There is an emerging movement that sees its members speak about belonging to a “Christian culture.” This “culture” can include atheists and agnostics, and all sorts of people who practice or condone behaviors that Jesus specifically forbade. People in this “Christian” culture will accept laws against stealing goods from stores, and murdering someone without good reason, and other basic concerns (like stopping for a red light). However, this same “Christian” culture is “Caucasian” and intolerant of anyone who is not “WAS” (“white Anglo-Saxon). The acronym USED to be “WASP”—the “P” being “Protestant.” However, the new “cultural Christian” doesn’t have to practice the faith.
In short, this movement is Christian in name only and largely reflects what the Nazis did in pre-War Germany. The “Fatherland” was the new God with Hitler as the savior who would restore to power the mythical “Aryan” race that had been so dishonored in WW I. One of the many bizarre things that the Nazis did was distribute photographs of young people who “looked” like what they imagined was a mythical Aryan child. One such photo—described as having the “ideal” appearance of an Aryan—was actually the photo of a little Jewish girl. Had the Nazis known of her true identity, she would have been killed—as Jewish people were earmarked for extermination. Sadly, today’s American Nazis and “White nationalists” are traveling the same road as Germany did.
The above social trend has spilled into people’s practice of the Christian faith—with church-going individuals making no connection between the message of Jesus and the actual human persons his birth addressed. This trend came to mind when I came across the reflections that follow. I did not write them, but think that whoever did compose the piece was on the right track of identifying the person who was put to death by the Romans 2000 years ago. The child born in Bethlehem did NOT come just for those of White Anglo-Saxon descent. Being a Jew himself, the baby Jesus could hardly be anti-Semitic. Instead, he entrusted us with the task of taking people off he diverse crosses on which they hang in everyday human activity.
Welcome to the annual Christmas party! Help yourself to a hot buttered rum. Mind the big bowls of popcorn; we’ll be needing those later.
Now, before we begin our annual holiday festivities, there are a couple inveterate party poopers in attendance that I’m just going to have to address.
First, we have the omnipresent Smug Anti-Theist who thinks they’re getting off a good one by pointing out that a lot of Christmas traditions come from earlier pagan celebrations. I’m not talking about people who point out things like that because they think it’s a fun historical fact; I think it’s a fun historical fact too.
I’m talking about the tiresome people who honestly believe they’ve disproved Christianity because Saturnalia exists. To which I reply: Yeah duh. We’re Christians. That’s what we do. We baptize pagans. We also take elements of all the many cultures we come from and cast new meaning on them in the light of the Gospel. We baptize yule logs, mistletoe, candles, pine trees. We baptize the name “Brigid.” We baptize temples and make them churches. We baptize special times of year. We baptize goddess imagery and use it differently to illustrate truths about the Virgin Mary. We baptize calling God by different names. We baptize everything. Want me to baptize you? Christians aren’t threatened by Saturnalia.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s move on to our fellow Christians. There is a certain type of Christian Christmas party pooper who likes to grump at people who are touched by the Holy Family’s poverty and helplessness in the infancy narrative this time of year. You know the type.
These are the people who post op-eds or preach sermons about the Holy Family not REALLY being poor or not REALLY being refugees. People who assure us that Mary wasn’t anything like today’s single mothers or that Joseph wasn’t the same as an immigrant dad taking his children to safety. They want to keep Jesus, Mary, and Joseph up on a pedestal lest anybody sully them by pointing out that they were humans and can teach us something about the inconvenient humans we encounter in our day-to-day life. And they are wrong. They are so wrong it’s ludicrous.
I’m going to go ahead and make a hard and fast rule: if someone writes an entire article or preaches a sermon assuring you that any Gospel passage, on Christmas or at any other time, is not really meant to remind you to empathize with marginalized people, you may throw popcorn at them and disregard it. They’re always wrong. Even when they have a ghost of a point, they’ve missed the broader point of the entire Gospel so they’re simply wrong.
If they say “Joseph and Mary weren’t really refugees” throw popcorn and disregard it. If they say “Jesus wasn’t really a foster kid” throw popcorn and disregard it. If they say “The Holy Family wasn’t really poor” throw popcorn. If they say “The Holy Family weren’t similar to a blended family” throw popcorn. If they say “The Virgin Mary wasn’t comparable to a teenage single mom” throw popcorn. If they say “The Three Kings weren’t really a sign that God wishes to manifest Himself to everyone including scary brown people who have a different religion to us” throw popcorn.
If they say “Jesus wasn’t really lynched on Good Friday” or “Jesus wasn’t really sexually abused on Good Friday” or “Jesus wasn’t really spiritually abused on Good Friday” throw popcorn. If they repeat any version of “The Gospel doesn’t really mean that we have to take care of poor people” throw popcorn. If they say “‘The Son of God has nowhere to lay his head’ isn’t supposed to make you think of the plight of homeless people” dump the whole bowl over their heads and make them go stand outside. If they say “The persecution of Jesus’s people by the Romans isn’t supposed to make you think about racism,” you’re going to have to make a batch of nice sticky caramel candy corn and carefully stick it to their best clothing. And don’t take it any more seriously than that.
The whole point of the Gospel is that Jesus came to earth as a human to make His dwelling among us, to become one of us, and draw us all up into the Life of the Blessed Trinity. He specifically chose to do this as a member of an oppressed race in an occupied land, who would know poverty, who would take refuge in a foreign country, and who would eventually be abused and tortured to death by a brutally unjust racist police force.
He suffered for and with us because He loves us. But this glorious gift also leaves a great demand on us. Christ told us that whatever we do to the least of His brethren, we do to Him. He is always present for us in marginalized people. Wherever you see people that society wants you to despise, you know for certain you are looking at Christ.
So there you have it. We’re allowed to have fun at Christmas, and Christmas makes a demand on us on behalf of all marginalize people.
Now, let’s have a party.
When Was Jesus Born—
B.C. or A.D.?
In which year was Jesus born?
While this is sometimes debated, the majority of New Testament scholars place Jesus’ birth in 4 B.C. or before. This is because most date the death of King Herod the Great to 4 B.C. Since Herod played a major role in the narrative of Jesus’ birth (see Matthew 2), Jesus would have had to be born before Herod died.
This begs the question: How could Jesus have been born in B.C.—“before Christ”?
The terms B.C. and A.D. stand for “before Christ” and “anno Domini,” which means “in the year of the Lord.” These terms are used to mark years in the Gregorian and Julian calendars—with the birth of Jesus as the event that divides history. In theory, all the years before Jesus’ birth receive the label B.C., and all those after his birth get A.D. If Jesus had been born in 1 A.D., these designations would be completely accurate.
However, as mentioned above, it seems most likely that Jesus was born in 4 B.C. or earlier. How then did the current division between B.C. and A.D. come to be? The monk Dionysius Exiguus, was the originator of the B.C. and A.D. calendar (based on when the calculated Jesus was born): Dionysius lived from about 470 to 544 A.D. He was a learned monk who moved to Rome and became well-known for translating many ecclesiastical canons from Greek into Latin, including the famous decrees from the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon.
Although we are not exactly sure how he came to this conclusion, Dionysius dated the consulship of Probius Junior, who was the Roman Consul at the time, to “525 years after ‘the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ’”—meaning 525 years after Jesus’ birth, that is, 525 A.D. Because of Dionysius’s calculations, a new calendar using B.C. and A.D. was born. The terms B.C.E (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) also use this calendar. These latter usages became standardized in the late 20th century.
Even though Dionysius Exiguus calculated his date for the year in which Jesus was born in the sixth century, it was not until the eighth century that it became widespread. This was thanks to the Venerable Bede of Durham, England, who used Dionysius’s date in his work Ecclesiastical History of the English People.