Looking at its glitzy Christmas lights, Victoria, Betty, Granny, Bethany and I drove slowly the other night through a ritzy section of Betty’s town that I didn’t know existed until our present trip south.  The area’s nicest homes rest on top of a hill from which, along several bends of the road that connects its subdivisions, we could see the considerable lights of Columbia, Tennessee.  Looking down the hill, it occurred to me that the town’s expanse of lights was similar to what the traveling Magi must have seen, looking up at a Levantine sky not snuffed out by the kind of arrogant light pollution the homes and businesses of this typical American town generate all night.

We tended to flocks of reindeer and Santas and other recent holiday fabrications milling about most of the hill’s front yards.  Around the last curve, however, we saw it: the only crèche extant in this series of fashionable neighborhoods.  I felt like Charlie Brown in that presently ubiquitous Christmas special, finding a real, albeit feeble, tree among the shiny aluminum numbers his friends urged him to select from for their Christmas pageant.   Each sheep and shepherd and Holy Family member huddled around the suburban manger possessed a kind of inner light, most likely a sixty-watt incandescent bulb, that made the entire drama stand out among the inflatable Grinches and snowmen we had passed up to that point.

Bethlehem, the location of Messiah’s birth – exotic yet unassuming and off the beaten track – has inspired countless paintings, songs, and sermons over the past two millennia.  Bethlehem demonstrates that Heaven’s idea of good origins may not be our own; that great leaders may have humble, almost Lincolnesque beginnings; and that small, backwater places can impact the world.  Yet how can we really be sure that Messiah was born there?

In this age of rumors, unsubstantiated claims, and The Da Vinci Code, most of us still trust one or more of the Big Four to give us the Good News.  I thought it would be worthwhile this holiday season to see how each of the four dealt with the controversy surrounding where Messiah was born.

Luke’s broadcast of Messiah’s birth was as colorful as the peacocks that grace the grass in Northern European Renaissance paintings depicting that event.  If the Gospel is the greatest story ever told, Luke was the greatest at telling it.  Like Linus later in that special, I can still quote the King James Version of Luke 2 at least through the Gloria in excelsis Deo, including the famous, spare words that have helped Messiah’s lowly origins capture the world’s imagination.  Luke 2 first transmitted the understated subordinate clause that preachers have used for centuries to contrast this Ruler’s humble arrival with the advent of more imperious world leaders:

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Luke told a beautiful, ironic story, suitable for a bestselling memoir, the kind of master tract Messiah’s followers would later use to support his candidacy.  And Luke gave no hint of a controversy over the location of Messiah’s birth.

Matthew spoke of no birth controversy, either, but the pains to which it went to document Messiah’s every childhood move make one suspect that it had a keen eye for an anticipated, future controversy long before more than a handful of people recognized the Messiah as such.

Matthew’s treatment of the circumstances surrounding Messiah’s birth was somewhat more prosaic than Luke’s.  Maybe it was the accountant’s by-the-numbers mindset; maybe it was Matthew’s aging, hard-boiled and higher-than-average Jewish audience; or maybe it was just Matthew’s slant: demonstrate how Messiah’s birth comports with prophecy.  Matthew doesn’t broadcast as much to capture the imagination; it’s designed to convince folks of Messiah’s bona fides.  And Messiah sure did a lot of traveling as an infant and toddler: Bethlehem, Egypt, and Galilee, each stop necessary to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy about where the Messiah would hail from.  Matthew tracked each stop, and along the way Matthew also helped Messiah explain his early-childhood contacts with the Magi.  Who knows what ideas Messiah’s later constituency might otherwise have assumed those agents of an enemy religion implanted in his head?

Matthew seemed to have anticipated what the Birthers would later focus on: if Messiah were not born where Scripture required him to have been born, then he would be ineligible to serve as Messiah.

Mark, the smallest of the Big Four, just didn’t cover Messiah’s birth.  It may have been an issue of resources.  With objective journalism falling on tough times, you can’t be everywhere.

The Big Four were only the Big Three for decades; John came late in the century.  The latecomer makes a point of marching to its own drum, and its different approach makes Matthew, Mark, and Luke look as if they share a common viewpoint, as if they were cut from the same cloth – from the same unknown source that has been the object of a lot of conjecture among religious circles.  John delights in distinguishing itself from the other Big Four by describing itself “fair and balanced,” a barely concealed slight against its fellow networks.

Although Mark never mentions the location of Messiah’s birth, John wins the prize for being the least factual about where Messiah was born, “fair and balanced” or not.  John doesn’t usually publish editorials as news, but it supports its claim to unbiased journalism in part by broadcasting debates in which one side is, shall we say, inadequately represented.  John recorded two debates involving where Messiah was born, and though it never out-and-out said that Messiah was not born in Bethlehem, it always gave the Birthers the discussion’s last word as if they had the winning argument.  Here’s the first debate:

Many of the people . . . said, Of a truth this is the Prophet.  Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee?  Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?  So there was a division among the people because of him.

At this point, John could have reported something like, “Of course, it’s established beyond any doubt that Messiah was born in Bethlehem.  We have a government record, the testimony of friends and strangers, a contemporaneous birth announcement, no evidence to the contrary . . .”  But it didn’t.  Ah, well.  Anyway, this people’s debate John recorded ends in something like a draw.

But a second debate broadcast by John – this one among the Pharisees – ends more definitively in favor of the Birthers:

Then came the officers to the chief priests and Pharisees; and they said unto them, Why have ye not brought him?  The officers answered, Never man spake like this man.  Then answered them the Pharisees, Are ye also deceived?  Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?  But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed.  Nicodemus saith unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,)  Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?  They answered and said unto him, Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.  And every man went unto his own house.

This “Messiah” is from Galilee and not Bethlehem.  End of discussion.

Would it have been too much for John & Friends to have pointed out that the controversy isn’t real, that there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest that Messiah was born anywhere but in humble Bethlehem, and that Messiah is not disqualified to serve as Messiah?  I suppose not, but John’s role is not to clear up baseless rumors.  John reports; you decide.

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Posted December 28, 2009.