Have you ever wondered why Jesus was born when he was? Why not 50 years earlier? Or 100 years later?
The apostle Paul gives the answer in the New Testament Letter to the Galatians. There he wrote “when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his son.” (Gal. 4:4). In today’s vernacular we would say, “At the right time, God sent forth his son.” In other words, God was acting in accordance with a plan.
So, what made that particular night over 2,000 years ago the “right” time?
Our search for an answer would begin in the prophecies of Daniel who lived 600 years before Christ when the Hebrews were captive in the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, had a dream about the future which troubled him. He called for Daniel to tell him what it meant and Daniel’s interpretation placed “the right time” in the Roman era – a period that lasted 700 years. That’s too large a time span to be more than generally helpful.
However, several significant historic variables help narrow the focus. One historic variable was the preparation of the Jews for the Messiah. Their preparation began during the Babylonian captivity. Before it they were promiscuously idolatrous; after it they were monotheistic and returned as a nation to God and his prophetic promises. A second variable was the consolidation of the Old Testament canon for the first time into one volume. This was done by Ezra, a Jewish priest, and made it easier for the Jews to trace the thread of prophecies about the coming Messiah. A third variable was the development of the Jewish synagogue system. Since the captive Jews were separated from their Temple in Jerusalem, the synagogue network gave them community-based places to worship while in captivity and this synagogue system would later facilitate the spread of the gospel throughout the world where Jews had settled.
All of these developments made it possible for the gospel of Jesus to be proclaimed to the Jews.
A forth historic variable made it possible for the gospel to be proclaimed to the Gentiles. This important development was the rise of the Greek hegemony and the collapse of the Persian Empire as Daniel had foretold. Beginning in 350 BC, and ultimately continued under Alexander the Great, the civilized world was conquered by the Macedonian Greeks. The Greek language became the lingua franca, and continued so even under the later Roman Empire. Therefore converts to the gospel of Jesus would one day travel the Roman Empire from end to end and find people speaking a common language, making it easier to spread the teachings of Jesus. Today thirteen languages have replaced the universal Greek once spoken in the geographic area of the old Roman Empire. Beginning in the third century BC, the community of scholars living around the great library of Alexandria in Egypt produced the Septuagint – a Greek translation of the Old Testament Hebrew scripture – making it possible for the Greek-speaking world to read Ezra’s canon and its prophecies.
The Roman Republic began hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus. Its power grew, and with the death of Alexander and the division of his land conquests among his generals, Rome eventually replaced the Greeks as the leading world power. Internal civil wars, however, eroded the Republic and the leadership of the Roman Senate. The solution was to appoint Julius Caesar as a perpetual dictator. He was assassinated in 44 BC and replaced in 27 BC by his nephew and heir, Octavius, who took the title Caesar Augustus – the Roman ruler at the time of Jesus’ birth. Octavius Caesar Augustus is credited with the creation of “pax romana” or Roman peace – a period of 150 years during which there was no war in the Empire. Pax romana was the fifth historic variable. It would enable the message of Jesus to spread and flourish in a world suspended of strife.
Roman world conquest, as harsh as it was, suppressed chaos and produced world peace, commerce, and prosperity for the period between 28 BC and 180 AD. A postal system was instituted, allowing the Empire to communicate throughout its extent, and a road system allowed widespread travel on foot. Roman legions suppressed brigands and rogues who would threaten the safety of travelers. The dissemination of a new ideology over Roman roads was thus made unprecedentedly easy. Over these roads traveled a pregnant teenager and her husband to return to their hometown to be counted in a census ordered by Caesar Augustus. When Mary’s birth pains began, that journey would place them in the town where prophecy said Jesus would be born.
Could all of these historic variables have lined up favorably over six centuries by extraordinary coincidence? To believe so takes more faith than to believe that they occurred as part of a plan. In retrospect, we can now see a line from Eden to Bethlehem when the “fullness of time” was complete and the Messiah came. All of the pieces were finally in place.
Under Hebrew law a girl in ancient Jewish society 2,000 years ago could be married as early as 12 years of age plus one day, and the rabbis taught that a father should betroth his daughter to his slave rather than keep her unbetrothed beyond puberty. Thus a girl would be married around 14 or earlier, although she would begin the relationship with her future husband in the state of betrothal. Betrothal was a one-year pre-marriage period in which the bride continued to live at home, although the period could be shorter than a year. Its objective seems to have been to provide time before marriage to prove she wasn’t pregnant, which several months would sufficiently demonstrate.
In Mary’s case, she was pregnant. Her conception was not the consequence of intercourse with a man, but as the Bible reports in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, the consequence of the intervention of the Holy Spirit. That this divine pregnancy would happen had been told to her by an angel, but because she was a virgin and still living in her father’s house, the angelic announcement was incomprehensible to her.
Mary was greatly troubled at [the angel’s] words … “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
The divine impregnation of a virgin was clearly miraculous and had been prophesied more than 700 years earlier by Isaiah:
Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)
In fact, the first clue that Jesus would come by virgin birth was hinted at the beginning of time in the Garden of Eden when God placed this curse on Satan:
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: it shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. (Genesis 3:15)
The reference to “her seed” is extraordinary, since a child is the seed of the father. The implication of “her seed” is that no man would be involved. The coming conqueror foretold here would receive a bruised heel – not a mortal wound – but he would inflict a mortal wound – a bruised head – ending Satan’s reign. The bruised heel signifies the future death on the cross – an apparent defeat which was not a defeat because of the resurrection.
Yet before Joseph and Mary had begun to live as husband and wife, he discovered her pregnancy. This presented a serious problem to the young husband who couldn’t have been more than a teenager himself. Mary was apparently guilty of adultery and the punishment was death by stoning. But Joseph, the Bible tells us, was a fair man and decided that he would not put her on trial for her life but would instead “put her away quietly” – i.e. give her an unpublicized divorce.
Still, Mary’s untimely pregnancy apparently hadn’t escaped notice in the neighborhood. Rumors have circulated to the present time that the real father of Jesus was one of the ubiquitous Roman soldiers stationed throughout Palestine. These assertions are easily discredited, but even the New Testament reports an incident which could be interpreted as a slander on the legitimacy of Jesus’ birth. It involved one of his many collisions with the Jewish establishment during his ministry. The Jewish leaders took offense with him and their accusation suggests knowledge of the rumor that he was a bastard.
Then they said to Jesus, “We were not born as a result of immorality! We have only one Father, God himself.” (John 8:37-41)
Joseph’s concerns about the fidelity of his wife are assuaged when an angel appears in a dream and tells him that Mary is carrying the child of the Holy Spirit and he should take her as his wife, which, awakening from the dream, he does immediately. Remarkably, not one word of Joseph’s is recorded in scripture, but when he is told to do something, he does it promptly.
Matthew tells us that Joseph “did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son.” But there is no biblical evidence that they did not live as husband and wife thereafter and in fact Matthew and Mark give the names of younger brothers: James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas (Matthew 13:55; Mark 6:3.) James was the brother who never believed Jesus was the son of God until after the resurrection when Jesus appeared to him.
A Roman edict interrupts the life of the young couple while Mary is pregnant.
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register.
Since Joseph and Mary were descendents of David, they were required to travel 85 miles from their home in Nazareth by foot or donkey to journey to the home of their ancestor David and be counted. There Mary’s baby would be born, fulfilling another ancient prophecy:
Bethlehem, you are one of the smallest towns in the nation of Judah. But the Lord will choose one of your people to rule the nation – someone whose family goes back to ancient times. (Micah 5:2)
When the wise men come from the East, Micah’s prophecy will help them locate Jesus.
Caesar Augustus didn't know anything about Micah. Or the Old Testament or God. One of his accomplishments was the reform of the tax system and maybe the census was part of that. The census and Luke’s clue that Quirinius was governor of Syria helps pinpoint a time span when all of this took place.
Matthew’s account of the nativity tells us that Jesus was born when Herod was King. If reckoned by today’s calendar, Herod died in Jericho in the spring of 4 BC so the birth of Jesus would have had to occur before that. Yet Josephus, a first century Jewish historian, puts the census in the period of 7 BC to 6 BC. Reconciling Luke’s dating with Matthew’s has created a cottage industry of disputants, but suffice it to say that Jesus was likely not born on the first day of the first century – the date on which subsequent calendars are anchored.
Moreover, it’s unlikely that Jesus was born on December 25. The date of Jesus’ birth was not celebrated as a tradition for centuries and no tradition linking Christmas to December 25 can be traced back before the time of Constantine. The date was likely an invention of the fourth century – possibly to compete with the pagan holiday of Saturnalia, the worship of the sun god, which was celebrated on December 25.
Luke’s account of the nativity says that angels appeared to shepherds keeping watch over their sheep nearby. Bethlehem is about five miles southwest of Jerusalem at an elevation of about 2,300 above sea level – about 100 feet higher in elevation than Jerusalem. It’s unlikely that sheep would have been in the fields after about October due to night temperatures, although some say these could have been Temple sheep which remained in the fields year around. It’s unlikely that they were since the Temple was five miles away. The most likely time for shepherds to be in the fields with sheep after October would be springtime.
It’s unlikely that Jesus’ birth would occur on a random date. Since his coming happened in “the fullness of time,” God would have chosen a significant day in the Jewish year, and the most likely prospect would be a feast day, if not Passover, which comes in April. When we consider that he died on Passover, rose on the Feast of the First Fruits, created his church on the Festival of Weeks, also called Pentacost, the celebration of the giving of the law to Moses at Mount Sinai, it’s hard to argue that Jesus would be born on a day that had no significance in the Jewish calendar. While no scholar has given compelling evidence for a date, there is compelling evidence that it wasn’t December 25.
The Christmas Story is a long blog so I’m going to break it here and continue it next week. I hope you’ll read the rest of the story and have a very merry Christmas celebration!
The apostle Paul gives the answer in the New Testament Letter to the Galatians. There he wrote “when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his son.” (Gal. 4:4). In today’s vernacular we would say, “At the right time, God sent forth his son.” In other words, God was acting in accordance with a plan.
So, what made that particular night over 2,000 years ago the “right” time?
Our search for an answer would begin in the prophecies of Daniel who lived 600 years before Christ when the Hebrews were captive in the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, had a dream about the future which troubled him. He called for Daniel to tell him what it meant and Daniel’s interpretation placed “the right time” in the Roman era – a period that lasted 700 years. That’s too large a time span to be more than generally helpful.
However, several significant historic variables help narrow the focus. One historic variable was the preparation of the Jews for the Messiah. Their preparation began during the Babylonian captivity. Before it they were promiscuously idolatrous; after it they were monotheistic and returned as a nation to God and his prophetic promises. A second variable was the consolidation of the Old Testament canon for the first time into one volume. This was done by Ezra, a Jewish priest, and made it easier for the Jews to trace the thread of prophecies about the coming Messiah. A third variable was the development of the Jewish synagogue system. Since the captive Jews were separated from their Temple in Jerusalem, the synagogue network gave them community-based places to worship while in captivity and this synagogue system would later facilitate the spread of the gospel throughout the world where Jews had settled.
All of these developments made it possible for the gospel of Jesus to be proclaimed to the Jews.
A forth historic variable made it possible for the gospel to be proclaimed to the Gentiles. This important development was the rise of the Greek hegemony and the collapse of the Persian Empire as Daniel had foretold. Beginning in 350 BC, and ultimately continued under Alexander the Great, the civilized world was conquered by the Macedonian Greeks. The Greek language became the lingua franca, and continued so even under the later Roman Empire. Therefore converts to the gospel of Jesus would one day travel the Roman Empire from end to end and find people speaking a common language, making it easier to spread the teachings of Jesus. Today thirteen languages have replaced the universal Greek once spoken in the geographic area of the old Roman Empire. Beginning in the third century BC, the community of scholars living around the great library of Alexandria in Egypt produced the Septuagint – a Greek translation of the Old Testament Hebrew scripture – making it possible for the Greek-speaking world to read Ezra’s canon and its prophecies.
The Roman Republic began hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus. Its power grew, and with the death of Alexander and the division of his land conquests among his generals, Rome eventually replaced the Greeks as the leading world power. Internal civil wars, however, eroded the Republic and the leadership of the Roman Senate. The solution was to appoint Julius Caesar as a perpetual dictator. He was assassinated in 44 BC and replaced in 27 BC by his nephew and heir, Octavius, who took the title Caesar Augustus – the Roman ruler at the time of Jesus’ birth. Octavius Caesar Augustus is credited with the creation of “pax romana” or Roman peace – a period of 150 years during which there was no war in the Empire. Pax romana was the fifth historic variable. It would enable the message of Jesus to spread and flourish in a world suspended of strife.
Roman world conquest, as harsh as it was, suppressed chaos and produced world peace, commerce, and prosperity for the period between 28 BC and 180 AD. A postal system was instituted, allowing the Empire to communicate throughout its extent, and a road system allowed widespread travel on foot. Roman legions suppressed brigands and rogues who would threaten the safety of travelers. The dissemination of a new ideology over Roman roads was thus made unprecedentedly easy. Over these roads traveled a pregnant teenager and her husband to return to their hometown to be counted in a census ordered by Caesar Augustus. When Mary’s birth pains began, that journey would place them in the town where prophecy said Jesus would be born.
Could all of these historic variables have lined up favorably over six centuries by extraordinary coincidence? To believe so takes more faith than to believe that they occurred as part of a plan. In retrospect, we can now see a line from Eden to Bethlehem when the “fullness of time” was complete and the Messiah came. All of the pieces were finally in place.
Under Hebrew law a girl in ancient Jewish society 2,000 years ago could be married as early as 12 years of age plus one day, and the rabbis taught that a father should betroth his daughter to his slave rather than keep her unbetrothed beyond puberty. Thus a girl would be married around 14 or earlier, although she would begin the relationship with her future husband in the state of betrothal. Betrothal was a one-year pre-marriage period in which the bride continued to live at home, although the period could be shorter than a year. Its objective seems to have been to provide time before marriage to prove she wasn’t pregnant, which several months would sufficiently demonstrate.
In Mary’s case, she was pregnant. Her conception was not the consequence of intercourse with a man, but as the Bible reports in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, the consequence of the intervention of the Holy Spirit. That this divine pregnancy would happen had been told to her by an angel, but because she was a virgin and still living in her father’s house, the angelic announcement was incomprehensible to her.
Mary was greatly troubled at [the angel’s] words … “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
The divine impregnation of a virgin was clearly miraculous and had been prophesied more than 700 years earlier by Isaiah:
Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)
In fact, the first clue that Jesus would come by virgin birth was hinted at the beginning of time in the Garden of Eden when God placed this curse on Satan:
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: it shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. (Genesis 3:15)
The reference to “her seed” is extraordinary, since a child is the seed of the father. The implication of “her seed” is that no man would be involved. The coming conqueror foretold here would receive a bruised heel – not a mortal wound – but he would inflict a mortal wound – a bruised head – ending Satan’s reign. The bruised heel signifies the future death on the cross – an apparent defeat which was not a defeat because of the resurrection.
Yet before Joseph and Mary had begun to live as husband and wife, he discovered her pregnancy. This presented a serious problem to the young husband who couldn’t have been more than a teenager himself. Mary was apparently guilty of adultery and the punishment was death by stoning. But Joseph, the Bible tells us, was a fair man and decided that he would not put her on trial for her life but would instead “put her away quietly” – i.e. give her an unpublicized divorce.
Still, Mary’s untimely pregnancy apparently hadn’t escaped notice in the neighborhood. Rumors have circulated to the present time that the real father of Jesus was one of the ubiquitous Roman soldiers stationed throughout Palestine. These assertions are easily discredited, but even the New Testament reports an incident which could be interpreted as a slander on the legitimacy of Jesus’ birth. It involved one of his many collisions with the Jewish establishment during his ministry. The Jewish leaders took offense with him and their accusation suggests knowledge of the rumor that he was a bastard.
Then they said to Jesus, “We were not born as a result of immorality! We have only one Father, God himself.” (John 8:37-41)
Joseph’s concerns about the fidelity of his wife are assuaged when an angel appears in a dream and tells him that Mary is carrying the child of the Holy Spirit and he should take her as his wife, which, awakening from the dream, he does immediately. Remarkably, not one word of Joseph’s is recorded in scripture, but when he is told to do something, he does it promptly.
Matthew tells us that Joseph “did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son.” But there is no biblical evidence that they did not live as husband and wife thereafter and in fact Matthew and Mark give the names of younger brothers: James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas (Matthew 13:55; Mark 6:3.) James was the brother who never believed Jesus was the son of God until after the resurrection when Jesus appeared to him.
A Roman edict interrupts the life of the young couple while Mary is pregnant.
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register.
Since Joseph and Mary were descendents of David, they were required to travel 85 miles from their home in Nazareth by foot or donkey to journey to the home of their ancestor David and be counted. There Mary’s baby would be born, fulfilling another ancient prophecy:
Bethlehem, you are one of the smallest towns in the nation of Judah. But the Lord will choose one of your people to rule the nation – someone whose family goes back to ancient times. (Micah 5:2)
When the wise men come from the East, Micah’s prophecy will help them locate Jesus.
Caesar Augustus didn't know anything about Micah. Or the Old Testament or God. One of his accomplishments was the reform of the tax system and maybe the census was part of that. The census and Luke’s clue that Quirinius was governor of Syria helps pinpoint a time span when all of this took place.
Matthew’s account of the nativity tells us that Jesus was born when Herod was King. If reckoned by today’s calendar, Herod died in Jericho in the spring of 4 BC so the birth of Jesus would have had to occur before that. Yet Josephus, a first century Jewish historian, puts the census in the period of 7 BC to 6 BC. Reconciling Luke’s dating with Matthew’s has created a cottage industry of disputants, but suffice it to say that Jesus was likely not born on the first day of the first century – the date on which subsequent calendars are anchored.
Moreover, it’s unlikely that Jesus was born on December 25. The date of Jesus’ birth was not celebrated as a tradition for centuries and no tradition linking Christmas to December 25 can be traced back before the time of Constantine. The date was likely an invention of the fourth century – possibly to compete with the pagan holiday of Saturnalia, the worship of the sun god, which was celebrated on December 25.
Luke’s account of the nativity says that angels appeared to shepherds keeping watch over their sheep nearby. Bethlehem is about five miles southwest of Jerusalem at an elevation of about 2,300 above sea level – about 100 feet higher in elevation than Jerusalem. It’s unlikely that sheep would have been in the fields after about October due to night temperatures, although some say these could have been Temple sheep which remained in the fields year around. It’s unlikely that they were since the Temple was five miles away. The most likely time for shepherds to be in the fields with sheep after October would be springtime.
It’s unlikely that Jesus’ birth would occur on a random date. Since his coming happened in “the fullness of time,” God would have chosen a significant day in the Jewish year, and the most likely prospect would be a feast day, if not Passover, which comes in April. When we consider that he died on Passover, rose on the Feast of the First Fruits, created his church on the Festival of Weeks, also called Pentacost, the celebration of the giving of the law to Moses at Mount Sinai, it’s hard to argue that Jesus would be born on a day that had no significance in the Jewish calendar. While no scholar has given compelling evidence for a date, there is compelling evidence that it wasn’t December 25.
The Christmas Story is a long blog so I’m going to break it here and continue it next week. I hope you’ll read the rest of the story and have a very merry Christmas celebration!
No comments:
Post a Comment