2 of 15

Here's one of her first paragraphs:

But whatever one's personal beliefs, no student of religion or culture should overlook the significance of the world of the Nativity, for the milieu into which Jesus was born—and in which he was raised—has fundamentally shaped the manners and morals of the ensuing two millennia. The Jewish family values that were prevalent in first-century Judea—the values of Mary and Joseph and of the young Jesus—became the values of Christianity, and of the regions of the world in which Christianity has long been a critical force.

Here's her conclusion:

No matter what one thinks of Jesus of Nazareth—that he was the Son of God, an interesting prophetic figure or a religious provocateur with particularly prolific followers—surely we can agree that he was no ordinary man. Yet at the end, in agony on Golgotha, Jesus affirmed the familial order he had spent so much of his public ministry arguing was about to be disrupted. … At the end of his life, then, Jesus took care of his mother, the penultimate act of a nice Jewish boy—and a blessing of the kinds of values that should endure, as his followers say even now, until his coming again.

Remarkably, the article does not quote Jesus saying, "I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law," "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me," or "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" The emphasis on Christianity adopting Jewish family values is nice, but in such a cover story, why not raise the question of whether Christianity also differs in some of those values? Judaism, after all, is a religion about a family of blood—the children of Abraham. Christianity is not. Miller quotes Elaine Pagels, who argues that "Matthew recalibrated some of Jesus' more radical sayings to accommodate the familial concerns of regular people." Whatever. If you've got room for that, you have room to talk to Norwegian church historian O. M. Bakke, author of When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity, about how Judaism and early Christianity stood together against the social mores of Greco-Roman culture—and how the church fathers differed from their Jewish counterparts.

An online sidebar notes that many Nativity scenes "are historically inaccurate" and rarely portray the Holy Family as Semitic. ("It is a powerful human inclination to be drawn to people who look like ourselves.") Groundbreaking stuff. And by groundbreaking, I mean painfully obvious.

Juxtaposition of the day
"Jim Caviezel, star of The Passion of The Christ, is to reprise his role of Jesus in an audio Bible project for Thomas Nelson Publishers, according to a report in The New Yorker. Caviezel is to be joined by Seinfeld star Jason Alexander who will portray an unspecified Old Testament character in the project."

—From the December 11 "Christian Etailing" newsletter

"Thomas Nelson … wants to work with authors who profess a personal faith in Christ, embrace the central truths of historic Christianity and seek to live according to standards of biblical morality. 'We want people to have confidence that our books will be written from a Christian worldview, by people who profess to be Christians and are striving to walk the talk, regardless of the subject matter they may be addressing,' [Nelson CEO Michael] Hyatt said."

next page... |  2 of 15

share this page

December (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50