This is a radio interview with Marcus about writing The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Tell Us About Jesus’s Birth.
Marcus and John Dominic Crossan had already written a book about Holy week, Jesus’s final week, together and decided to write a book about the beginning of Jesus’s life as well. In the book they explain that the Gospels of Mathew and Luke differ from each other so much because they are parables not retelling factual events. The grounds to suggest these could be parables comes from Jesus’s own teachings in which he uses many parables. Parables are about meaning, they can be truth filled even if they are not historically factual. These parables are very anti-imperial in their first century context and continue to have relevant anti-imperial meanings today. Much of the language used to describe Jesus as the son of God and conceived by God was the same language used to talk about the roman emperor, this is the primary basis to understand the anti-imperial meanings in the parables. It then becomes a question we must ask ourselves, what does it mean for us as American Christians that are part of the American empire to celebrate the birth of Jesus who was so very anti-imperialism that he was crucified by the empire and then vindicated by God at Easter. Does celebrating the birth of Jesus ask Christians to resist American imperialistic foreign policy? The defining characteristic of imperialist societies is that they seek to achieve peace through forceful victory. The Christmas parables explain that peace through victory is merely a lull until the next outbreak of violence, true peace is achieved through social justice when everyone has a fair share of god’s earth as god’s children. This is not achieved through victory. Why haven’t we learned this in the last few thousand years? Empires are intrinsically filled with pride and hubris. The struggle through history is the struggle of domination systems and empires. The good news of the Christmas gospels is there is an alternative, better, way for the world to be.
Why did the early scholars of Jesus, such as Mark and Paul, fail to mention an extraordinary birth of Jesus?
Marcus thinks the birth stories were developed a decade or so after those gospels were written. In that era there was not much recording of people’s births. How then can you explain the birth and coming of age of such a significant figure? Often elaborate stories about great figure’s birth and childhood were created afterwards to help explain their greatness. Why did Jesus employ parables instead of telling his values in a more straight forward manner? Parables are intended to lure the audience to participate. For example if you hear a story about the Good Samaritan you can imagine a crowd arguing back and being lured into debate so that the audience has to make up their own mid about topics in the story. The whole function of a parable is to make you think.
Conclusion
What should people get out of this book? Firstly we need to let go of the argument did this actually happen, Crossan says no, this is parable. Parables are calls to action to make wise decisions. Crossan challenges us to take out and celebrate and refresh the teachings of these Christmas parables during Christmas and beyond instead of simply a tree and ornaments and tucking those teachings back away with the ornaments.