he is, decides he’s going to quietly divorce her and, and not, and not scream to the high heavens about how she is, I don’t know, deserving of being murdered maybe. I don’t know what happens to a woman who gets pregnant and it’s not her husband’s baby.

Well, again, if we go back to Deuteronomy 22 a few verses earlier, if a man comes together and accuses his new wife of not being a virgin, then she’s supposed to be stoned. So it was capital punishment. But right by this time period, one, they did not have authorization to engage willy-nilly in capital punishment. And so that wasn’t allowed. And so basically divorce was what was supposed to happen. And then she then becomes a divorced woman.

So he’s, he’s planning on that. But an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and says, go ahead and marry her, she conceived of the spirit. Which, that’s got to be weird to hear.

Yeah, there, there’s a lot that is a pregnant statement, which itself is a pregnant statement. But yeah, the, the authors probably were not, were not concerned with those details.

Nope, nope. There’s a lot of stuff that’s thrown into these things that’s like, you know that there’s going to be centuries of parsing that happens afterwards that somebody was just like, I’ll just write it this way.

Not my problem.

Right, exactly. Enjoy that, scholars. A thousand years from now or 2000, she will, she will bear you a son and you will name him Jesus, quote, “for he will save his people from their sins.” Is that what Jesus means?

So Jesus is our transliteration of the Latin transliteration of the Greek transliteration of the Aramaic name Yeshu or Yeshua as it’s written in the Hebrew Bible. And this is a contraction of Yahushua which means Adonai saves. And so Yeshua probably means it is also the Aramaic word for salvation. So it’s either salvation or Adonai saves.

And then there’s this moment which I will also need some help with, where the angel in the dream, this dream angel says that this is going to fulfill a prophecy. He’s just said you’re going to name the kid Jesus and then says this is going to fulfill a prophecy about a virgin becoming pregnant and quotes that prophecy and that, and the quote is: “And they shall name him Emmanuel, which means God is with us.”

Yes. So, oh, lots of stuff going on in this quotation.

Just so much happening.

Not, not least of which is you just said, name him Jesus. How does that fulfill a prophecy of him being named Emmanuel?

Well, this is being slotted in here for a very specific purpose. So this is Isaiah 7:14 , but specifically from the ancient Greek translation of Isaiah 7:14 , so the Septuagint. And in, in the Hebrew, it says, look, a young woman has become pregnant and will give birth to a son, and she will call him Emmanuel. So what’s going on here is we’ve made some changes. Young woman, almah, in Hebrew, has been changed or has been translated into Greek as parthenos, which usually more explicitly refers to biological virginity, as if there were a biological virginity. There’s not. But to virginity, as we think of it, that’s not always the case. For instance, in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, again, in the story of the rape of Dinah, she is referred to as a parthenos afterwards.

So it’s not incredibly strict. And there’s a wonderful paper by a friend of mine named Rodrigo de Sousa that talks about whether or not the, the rendering is theologically motivated. But anyway, Matthew has to appeal to the Septuagint because that’s the only way that this has anything to do with a woman being a virgin.

And then is it likely that the Septuagint is the only version that the author of the Gospel of Matthew knows?

It’s the one that’s being appealed to here. A lot of people think Matthew would have understood enough Hebrew to know that the, the. The Hebrew is different. But. But there are places where Matthew will fiddle with the prophecies in order to make them fit his rhetorical goals. And this is just one example we’ve talked before about, for instance, the triumphal entry where Matthew is like two animals at the same time. All right, whatever. And has Jesus—works for me. Yeah. So. So whether or not Matthew knows the Hebrew is different, Matthew is appealing to the Greek. And then it says in the Greek also says shall become pregnant, whereas the Hebrew, most scholars agree, means has become pregnant. And then. And then in the Greek here, it says, they shall name him Emmanuel. This is actually a change from the Septuagint, because the, the Septuagint says you will name him Emmanuel. Either you or he.

It’s. I’m going from memory, but it’s changed to they will name him Emmanuel, which is probably the author recognizing that Joseph is going to name him Jesus. So other folks are going to call him Emmanuel. So, and, and what I, what I think is going on here is this is a little bit of foreshadowing, shadowing, not shattering. The, the angel is like, yes. People, you don’t know yet, the, the, the mythical, they are going to refer to him as Emmanuel, meaning God is with us. In other words, other people are going to recognize that Jesus bears God’s presence and brings God’s presence among them. And so it’s kind of a recognition of the, his future mission. In, in my opinion, there are scholars who account for it in different ways, but the fact that the, the author changed shall call him Emmanuel, I think pretty clearly indicates this is intended to prophesy about people, other people recognizing Jesus’s mission.

It’s such a weird. This is not the first time, by the way. There are many times, especially in Matthew, where it overtly says this happened and that is a fulfillment of this prophecy. Yeah. So it, it, it’s, it’s almost, it’s. It’s very clearly like Matthew is going through the motions of like. And I, you know, here’s this part now. Now you guys can just know that that part, that prophecy was fulfilled. It. He’s just ticking boxes.

Yeah. As he goes through, he’s going to be like, and then this happened. And I bet you can guess why this happened so that the prophecy could be fulfilled. Yeah, we know, man. Right, Like. So, yeah, let’s go on from there.

Yeah. So we move on to chapter two. And this is where the magi come.

Oh, one, one more thing real quick. Sorry to interrupt, particularly if we’ve got some lag today. The chapter ends with verse 25 saying, but he had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son and he named him Jesus.

That’s true.

Indicating that there had not been the, the taint of sexual intercourse anywhere associated with, with, with Jesus’s gestation or birth. So he was free and clear of that territory by the time Joseph arrived. And there’s a. And, and this kind of makes it difficult to argue that Mary maintained perpetual virginity as well. Right there. There are folks who are like, hey, just because it said he didn’t have marital relations until he was born doesn’t mean he had marital relations after he was born. Just like when I say, yeah, I didn’t eat dinner until after I got home from work. Doesn’t mean I never had dinner ever again. It just means it happened after I got home from work.

But, yeah, it could mean you never had dinner again.

It’s not impossible. Yeah, we know what. That’s all.

All right, chapter two. We’ve got the magi who come in. We. We did a whole cool episode of that last year. Go have. Go back and look that up if you want to. The magi, who we know are not three men, but an undetermined number of men. And. And frankly, when. When you see how they behave, I don’t think we can call them wise men either, because they. They just come barging into town yelling, hey, where’s the kid that’s gonna be the King of the Jews? Which does not hit the King of the Jews very well. Herod is not happy about that.

Oh, do you mean me? Oh, you don’t mean me.

What are you talking about? Are you talking about my son? You better be talking about my son. Cause I’m not. By the way, we are very clearly in Bethlehem. There is no mention of Nazareth anywhere here.

None whatsoever. Yes.

Okay, so. And also this is after Jesus has been born, but no mention of Jesus’s birth or how long. This is after the birth.

Right.

Herod becomes furious, brings Magi in to trick them into, you know, go find him, and then come back and tell me where he is so that I can pay homage to him too. They follow a star, which, as I read it, it was very clear to me that the star moved and physically stopped directly over the house where they’re supposed to find Jesus.

It’s not just in the sky in a region, you know, guiding them in the direction. It’s like, it’s like follow the bouncing ball sort of thing.

Yeah, yeah.

So they get to the house, they pay homage, they give the gifts, and then they scurry off out of the country going a different way than they came in so that they wouldn’t get stopped by Herod again, because they had a whole dream about, about Herod being ready to do some damage. Yeah. And then Joseph has another dream. He’s visited by his dream angel again, who says, Herod’s gonna kill you guys. You have to run away to Egypt.

Which is interesting because that is also very much just in this narrative. Nothing to do with the Luke narrative. There’s no mention of Egypt anywhere around that.

And it’s precisely because Matthew found another prophecy that he was like, I bet I can get that into the story.

I bet I can squeeze it in.

I’m gonna, I’m gonna get it in there. And so has them go to Egypt. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

Yeah, so.

So that’s the… it is. It is the desire to have Jesus fulfilling all these messianic prophecies that is driving the narrative.

And unlike what we have in Luke, Luke is very different. And then what happens while they are sojourning in Egypt?

Herod dies. Oh, well, Herod first of all… first, Herod kills all the kids in and around Bethlehem.

Don’t forget that.

One, two and under. So, yeah, pretty horrific. And also an event which you would think would merit being told in other places. Yeah, you would think in any other places.

Yeah, it’s like this guy, he just lost it and killed all the babies that were under two. That would have… that would have merited some mention.

Yeah. You think Josephus might have had something to say about that moment.

And it says in verse 16, he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the Magi. Which suggests that this is within two years from Jesus’s birth.

So as much as two years is from there. Yeah, yeah. Which among other things, means that this… that Jesus would have been born at least or as much as two years before Herod was dead. In other words, that would have needed to be around 6 to 4 BCE somewhere in there.

Okay, right. So we got… we now… oh, great. Now you’ve ruined our whole calendar. Thank you so much for that. That’s… if, if nothing else, that is a good reason to use CE and BC as opposed to.

Because it’s not accurate. Yeah, they… they didn’t have a… they didn’t have a year zero countdown.

Right.

That they were like, this is going to screw up all of our computers. The whole economy is going to come crashing down. We better have a census.

Okay, we’re… don’t get to censuses yet. We’re going to get to censuses. But yes, Herod dies eventually while they’re in Egypt. So they feel like they can come back from Egypt, but they didn’t go back to Bethlehem, they went to Nazareth.

And that fulfills the prophecy that he…

…will be called the Nazarene, which is not a prophecy. It’s not. There’s no part of the… so this… this is usually put in quotation marks here. “He will be called a Nazarene.”

Right.

There’s nothing anywhere in the Hebrew Bible that says that. So other people are like, oh, it’s not direct speech. It’s. It’s, you know, just a paraphrase. Well, there’s nothing about the Messiah being from Nazareth. What. What a lot of people will do is they’ll point to Isaiah 11:1 , where it says there’s a root will come forth out of Jesse or something like that. Like that. And the word for root there is netzer in Hebrew. And so they’re like, if you squint at that, you can say, maybe he’s from Nazareth. Therefore, the prophets said he will be called a Nazarene. It’s either that or there’s something that we have lost that there was a. There was a prophecy that we’ve lost. Or Matthew was just making it up.

Or Matthew was. Yeah, he was so used to sandwiches, to wedging in, like, prophecies, that. Yeah, he just threw in one of his own. Why not?

Well, and this is one of the. This is one of the reasons that I think critical scholars would agree that the historical Jesus probably came from Nazareth and was known to come from Nazareth. When it comes to Egypt, Matthew’s like, oh, you know, stretching. He’s cracking his knuckles, like, check out what I’m going to do. But here, because he wants to fulfill the prophecies here, he kind of has to bend the Hebrew Bible a little bit to fit what sounds like everybody knows about Jesus. He can make up Egypt, he can’t make up Nazareth. Nazareth has to be there. And so whereas elsewhere the prophecies are driving narrative, here the history is driving his representation of prophecy.

I guess that makes sense. Is there. There must be then a prophecy that says that the Messiah will come out of Bethlehem.

Is that. Well, yeah, we skipped over it back at. In verse six of chapter two, they told him in Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet. And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah. For from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel. Okay, so that is what in that time period had been interpreted as a messianic prophecy about the Messiah coming from Bethlehem.

So really, the. The Nazareth thing to get. Getting him to Nazareth is just a matter of, like, explaining why this kid from Bethlehem is known as the Nazarene guy.

Yeah. So it’s basically like, okay, we had our fun, but now we have to tie it into what everybody already knows about history. And so I gotta get him, we gotta get him to Nazareth. And, and you’ll notice the text shares absolutely no indication whatsoever that they ever lived in Nazareth. They’re like, all right, we’re coming back from Egypt and God is like, go over there. Oh, okay. And, and so they show up in Nazareth and it makes it according to Matthew. If you only had Matthew, Jesus had never been in Nazareth before and his family, his family was, wasn’t planning on going there. They were just like, God told us to come here.

All right, well, and he’s, he’s a, he’s not grown, but he’s. This, this is years after his birth. That.

Yes, yes. So depending on when you date it, if it’s after Herod’s died, so it’s after 4 BCE so he’s anywhere from 1 to 3, maybe 4 years old at this point. Yeah.

Okay. And the, oh, and just, just so that I, I looked this up just to paint a picture for, for those of you who are curious. Nazareth is about like 90 miles north of Bethlehem and Bethlehem is, is just outside of Jerusalem.

It’s just a little, a little south of, of Jerusalem now. It’s like suburb of Jerusalem. Back then it would have been separate from Jerusalem.

It’s a good, It’s a long walk, though.

It’s a long, It’s a hike.

Yeah, it. Through some very hilly country apparently, is what I was seeing on the map.

Yeah. And Nazareth is in a, it’s in a little bowl between some mountains. It’s quite large city now, but at the time it would have been a tiny little hamlet, so there wouldn’t have been much going on there. But the, it’s right at the kind of northern center of the Jezreel Valley.

Beautiful area near the, near the Pond of Galilee.

Yeah, it’s a bit, it’s a bit of a hike to the Sea of Galilee. But it is near it. Yeah.

I will not call it a sea. I’ve seen how small it is. It is not a sea. All right, so let’s go, let’s move on then now to Luke, because that’s, that’s basically the end of the, of the birth of Jesus story in Matthew. So Luke tells a very different story.

Yes. So just like with Jesus, everybody had to one up the story before and be like, well, yeah, well, what about his birth? What about the beginning of time, Matthew? What about then? And here they’re doing the same thing with John the Baptist because now it’s like, oh, we got to go back to John the Baptist’s birth, which is all miraculous and everything as well. So.

Yeah, and very, very reflective of the Jesus narrative as well, which is, which is very interesting.

Well, and it’s probably because there were a bunch of people—and we talked with my friend James McGrath about John the Baptist—it’s probably because a bunch of people were like, Jesus was a subordinate to John. And now they’re like, oh, but wait till you hear this. Before John was even conceived, they were like, he’s number two. He’s the runner up. He’s just a.

But he was really, really important. So there’s angels telling them that, that, that he’s coming too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was special. You got that right. But he was always number two.

So after all of that happens to Elizabeth where, you know, and, and Zechariah, where there’s an angel comes and tells them about their kid and all this other stuff, then we get to Joseph and Mary and, and an angel appears to Mary, not to Joseph. And this isn’t in a dream. And the angel has a name, and that name is Gabriel.

So Gabriel is sent to Nazareth because Mary and Joseph are in Nazareth.

That’s where they live. Yep.

Tells Mary that God is pleased with her and so she’s going to bear a son and she’s. You’re going to name him Jesus and he will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom, there will be no end. Which, by the way, I, I feel like him saying he, you know, he will get the throne of his ancestor David. He doesn’t get that, like, like, maybe metaphorically, but it sounds like what he’s saying is you’re going to be the, the king of the Jews.

And that, that doesn’t seem to happen in the story, does it?

Like, no, this is what everybody’s been waiting for. Everybody has been waiting for this deliverer to come and to whoop the Romans and drive them out so that they can reestablish their kingdom, which is what the Maccabees did, you know, 160 years before with the Seleucids and Antiochus IV Epiphanes. So that’s what they’re anticipating. And Gabriel kind of. Gabriel is kind of like, yeah, yeah, that’s what’s going to happen. Yeah. That’s filling them with false hope. When he was like, no, this was all a spiritual throne, you know, not a physical, actual literal throne.

One could imagine a conversation between God and Gabriel afterwards where God says, you told them. What? Why, why did you say that?

Anyway, yeah. Or at Jesus’s crucifixion, Mary is like, wait a minute, hang on, I wrote this down. I still have it in my scrapbook. It’s in the garage. Yeah.

Oh, man. So anyway, moving on. Mary goes and visits her, her cousin, her, her, her relative Elizabeth. Yes. And. And little baby John, who’s about 6 months old or 6 months gestated in Elizabeth’s womb, kicks. And so that’s why abortion isn’t legal.

It’s a post-quickening, by the way. Yeah. Movement on the part of John the Baptist. And, and so, yeah, anyway, there you go.

Mary sings a song which I am led to believe is called the Magnificat.

The Magnificat, yes. This is a, this is another mashup of praise coming from the Psalms and, and stuff like that.

Right. And then there’s a bunch more stuff about John the Baptist that we don’t care about. So then let’s move on to chapter two. Yeah. And here’s one of my favorite bits in all of this. The weird census where they say, everybody leave where you are and go to where you’re from. Which, yeah, to my knowledge, has not been how any census has ever worked, ever, and couldn’t possibly work and is crazy.

And your knowledge is accurate. They, like, they, they wanted people to be where they lived and worked because they needed to know how many—how much to charge in taxes, and they needed it to be accurate. And if they’re like, “Everybody go to your ancestral homestead,” not only do you nuke the economy, but a lot of people are going to leave your jurisdiction and then you’re going to have utterly useless data. It’s like, “Why are your taxes so low? There were supposed to be a million people living in your city.” And you’re like, “No, there were just a million people who came ancestrally from the city.” Like, it would be utterly useless. And there are apologists who are like, well, no, there was a census from 115 BCE in Egypt or—or CE, I forget which one it is—where the instructions were for everybody to return to their hearth, and they think that means your ancestral homestead.

And it 100 percent does not. It quite literally and explicitly means if you’re out traveling for work, go home so you can register for the census at your home, where you live. Not where your great-granddaddy said you were from. Right. So, yeah, that’s nonsensical.

But it does get us to the city of Bethlehem.

Yes, you can call it the—it is the MacGuffin Census.

Yes, it is the MacGuffin Census. It gets us to Bethlehem, which is called the City of David. Is that right? Is there—are we just fulfilling a prophecy thing or why?

City of David is a name for a ridge that kind of juts down a little south of—it’s like the Florida of Jerusalem. It kind of sticks out a little on the south. And that’s where David’s palace was. That was Jerusalem before, like, the temple was built and all that kind of stuff. So it had that title, the City of David.

Okay. I just get—you know, you get Jesus, who’s called Emmanuel, and Bethlehem, that’s called the city—like, just name things once. I don’t want more names.

Well, we need to talk about dating as well here, because it says, “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Quirinius was governor in Syria or legate in Syria, and conducted a census in the year 6 CE. Because after Herod the Great died in 4 BCE, his son Archelaus took over rule of Judea. And because of his ineptitude, he was deposed in the year 6 CE. And Rome was like, “We’re doing it ourselves.” And so Rome was like, “Well, we got this territory now that we took over because of that moron. We need to know how to tax it.” And so they said, “Quirinius, you’re closest to Judea. Go run a census in Judea.” And so in 6 CE, Quirinius ran a census in Judea, which means that this is a full 10 years separated from after the death of Herod the Great.

So, and even though Luke says that this was happening in the time of Herod the Great, so internally… So in Luke 1 , verse 5, “In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah.” So internally, Luke’s story already is contradictory. It cannot work because it is placing two different events that took place 10 years apart from each other at the same time.

And so in fairness to the author of Luke, he was writing this well after the fact. You know, it’s hard to get all of the facts right.

And probably extra well after the fact because this might be a secondary addition to Luke, which means this might come from like the middle of the second century CE.

This might be a hundred years after the death of Jesus. And I don’t know about you, but I would probably not do a great job trying to write a story about something that happened, you know, 130 years ago. Even with Wikipedia.

I was gonna say, just Google when the census was, man. Come on. Yeah, all right. So there they go to the city of Bethlehem. Mary has the kid, wraps him, and I prefer the phrasing swaddling clothes, but NRSVUE has bands of cloth and puts him in the manger because there’s no room for him in the guest room, which is how the NRSVUE—that is not how Robert Peterson said it at Temple Square down in downtown Salt Lake City. What about the inn? Where’s the inn, Dan?

There was no inn because the word in Greek is kataluma, which usually means some kind of sleeping quarters or something like that. So you could squint at it and be like, that’s an inn.

The animals were down there, a manger would be down there, and then you’d have a ladder or something that went up to a second floor. And that’s where you would sleep, that’s where you would eat and things like that. So there is something downstairs, like a feeding trough.

Is that right?

Yeah. An awful lot of people think manger means like shed or, or, or something like that or a stall. But yeah, it is just a feeding trough. So it would have been a little stone feeding trough which he was put in.

Which could be a cradle. Like, it’s fine. Okay, so they put it in.

Just, just to clarify one other thing.

They did not swaddle sheep and put them in mangers to protect them in this time period. This is a laughable, laughable myth that people have made up to try to inject more significance into Jesus being swaddled and laid in a manger.

Why? Because it, because he’s the Lamb of God. Is that the, the connection they’re trying to make with that? I’ve never heard that. I’ve never heard that.

They do all over social media.

Oh, I’m sure.

But yeah, the idea is that, you know, they, they swaddle them because otherwise they thrash around in the manger and they, they bash their heads against the stone and they, and they die. It’s like, well, they didn’t put them in a manger to begin with, but yes.

Why would you put it in the feeding trough?

Swaddling, swaddling a baby sheep just sounds like such a great idea.

Yeah. Have you tried swaddling them?

I just can’t imagine. I love the idea that sheep are so dumb that, like, the first few hours of their lives, if you don’t, if you don’t bind, if you don’t put them in a straitjacket, they just flail themselves to death.

All right.

So that, that didn’t happen. Good shepherds. We’re gonna get to shepherds now who, this part baffles me, okay. But I think it’s actually kind of cool. And maybe I’ll tell you why. But what happens in the Bible in chapter two of Luke is that shepherd…

Stays in the Bible. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

You’re right.

The…

So the shepherds are watching their flocks by night. So it’s nighttime. Did shepherds do that? Do you have to watch them 24/7? Anyway, they’re watching their flocks by night. And then angels appear, a heavenly host or whatever. It’s a huge laser light show. They got a full orchestra. Chappell Roan is there. It’s a hullabaloo. And, and they tell these dudes, just, just a few dudes, hey, go find a baby. Here’s how to find it, which is, you want a baby?

I’ll get you a baby by two o’clock.

It’s, it’s such a weird thing. Why are they, why, why is it important that the shepherds know and like, not everybody else? I’m, I’m mystified by this.

Do you have any insights or is it just a big question mark?

I, I think it’s just, it’s just vibes. You know, we, this is the. So here it is, the Lamb of God. So you gotta have some shepherds come by and go, yep, that’s the Lamb of God. Okay, well, there’s your problem right there. You, you left him in the manger. Wait, you can take them out of the manger?

It’s just so weird. It’s just it, I kind of like it in part where like, you know, I think there are a lot of Christians in the United States of America, especially with, you know, the, the whole prosperity gospel thing. They, where they put wealthy people as, as sort of the, the most deserving and the most important of our society and they kind of biblically justify that.

Yeah, it could have been Paul Revere riding through town. The Messiah is coming. The Messiah is coming. Right. And then not making it all the way to Concord and then demanding he be paid an amount of money. But, but it wasn’t. They went to some lowly shepherds.

Yeah. So the shepherds do what they’re told. They go and they find the baby and they tell the story of the big concert that they got to see. And everybody’s very impressed by that. And that’s the end of the shepherd’s bit. Yeah.

And then, and David was a shepherd, by the way. So they’re, they’re drawing. There are connections being drawn here.

Okay, there’s that.

But again, mostly vibes.

Mostly vibes. And then that, that’s most of it. Then eight days later they, they name him Jesus and cut off the end of his penis. And then they, they take him to the temple and kill some birds to purify him and to make him holy to, to the Lord, which isn’t a special thing for Jesus, apparently. They were supposed to do that for all of the firstborn sons. A guy named Simeon—I don’t know why, this isn’t ever in any of the nativity stories that I hear. I never heard about Simeon in the nativity stories, but it seems like a cool part of the story. He’s in Jerusalem. He was told by the Holy Spirit that he would live to see the Messiah. And he goes to see the kid, and he’s happy about that. And an old lady prophet named Anna praises Jesus, and then they. They scurry off back to Nazareth.

Yep. And then, in verse 39, when they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. So in Luke, they go back home to where they’re from. Yeah, in Nazareth. So what are two discrepancies between Luke’s account and Matthew’s account?

Or two completely different and utterly unrelated stories.

Yes, that would be a better way, a more accurate way to put it. Yes. These are completely unrelated stories, and really the only thing that they share is that this was announced beforehand by an angel and Jesus was born in Bethlehem because that’s what the prophecy says.

Right.

Everything else is dealer’s choice. And these two dealers chose very, very different stories.

Yeah, just. I mean, it. It’s. It’s very clear that the authors of these two stories were not aware of each other. Like, whoever wrote second had not read the first one.

Yeah. Not big on reading, but. And, and also, I think it’s. It’s interesting that in both Matthew and Luke, for the rest of the Gospel, none of the details of these narratives pop up. Like, there’s. The name Bethlehem never appears again. In fact, there are eight total occurrences of the name Bethlehem in the entire New Testament. Seven of them occur in Matthew and Luke, and the other one is just a passing reference in John to that. To the prophecy about the Messiah being born in Bethlehem. The. The town is never mentioned anywhere else in the entire New Testament.

So. And the miraculous events, it’s not like, hey, remember when that cool thing happened? Nope. They. Nothing is. Is mentioned from these miraculous events anywhere else in Matthew or. Or Luke.

There you go. I mean, and there. There are some other points. There are some, like, you know, looking at it, there are some points in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus is called Jesus of Nazareth or the Nazarene. So that’s good. Like, it is important to make sure that he’s. He’s from Nazareth, like, somehow. And then, you know, in. In John like you say, like John’s, John’s all over the map. John’s just back in the, in the, in the creation of the universe.

Yeah, yeah. And, and there are so many differences between John and the other gospels. One of the one, I think the most interesting is the synoptics. Matthew, Mark and Luke. Jesus’s ministry is one year. He basically is like, we’re up in Galilee, we’re down around here. We’re doing this, we’re doing that. We go to Jerusalem and he gets killed.

Right.

John is a three year ministry. He’s going back and forth. He’s in Jerusalem, he’s in Galilee, he’s in Jerusalem. In fact, there’s, there’s one chapter where he’s in Jerusalem sermonizing. And then the text says, so then they crossed over to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. Like. Yeah, it’s.

Jerusalem is nowhere near the Sea of Galilee.

Correct. Correct.

It is, it is a mess. Okay.

I’m gonna, I, I, you mentioned that Paul doesn’t talk about this at all. I think the closest it comes that I could find is in Galatians. Is that one of the real Paul ones or the fake?

That is one of the real Paul ones.

In Galatians, he says, but when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son born of a woman, born under the law. That’s as close as we get to Paul talking about the birth of Jesus.

Yeah. And, and the idea there seems to be to emphasize that Jesus came as a human and tabernacled in actual flesh among us. And you can tell because he was born of a woman, not, not, not a bird, not a stone, not a stork, not anything else.

I mean, it’s interesting, the content of these two narratives is interesting, but also the sort of the emphasis, what each of these two narratives is focused on is really interesting. You’ve got, you know, you’ve got Matthew very clearly focused on bullet pointing different prophecies that this fulfills, and as you say, shoehorning in as much as he can to make it happen. And Luke seems much more interested in saying, this was miraculous. This was amazing.

Yeah. It’s all about people singing praises. Whether it’s John the Baptist’s parents, whether it’s Jesus’s own parents, whether it’s the shepherds, whether it’s the angels. Everybody is singing praises.

To this young boy.

And nobody is killing all of the, all of the babies.

Yeah, yeah.

Or, you know, and Herod’s not.

Even a part of the story. Yeah, no, there are no Magi. There’s no Herod. He’s not a good guy, he’s not a bad guy. It just, “Hey, guess what happened when Herod was king.” And yeah, he does not play a role.

He’s an NPC. The, the Lucan Nativity.

Well. And as you say, wasn’t even actually alive.

Yeah. If this happened during Quirinius’s census. Yes, he was long gone. And some of the other traditions that people associate with the Nativity, I mentioned earlier, Mary riding on a donkey.

Right.

A lot of the paintings you see of Mary traveling down to all over Judea. Yeah. It’s Joseph walking, Mary riding on a donkey, gently caressing her, her belly. That comes from the Protevangelium or the Protevangelium, the Proto-Gospel of James or the Infancy Gospel of James , a pseudepigraphic 2nd century CE text. The notion that he was born in a cave. So particularly within the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, you’ll see a lot more depictions of the Nativity that are in caves. That is based on the Protevangelium of James. There are a bunch of traditions that have worked their way into the Nativity that are deriving from later non-canonical, frequently entirely rejected as heretical texts having to do with Jesus’s birth. So and the idea that Joseph brought children from a previous marriage.

And this is why there are references to Jesus’s brother, brothers, and we can maintain the idea that Mary was perpetually a virgin. That comes from the same. So interesting. Yeah.

It is fascinating how many things like, yeah, I haven’t heard all of those things, but the image of Mary on a donkey is indelibly printed into my brain.

And I, and now that I’ve, you know, paid a lot of attention as I read through this, it’s like, oh, yeah, it doesn’t say that, but thank goodness, whoever the author of that James book was. Thank goodness someone came up with that because the idea of a woman deep into her pregnancy making a 90 mile trek. Yeah. Give that woman a donkey.

Yeah. And I imagine the bathrooms on the way were not very clean. You can just see her, she’s like, “I need to pee again.”

And oh my gosh, those Galilean rest stops are the worst.

They don’t even have good energy drinks.

It’s so true. All right, friends, well, there you have it. I, I hope that your Christmas isn’t entirely ruined. Go and take down all of your little creches, all of your nativity scenes because they’re wrong. You, you get to choose. You either get the wise men or you get the shepherds, but you can’t have both. No. As we’ve talked about before, enjoy it as exactly as it pleases you. Yeah.

And, and I imagine that there are people out there who are like, what the hell does Dan do on Christmas? But I, I have my own translation of the New Testament that I’ve, that I’m doing for childhood readership. I, I read the, the nativity scenes from Matthew and from Luke and we have our, each of our kids has their own nativity set and we just talk about it and, and you know, I am perfectly open with them saying this is a, this is a tradition. The, the two stories don’t fit together perfectly. Probably didn’t happen this way. And yeah, everybody’s cool with it. We still enjoy celebrating Christmas and doing this little tradition of, of sharing the Nativity story. So.

And then your kids go to church and get in trouble.

No, they don’t get in trouble. We, we, they’re more likely to get in trouble at school.

By, you know, Santa’s not real.

Right. But not only is Santa not real, your Jesus story is messed up. Yeah. You know, actually now that I think about it, I think it might be really fun to just take all of. You know, there are lots of people who, who, my mother in law included who take, who collect creches of the nativity scene. Yeah, it’d be fun to take the characters like only allow wise men on one half of them and only allow shepherds on the other half of them and like just, just separate it all out so that you’ve got the mat, you’ve got the Matthew side versus the Luke side and they can, they can have a rumble.

I was just gonna say. Yeah, there’s a, whenever I, I lead tours in Israel and Palestine, we go in to Jericho, which is a Palestinian territory and there’s a, a souvenir shop called Jimmy’s. I think it’s Jimmy’s Bazaar. It might just be Jimmy’s, but there’s a guy there who works almost entirely in olive wood. But you can get twenty thousand dollar like eight foot tall nativity sets carved entirely from olive wood or down to the little tiny ones. And, and every time I go there, people always have a great time just looking at the, the many different types of nativity scenes they have there. But it’s always such a treat for them to, to be in Jericho and looking at olive wood nativity scenes. And.

Yeah. All right. Well, that’s lovely. I like that story. More stories. I’m gonna promise that you and I are going to tell more of our Christmas stories.

In the after party for this episode. So anyone who is one of our ten dollar a month or more patrons over on patreon.com can join us over there. I encourage you all if, if you can afford a little bit of extra dosh every month, come on over. The water’s fine. Be a patron at patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you can’t, that’s totally fine. We will talk to you again next week. You can reach us at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com we’ll see you next week.

Bye, everybody.

The Dans Ruin Christmas

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology