Dear Bishop Spong:

[Scully60]

I am a Sunday school teacher at the George Street United Church. Christmas is coming, and that means a Christmas pageant. If the material in the story of Jesus' birth is not history, then I don't know what to do about our children's Christmas pageant and still be true to this new understanding of the Jesus birth stories as myth. Would you give me some suggestions as to how I might handle this ? quickly? Christmas will soon be here.

Dear Penny,

Why is it that people think that something has to be historically accurate in order to be portrayed dramatically? No, of course it is not history that a star announced Jesus' birth. Stars were used to announce a number of historic births in the Jewish tradition, Isaac and Moses among them. It is not history that a star can wander across the sky so slowly that wise men can keep up with it or that this star can actually stop over wherever the wise men are supposed to dismount. It is not history that Middle Eastern magi will follow a star to the birthplace of a new king of the Jews, who in fact is said to be the son of a carpenter. Neither do angels sing to hillside shepherds in the middle of the night to tell them about the birth of a baby in Bethlehem. Shepherds do not then go to find this child in a crowded village with no clues other than that the babe is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

That, however, is not what these narratives are about. The gospel writers knew that they were not writing history, they knew they were creating an interpretive portrait. That is also what you are doing when you present their portrait in a pageant. Why not then open the pageant with the words, "Once upon a time." Would that not signal that this is not history but like all great myths is still profoundly true and significantly important?

Perhaps you might also present a commentary to accompany the pageant. That commentary could then explain the sources on which the gospel writers were drawing for their details and thereby explain the meaning of these symbols. For example scholars know today that Matthew's story of the wise men and the gifts of gold and frankincense come out of Isaiah 60, where kings come to the brightness of God's rising, they come on camels and they bring gold and frankincense. The star in the East is lifted out of the Balaam and Balak story in Numbers 22-24. The manger/crib is a reference to Isaiah 1. The swaddling clothes come out of the Wisdom of Solomon and on and on we could go. A friend of mine who is a priest in the Church of England tried to write a contemporary version of the Christmas story but found it had little appeal to his audience. I do not think people respond to attempts to take the mystery out of an ancient tale. That does not mean, however, that they think the ancient tale is literally true or actually believable.

Perhaps we ought not to worry that for a few days each year people suspend their rational faculties and enter a world of magic where stars do wander and angels do sing and wise men do travel and virgins do conceive. There is enough time each year to deal with reality, maybe Christmas is the time for pretending. What is important is that we need to know that pretending is exactly what we are doing.


–John Shelby Spong