It's nearly Christmas. 

I feel less Christmassy with every year that passes, and I know I am not alone in that regard. Crass commercialism lost its appeal a long time ago, and it's been many years since the Nativity story -- as it is recounted every year --  held any magic for me. What's left? What you make of it, of course, same as anything else. It can be liberating to know just how much of what we believe at this time of year is just...made up.

Virtually every historian agrees Jesus himself wasn't made up, though few of them would capitalize the 'h' and  there is some contention as to how he was made.  Science has had a go at explaining the Virgin Birth -- not a very convincing go, in my opinion. Both Old and New Testaments are emphatic on the point that Joseph had nothing to do with the whole thing: he couldn't have, for those all-important prophecies to be true. 

I'd posit that Christianity's attitudes towards sexuality and women are to blame -- it's all too easy to see the lurking misogyny in Christian sites that say things like "If Jesus were not born of a virgin, Mary was a harlot and conceived out of wedlock". Yeah, there's little doubt a religion that pins every single evil thing in the world today on a single woman eating a fruit has it in for the fairer sex. 

But Christianity isn't alone.

Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome, were born of a virgin. So were Ra (the Sun) and Horus in ancient Egypt. There are virgins giving birth in ancient China, in the Indus River Valley, and in Mexico under the Aztecs.  The Phrygo-Roman god Attis was born of the virgin Nana on December 25th; he later died and was resurrected. (That's another thing god-figures have in common: the buggers just won't stay dead. Jesus is NOT the only holy zombie shambling around.) 

Now, it's uncertain how literal this is in all cases. Witchcraft, for instance, is replete with references to 'blood of a virgin', which sounds ominous until you discover it really means 'virgin blood' in the same sense as 'virgin olive oil'. Virgin blood has not been previously used in a ritual. Likewise, words for 'virgin' and 'young woman' are often identical across languages. Then there's the eternal opprobrium heaped upon women who have sex, and the lack of sex education. Both conditions are ripe for miraculous pregnancies. 

Personally, the divinity of Jesus -- or of you, or of myself, for that matter -- is not dependant on the absence of s-e-x in the cooking process. But that's just me. It also seems to me like Jesus' origin story ought to be just about the least important aspect of his existence, but alas, that also is just me.

Oh, about December 25th? Yeah, arbitrary. Nobody knows when in the year Yeshua bar Yosef was actually born, but it wasn't in the bleak midwinter. Shepherds don't watch their flocks by night in the depths of December in the Middle East. The date was chosen to co-opt the Roman festival of Saturnalia.

The Star of Bethlehem: we don't know what that was for certain -- no celestial object behaves like the one in Matthew -- but the closest thing is a conjunction: when two planets appear close to each other from our vantage point. It's unknown why the Magi (which simply means 'wise ones' and comes from the same ancient root as our word 'magician') would have interpreted this conjunction in particular as heralding the birth of a king, and astrology itself is not treated kindly elsewhere in the Bible, and there's a lot I don't know. Perhaps there really was a stationary star in the sky. Though you would think the Chinese or Egyptians might have noticed and recorded something. Honestly? It sounds like something grafted on to fulfill a prophecy...something like a virgin birth. I'm vergin' on blasphemy here, but since I don't believe, I think I'm safe.

Really, the Bible is full of stuff that's obviously grafted on. Like the morality tale in Noah's flood. 

I truly hope I don't have to tell you that the flood story never happened as it's recounted. Among the thousands of things to be explained if it did: how (and why) a pair of penguins waddled all the way to the Middle East, or how all the carnivores on the Ark ever so kindly waited until their prey had reproduced before gobbling them up. Forty Days and forty nights is a long time.

Actually, it really is. That's exactly what that idiom means: a long time. Whenever you come across 40 in the Bible, that's what it means: an indeterminate long time. And you do run across it après la déluge. Moses was on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights. Jesus wandered in the desert for forty days and forty nights. Forty days passed between the Resurrection and the Ascension. I can almost hear the ancient scribe: shit, we don't know how long Jesus hung around once He came around after being hung. Better go for the all-purpose "while". You find similar usages throughout the Abrahamic religions, which for me lends credence to the idea they all sprang from a common idiom in a common tongue.

As for the global flood itself, which has antecedents in the Epic of Gilgamesh and other places...again, try not to think literally. In a place and time when you rarely travel more than ten miles from the place of your birth, any bad local flood is the end of your world. I have little doubt somebody saved themselves and their family and maybe some of their livestock by building a boat. No doubt they felt blessed by God, and it's never a big step between "I'm blessed by God" and "they're cursed by God". 

The biggest reason I don't believe in an all-encompassing flood with just one family surviving it in the entire world: it turns the Lord God into the biggest monster in this planet's history. How do you worship something in good conscience that engaged in uber-genocide? "But they were evil." Really? All of them? In Christian parlance, who made them that way? And why does the Lord God have such antipathy towards the beasts on the land and in the air, but sees fit to massively (but temporarily!)  expand the habitat of the sea creatures? To say nothing of all the two-by-two nonsense. Uh, Lord? This male hippo has absolutely no interest in the female hippo I brought on board at great risk to life and limb, I might add. What now?

Back to Jesus, who really is the Main Event, the Reason for the Season, etc., etc., etc. I've had several pastors tell me that the Old Testament is there to show us what kind of God Jesus saved us from, and nope, sorry, my bullshit-o-meter just went redline. As far as I'm concerned, the OT -- not to mention the Pauline epistles -- are there just so people today can cherry-pick verses out of Leviticus to browbeat LGBTQ+ folks and women with. 

Jesus was, let's not forget, a Jew. Not a Christian. The whole purpose of Jesus, if you believe this stuff at all, was to bring faith to the Gentiles in a way the Gentiles could relate to. That means telling a lot of parables, but even beyond that, I guarantee you there are expressions He used with His disciples that have gone over every head that's read or heard them for more than nineteen hundred years.

Some of them might have to do with miracles.

I have little doubt at least some of Jesus's healings were figurative. The blind man who sees the light? Could very well have been a disbeliever, even a hater, that Jesus converted. That very metaphor is as common as hallelujahs in current Christian discourse. The same can be said of causing a 'deaf' man to hear (the Word of God) or even the healing of leprosy, which is mentioned some forty times (there's that number again) in Scripture. Leprosy was the disease God afflicted you with if you pissed Him off. Or exorcisms -- again, the removal of something unclean through commune with the Divine. 

Of everything I'm writing here, I hope this becomes normalized. Because Christianity is ridiculously ableist, thanks to Jesus going around "healing" people. If you need to be healed by Christ, there's clearly some sin in ya, ya sinner. If you just pray hard enough...

Ugh. 

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Many Biblical miracles and strange happenings turn out, on close inspection, to have rational explanations. My favourite involves the Plagues of Egypt....every single one of which can be explained as an effect of a massive volcanic eruption, such as Thera circa 1600 BCE.

• Nile turns to 'blood': volcanic ash was rich in cinnabar, which turns water blood-red
• Frogs: the ash was toxic, so of course all the frogs fled the river
• Lice: would be a side effect of ecological collapse
• Flies: and there's another
• Beasts: besides all the mass death, in cataclysms like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, animals are driven mad and act in strange and unpredictable ways
• Livestock pestilence: self-explanatory at this point
• Boils: the ash eventually coalesces into rain -- acid rain. The acid, landing on skin, would raise boils
• Locusts: more dead stuff to feast on!
• Darkness: ash blotting out the sun
• The killing of the firstborn: Charles Pellegrino, in RETURN TO SODOM AND GOMORRAH (great read, btw, no matter your level of faith) theorizes that first born sons would have had pride of sleeping arrangements, up off the ground. Sinking gasses would have got them first, maybe giving the rest of the people time to scramble out. It's also possible the volcanic toxins were more deadly for children: many things are. It's also a theory that families sacrificed their firstborn themselves in desperation, blaming the plagues (and Egypt itself) for the slaughter. 

So I keep circling around, giving some different perspectives: ones that work for me, much more than taking it all literally. I ask you to consider: what if Jesus's miracles aren't really miraculous? Does that lessen the man -- or the god? 

I mean, even calming a man prone to anger and hatred might be regarded as a workaday miracle. We toss that word around today to mean anything highly improbable that nevertheless happens. It all hangs together until you get to the Resurrection, and folks, that's where my theorizing must end. It's not that people haven't died and came back to life. I know two people who have, and sometimes, in the deep of night, I believe I did, too. Died on one timeline; flipped to another at the last moment. None of them, to my knowledge, stayed dead for three days. 

Well, I do have a thought. But it's blasphemous.

(Since when did that ever stop you?)

Suppose, just hypothetically, that the bodily Resurrection never happened, or at least was misunderstood by the people seeing it. Jesus lived in a Gnostic tradition: many historians believe that the 'heresy' of Gnosticism was in fact the original Christianity. This is very different from the faith that bears his name: it's at once infinitely more concerned with this world than the next, but also swimming in the kind of esoteric mysticism that many Christians would brand witchcraft today. One famous Gnostic work called The Shepherd of Hermas -- it was actually, briefly and narrowly considered canonical scripture -- states outright that the Son of God was a "virtuous man, filled with a pre-existent spirit and adopted as the Son". This "adoptionism" was nixed in Nicaea in 325, when the faith was codified (some would say fossilized) into something much more  resembling its current form. Oh, and per the Gnostics, there's no such thing as bodily resurrection. 

I find a Resurrection marginally easier to accept than a virgin birth, but also don't think it matters as far as what's important in Christianity. This may sound insane given that without a Resurrection, there is no Christianity, but questions of whether Jesus was human or god or both really don't signify for me. What matters, to me, is what he preached. Love your enemies? Revolutionary. Turn the other cheek? Unheard of. Women in positions of authority, placed there by Jesus himself? Pretty sure that was the sticking point for one Saul of Tarsus, who couldn't defeat Christianity from outside so he infiltrated and wheedled and said all the right things and boom, Paul, you get to write about half the New Testament. And if your ideas directly contradict the big J.C.'s on a number of points? That'd be the long con.

You can certainly question everything I've written here. I hope you do. It's much better than blindly believing stuff. I'm not suggesting everything I wrote is (haha) gospel, either. These are possibilities and perspectives, not proofs. 

But I'll bet you at least some of them are at least somewhat more accurate than the narrative we're fed from pulpits.  And strangely, or perhaps not so strangely thinking about all this doesn't lessen the Christ story for me in any way whatsoever. It's been two millennia -- more like four, if we're looking at the OT, too. There's serious staying power in the story. I think at least some of that story was crafted that way.

If you celebrate the birth of Christ, no matter the season, I wish you a  Merry Christmas. I'll be writing later on what the day itself means to me.