The birth of the Saviour wasn’t foretold. It was backtold. That doesn’t mean the story is false, though in fact it is. But it does mean the backtellers have to make up a whole lot of the details. Repeat a story often enough and it becomes believed. But add enough details and the belief becomes entirely real to the believer.
But how could anyone know what Jesus said when he was alone in the Garden of Gesthemane? Okay, so for some of the details the backtellers had to resort to conjecture. But I don’t. I don’t because I was there.
His lineage was made up after the fact. As was the manger, the star, the three wise men, the escape to Egypt … When stories get told, they get embellished. Fair enough. But what, you might ask, was the story before it got embellished?
Well, it’s true there was a guy – by the way he was born in Capernaum, not Bethlehem – who fancied himself a preacher and, as often happens under Occupation, came to a tragic end. And, well, that’s about it.
The Gifts of the Spirit notwithstanding, he didn’t speak English. But neither did he speak Hebrew, which was already a dead language at the time. He spoke a Galilean accented Aramaic, which sounded a bit more ‘edumacated’ because it was infused with the odd Greek word. In case you didn’t know, Greek, rather than Latin, was then still the lingua franca in the northern parts of the Levant.
But no, he couldn’t read or write, in any language as it happens. If he had the Gospel writers wouldn’t have given themselves the carte blanche leave they did. But the rest, as they say, is history.
It was a fellow named Saul – he wasn’t from Tarsus, by the way – who got hold of the story and decided he’d try to conjure up a new religion out of it. New religions aren’t invented out of whole cloth. They’re stitched together from scraps the tailor finds scattered around. And this kind of tailoring takes skill. Saul, not unlike Joseph Smith, just happened to be very good at it.
Saul’s masterstroke was the amalgam of kingship and invisibility. A god has to rule, else why worry about him. Most polities already have a ruler. But as often as not he’s not to our liking. So why not pretend there’s another ruler, one entirely to our liking. But, of course, he has to be invisible. If he weren’t he’d already be the ruler. Well, haven’t we all had an invisible BFF? Mine was a rabbit, by the way. But unlike Harvey, he wasn’t six feet tall. He was just, well, a regular invisible rabbit.
But an invisible rabbit wields no political power. So we need a BFF who, though he lacks that power now, will have it in … well, if not in some hereafter, then in some Hereafter. None of these constituents of Saul’s story were original. But the combination was. And, well, it caught.
When I told Saul that it caught – I’m a time traveller, remember – I won’t report he was flabbergasted. But neither was he all that pleased. It’s not that for him it was a joke that unexpectedly got taken seriously. It’s that he had no idea it would go so transnational. I explained to him that it was colonialism that had much to do with it. And that bothered him. Perhaps he entertained some kind of prescient intuition about cultural appropriation. I’m not sure.
In any event, we all need stories to live by. And having canvassed a goodly number of them, the Jesus story is by no means a bad one. That it happens not to be true need not count against it. Nor that it’s a just a tad – okay, so more than just a tad – fantastical. It’s not as fantastical as some of the stories making their rounds today. Jewish space lasers starting forest fires in California. The Democrats running a child pornography ring out of the basement of a pizza parlour in New York. A 13 year old kid from Regina, Saskatchewan being the second gunman on the grassy knoll. Okay, that one happens to be true. But even I have to admit it’s a tad fantastical!
So notwithstanding I’m Jewish, I celebrate Christmas with my Christian friends because theirs is a good story. It makes me merry. And given the sadness of what’s happening this Christmas in Palestine and Ukraine and Sudan and … there could be a lot worse correctives than merry.
Categories: Fiction, Humour, Philosophy of Religion
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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