Any story popularly identified with a culture’s origins attracts embellishments and becomes mythic. So it is with Christmas.
In fact, the original story recounting the strange events from two millennia ago hangs entirely on two too-brief accounts in an ancient text. It is a story whose “absence of details,” wrote 19th-century Jewish scholar Alfred Edersheim, “painfully increases” the more it is studied.The absence of detail helped the ancient story go viral.
For example, one Christmas image celebrated by everyone from Crusader knights to the Barenaked Ladies is a bright, fascinating star. However, in the ancient text, the star that’s widely recognized today went mostly unnoticed. Today’s popular star of wonder was recognized only by heretical stargazers “from out of the east.”
Such embellishments, meant to be harmless, were created by local storytellers to add culturally important claims to an attractive story. Yet editing the ancient story to make it appealing crimps and dulls its message. Popular renditions validate cultural norms. In contrast, the original text confronts readers with deep mystery, engaging an indifferent and dangerous world.
According to the ancient text, the visiting Magi, a mesmerizing subplot in the story, find Mary and Joseph in a house, not a stable. But if the Magi had not read the stars, if they had not gone on a quest in search of the newborn king of the Jews, or if only they had avoided consulting the local despot, Bethlehem’s children would not have been slaughtered. How much better if they had stayed in the east. But they came. And death followed.
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