Christmas: The Original Story

I recently received a copy of Margaret Barker’s newest book, Christmas: The Original Story (SPCK, 2008), from a dear friend. As the book generally only ships from England, it is quite difficult yet to get a copy–some I am extra grateful to have had the opportunity to receive it and give it a thorough read. I had originally intended to write a post on it by Christmas, naturally, but the busy nature of the holidays has kept me from finishing. If you are willing to bypass the fact that Christmas has now come and gone, I hope that this post will be a nice addition to your desire to contemplate the true meaning of Christmas at this time of year. (And because Jesus was almost certainly not born on December 25th, perhaps that fact can afford me some flexibility regarding the date of this post)  :)

For those familiar with Margaret Barker’s previous works, you will be amazed (but not necessarily surprised) at how she is able to find in the traditional Christmas stories all the main points of her “temple theology.”¹ She provides ample evidence that the early Christian stories of the birth of Christ were based on a temple worldview and that an understanding of the ancient traditions of Solomon’s Temple are necessary to understand the “original story” of Christmas. In the process of explaining to us how her theory plays out, she answers many important questions about how the Christians understood the birth of Christ and why they chose to pass the story on in the manner they did.

This book comes to us at a very appropriate time, when the “original story” of Christmas is all but forgotten, and the true “reason for the season”–Jesus–is discounted (“trampled under foot” 1 Nephi 19:7), and his name counted offensive.  

From her preface, Barker explains one of the reasons she wanted to write this book:

 The great festivals of the Church have been almost taken over by supermarkets and sporting events. Easter is a time for bonnets and bunnies and chocolate eggs; Christmas, which starts at the end of October, is for reindeer and mistletoe and mince pies. Nativity plays have come a long way since St. Francis first set up his crib. Either they are banned to satisfy the politically correct, or they are odern and have the birth in a bus shelter, or they are sentimental and have squirrels and even sea creatures at the crib.

The original story is so much better. It has suffered from over-familiarity, and the words are sometimes lost in a flurry of domestic distraction.  Reread and repondered, the original story of the incarnation is one of the greatest treasures in the Bible.²

Reading Barker’s passionate exploration of the earliest Christmas stories has given me greater appreciation for these precious tales that we have heard repeated so many times and, furthermore, given me greater insight into the meaning of many of the details that so often get overlooked as unimportant.  Finally, her masterful ability to find temple imagery in places most would never look for it has opened my eyes to an even greater understanding of how important the temple truly was to the early Christians and helped me remember how grateful I am for our own temple tradition as LDS.

The Temple Setting of the Nativity

After discussing briefly what Christmas has become, Barker makes this important note for our understanding of the original Christmas stories:

The real “setting” for the Christmas stories, however, is the world in which they were first written. For the Jewish people of Palestine in the first century CE, the world was shaped by the temple. Their culture was shaped by its calendar and its taxes, its purity rules and and its sacrifices, and especially by the holy books and prophecies that were preserved there…There were, however, many who thought the temple impure and longed to see it replaced –but this was as much a political aspiration as it was religious. The promised Messiah would destroy the temple and rebuild it, they said.³

Those who knew the prophecies and the ancient temple traditions knew what to expect in a Messiah. For these, the role of the Messiah was inextricably bound to the temple.  Many Jews at the time of Christ felt that they were living through an extended spiritual “exile” that had continued long after the return from Babylon.  Many, such as the inhabitants of Qumran, saw the Second Temple and its priesthood as corrupt and longed for the day when the Anointed One would come and destroy the corrupt temple and restore the ancient holy order.  Ezekiel, and also (second) Isaiah, had prophesied of a future temple and a time when the Glory of the Lord would return.⁴ The Christians saw this glory as being present in Jesus (John 1:14). 

The Christians also saw the ancient temple rituals as prefiguring the coming of Jesus Christ.  When the high priest performed the holy rites on the Day of Atonement, he wore only white linen robes in the Holy of Holies, representing the clothing of celestial beings. When they emerged from the holy place, which represented heaven, they passed through the veil into the “material world” and were clothed in colored robes that represented the elements of this mortal realm.  The high priest (or king) was, in a sense, “incarnated” as they re-emerged into the mortal world. Barker further explains:

The high priests and kings of ancient Jerusalem entered the holy of holies and then emerged as messengers, angels, of the Lord. They had been raised up, that is, resurrected; they were sons of God, that is, angels; and they were anointed ones, that is, messiahs. The robes of the high priest in these two parts of the temple symbolized his passing from the angel state into the material world,. He came from the glory, and by putting on a vestment that symbolized matter, he veiled that glory when he was in the world. The first Christians used these images to describe the incarnation. The writer of Hebrews could say, without any explanation, that the curtain of the temple was the flesh of Jesus, the great high priest (Heb. 10:20), and the Gospels record that the temple veil tore when Jesus died ( Matt. 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45). ‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see’ is one of Charles Wesley’s best-known lines, familiar to anyone who has sung Christmas carols.⁵

Jesus was understood to have been begotten in heaven before his earthly birth–an event that also had been ritually depicted in the ancient temple. Speaking of the Davidic kings (while prefiguring Christ), Psalm 89 declares:

I have exalted one chosen from the people…With my holy oil I have anointed him….He shall cry to me “Thou art my Father”…And I will make him the firstborn… (Ps. 89:19–20, 26–27).

Barker notes that Ps. 2:7 contains further words that appear to pertain to this same temple ritual:

I will tell of the decree of the Lord: He said to me, “You are my son, today I have begotten you.

Thus, in a ritual that apparently took place in the Holy of Holies, also known as the “Bridal Chamber”⁶, the Israelite king was “begotten” as a “son of God” and emerged as the mortal representative of Yahweh. 

The oldest parts of the Old Testament distinguish God Most High (El Elyon) and the LORD (Yahweh). Yahweh was the first-born of the sons of God Most High, appointed as the Guardian Angel of Jacob, that is, of his descendents (Deut. 32:8, in the oldest known Hebrew text of that verse that was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls). Yahweh the Son of God Most High, the God of Israel who appeared in the Old Testament theophanies, in turn had a son, who was the human being in whom he was present with his people. This way of thinking about God and the divine presence did not fracture the Unity of the Divine; it extended it.  The Davidic king was known as Immanuel, which means ‘God with us’ (Isa. 8:8 and more famously, Isa. 7:14).  The psalmist described a procession into the temple when he saw ‘My God, my King’ going into the holy place (Ps. 68:24). When Solomon was made king, he sat on the throne of the LORD as king (1 Chron. 29:23), and all the people ‘bowed their heads and worshipped the LORD, the king’ (1 Chron. 29:20, the literal translation of the Hebrew).  The human king, in a way that they understood and we do not, was the LORD. He was the Son of God Most High with his people.  This problem of the human nature and the divine nature was to perplex Christian thinkers for generations; it was one of the temple belies that was never explained, or rather, never put into the public domain…The Christians saw all the temple ritual as foreshadowing the reality of the incarnation…⁷

The story of God having a Son, therefore, is not as foreign to the belief system of the ancient Israelites and later Jews as many biblical scholars would have us think. In fact, the idea was not foreign at all, but was an essential part of the ancient temple theology.  However, as Barker explains, the distinction between the Father (God Most High) and the Son (Yahweh) was “lost in the attempt to impose literal monotheism, and the language of fatherhood was changed to that of creation…The idea of a Father God and his Son fell out of favour among those who equated the LORD  and God Most High”⁸.  

One of the most important aspects of the temple in ancient times was the ritual of “seeing the LORD.” The greatest privilege and blessing was to be able to see beyond the temple veil and witness “the glory of the Lord’s presence.” The traditional high priestly blessing declared: “The Lord bless you and keep you: The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you: The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace” (Num. 6:24–26).  Barker reasons that Israelite temple-goers likely witnessed the king/high priest emerge from the holy of holies dressed in his “glorious robe”, representing Yahweh.  In one text, the high priest is described as appearing like “the morning star among the clouds…like the sun shining upon the temple of the Most High” (Ben Sira 50:6-7).⁹

Barker notes:

This was the glory in human form that Ezekiel saw in his vision. Isaiah recorded what was enacted in the temple ceremony: ‘The people who walked in darkness, have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has the light shined…For unto us a child is born…” (Isa. 9:2, 6).¹⁰

“Seeing the glory,” Barker explains, “however, became controversial. Nobody knows why.”¹¹ There were many attempts to downplay or exclude this ancient belief in the Lord appearing in his temple.  However, the Christians held on to this belief and witnessed that they had seen the Glory in the person of Jesus and, thus, had been given the privilege of looking beyond the veil.

Barker includes many other temple motifs that were incorporated by the authors of the Nativity stories which I don’t have room to include here.  These early Christian authors were careful to include events surrounding the birth of Jesus that they saw as fulfilling prophecy or pertaining to the temple tradition.  Now, this does not mean that they invented fictitious events about Jesus in order to fit a certain religious perspective. Barker explains:

A basic story was told, but not with the mundane detail  that modern writers might choose to include. There was no mention of, for example, nappies¹² or whatever was used at the time, although the infant Jesus doubtless needed them. but there was mention of the manger, and so we ask, Why was that detail  included? Those elements in the story that could be linked to prophecy, and illuminated by it, were naturally the most emphasized. This is not to say that the story of Jesus’ life was simply compiled from prophecies, as some have suggested. Rather, the incidents seen to be significant were emphasized, and the material of interest to modern biographers was not.¹³

In order to understand what the specific details of the Christmas stories were supposed to mean, one must be well acquainted with the worldview of the late Second Temple Jewish people.  First of all, one must understand the Temple–and not necessarily the way that the temple is represented in the Old Testament–but the way the temple was understood by those who knew the ancient temple traditions well. Also, Barker points out that some of the prophecies that were being used no longer exist in our Old Testament. Besides the fact that the early Christians had a more open canon and used “extra-biblical” works such as the Enochic writings as scripture, it is apparent that many Messianic proof texts used by the Christians were modified or removed by those critical of their movement. Justin Martyr maintained that Jewish teachers had been removing relevant texts from the scriptures: “they have deleted entire passages…”¹⁴ The discovery of ancient versions of key biblical texts among caches such as the Dead Sea Scrolls collection have confirmed this as fact.  The scriptures that the early Christians knew, both in Hebrew and Greek, supported their view of the Messianic expectations more than later Jewish versions would. 

The disciples of Christ knew that Jesus was the incarnation of Yahweh, the LORD. He was the reality that had been ritually depicted in the ancient temple rituals. He was the Son of God Most High and was the being who had appeared to the ancient faithful as the God of Israel.  Margaret Barker expounds on these ideas beautifully and convincingly.  However, this is only the beginning of her exploration. I hate to leave you hanging in suspense, but further comments on Barker’s enlightening discoveries will have to wait for my next post!

To be continued…

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1. See her explanation of this method on her website: http://www.margaretbarker.com/Temple/default.htm or any of her recent books. [↩]
2. Preface, p. ix [↩]
3. p. 1 [↩]
4. Ezek. 43:10; 45:9-12; Isa. 58:8 [↩]
5. p. 5 [↩]
6. See her explanation and quote from The Gospel of Philip, p. 8 [↩]
7. pp. 9-10, emphasis in original [↩]
8. p. 11 [↩]
9. See Barker’s discussion of this topic, p. 15 [↩]
10. p. 15 [↩]
11. p. 15 [↩]
12. the English term for diapers [↩]
13. p. 18 [↩]
14. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 71, as quoted on p. 19 [↩]