The Wrong Jesus by Monette Gregory

Author:Monette, Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Theology / Christology
ISBN: 9781612917351
Publisher: Tyndale House (eBook)
Published: 2014-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHRISTMAS PAGEANTS

Christmas is a fantastic time of year to celebrate with family and friends. Lights and ornaments sparkle on Christmas trees, and people decorate their homes with the anticipation of Christmas morning. Leading up to the Christmas season, you can almost always expect your local church to gather as many children as possible to put on the traditional Christmas pageant. In these pageants, the gospels of Matthew and Luke are usually thrown in a blender, giving us a harmonized version of the birth of Christ. What most people don’t know is that some of the details of our modern-day Christmas pageants don’t come from the New Testament gospels but rather from another text that was composed around the year AD 200, more than a hundred years after any surviving eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus. This is where the idea came from that Mary was desperate to give birth and that she and Joseph had to use a cave for Jesus’ delivery room; neither of these details are found in the New Testament gospels.

What is this text that has so misguided our yearly Christmas pageants? Good question! It’s a document called The Protoevangelium of James.[22] This ancient story retells the birth of Jesus and includes details about Mary being in a hurry to give birth and Joseph finding a cave for her to give birth in. These details find their origin in this apocryphal text from the beginning of the third century. Let’s take a look at a few of the assumptions we’ve included in the birth story.

Is it true that Mary and Joseph were rejected from staying in an inn when they reached Bethlehem? Is it really possible that the Middle Eastern citizens of Bethlehem would turn away a pregnant woman ready to deliver her baby? What if I were to tell you that this has all been a misinterpretation and mistranslation of the Greek text behind our modern language translations of the birth stories of Jesus? In these next few paragraphs, we’ll discover that Mary and Joseph were actually welcomed into the home of a Middle Eastern family for Jesus’ birth and that it wasn’t an inn at all. This is where Kenneth Bailey becomes a great help![23]

Kenneth Bailey lived in the Middle East for forty years, teaching in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Cyprus. He’s fluent in Arabic and has immersed himself in Middle Eastern culture in a way most New Testament scholars haven’t. We learn some paradigm-shifting information from the studies of Professor Bailey based on his detailed historical detective work into the birth of Jesus and how understanding Middle Eastern culture and the Greek language of the New Testament can shed valuable light on the story of Jesus’ birth.

In Middle Eastern societies, historical memories can be quite reliable and detailed, and it would not be unheard of for people to list their genealogies back for many generations. For others to recognize you as a distant descendant of your relatives would not be entirely rare. Joseph, the

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