Gospel of Matthew

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What would Seinfeld say? Concerning people without Christian beliefs who celebrate Christmas

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What would Seinfeld say? Concerning people without Christian beliefs who celebrate Christmas

QUESTION:

Should people who’ve shed Christian beliefs celebrate Christmas anyway?

THE RELIGION GUY’S RESPONSE:

The quandary above is not posed by The Guy himself but by Keith Giles in a December 5 piece titled “Deconstructing Christmas,” one of his Progressive Christian columns for the multi-faith site Patheos.com. Giles departed from his career as the pastor of a conventional church and now participates in an anonymous  “house church” with no salaried staff.

For purposes of this article, what’s pertinent about the writer is his vocation of encouraging people in the process of deconstructing their past Christian faith the way he himself has done, as expressed in his patheos columns, with “Heretic Happy Hour” podcasts, and in his books that include “Jesus Unbound: Liberating the Word of God from the Bible.”

So, what does a deconstructed Christmas look like these days? Giles is well aware from his past that in Christmas, believers are celebrating that the baby Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was God the Son come from heaven whose ultimate death brought salvation to humanity. That’s apparently at the heart of what “progressive” people shed,  the story as woven into those familiar carols that everybody sings (alongside all the Rudolph and Frosty and Santa tunes).

Think Charles Wesley’s 1739 phrases fused with Felix Mendelssohn’s 1840 music: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; Hail the incarnate Deity, pleased as man with man to dwell; Jesus our Emmanuel. . . Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.”

For Giles, “almost everything about the Christmas story is worth deconstructing” and the result is that “many of us wrestle with celebrating Christmas,” which “can be a difficul time” for those who follow their newly deconstructed religion. Perhaps the family “puts pressure on us to go along with something we no longer believe in.” Or perhaps a progressive still wants to celebrate the day yet will “feel weird doing so” because people know the celebrant has left behind the beliefs involved.


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Bible debates, ancient and modern: Why did early church choose only four Gospels?

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Bible debates, ancient and modern: Why did early church choose only four Gospels?

QUESTION:

Why did early Christians choose only four Gospels?

RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

During the formative first centuries of Christian history there were some 40 texts in circulation that could be considered “gospels,” according to one scholar, while another counted as many as 70. Marvin Meyer of Chapman University decided a dozen such non-biblical gospels merited inclusion in an 2005 anthology, while others have proposed different listings.

Early Christians dismissed what they judged to be “apocryphal” texts, meaning of doubtful authenticity, and recognized only the familiar quartet of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as authoritative and eventually included in what became the New Testament. The four did not name the authors, but the substance was deemed to come directly or indirectly from Jesus’ original apostles.

An obvious aspect of such judgments was the dating.

Chronology expert Jack Finegan calculated that Jesus’ crucifixion probably occurred in early April of either A.D. 30 or 33. “The Oxford Bible Commentary” typifies experts’ consensus in listing these dates for the final composition of the Four: Matthew between A.D. 75 and 100. Mark “probably not long after” Jerusalem fell in 70. Luke most likely around 80 to 85. John about 90 to 100.

That means there would have been living eyewitnesses to Jesus to provide or confirm oral or written material incorporated into the Four, rather like historians in 2023 gathering memories about the Dwight Eisenhower presidency through the Ronald Reagan years.

But over the past generation, liberal scholarship has emphasized those “apocryphal” contenders, effectively reducing the exclusive stature of the biblical four. Many decided there wasn’t much of importance to distinguish the traditional four from the others. Elaine Pagels of Princeton University popularized the revisionist mood in “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979). By 2003, the big-selling and rather ridiculous novel “The Da Vinci Code” fictionalized the supposedly arbitrary choice of New Testament books as a power grab.


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Why does the Bible include two different family trees for Jesus of Nazareth?

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Why does the Bible include two different family trees for Jesus of Nazareth?

THE QUESTION:

In the accounts of Jesus’ Nativity in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, why are the genealogies so different?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Because there are no Christmas-y questions from readers awaiting answers, The Guy raises this Yuletide classic himself. When Matthew and Luke recount the birth of Jesus they present different genealogies with fascinating intricacies. The following can only sketch a few basics from the immense literature on this.

The Bible provides no roadmap, leaving us to ponder who was included, who was omitted, how the passages were structured, and what all this might mean. Reader comprehension is difficult due to multiple names given the same person, the lack of specific Hebrew and Greek words so that a “son-in-law” was called a “son,” legal adoption, and “levirate marriage” where a widow wed her late husband’s brother to maintain the family line.

Family trees were of keen importance for the Hebrews and carefully preserved. The central purpose in both Gospels was to establish Jesus within King David’s family line, a key qualification for recognition as the promised Messiah.

Matthew starts right off with the genealogy in the first 17 verses of chapter 1. Beginning from the patriarch Abraham, it extends through three sections of 14 generations each, down to the conclusion with “Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.” The passage then immediately specifies that Joseph was not the biological father because Jesus was conceived miraculously by the Holy Spirit (1:18-21).


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Jack Taylor's 138-point game and the Gospel of Matthew

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Even though I’m not a big basketball fan, I’ve had a lot of fun with this story about Grinnell College’s Jack Taylor shattering the NCAA record books by scoring 138 points in a single game. The whole team beat Faith Baptist Bible 179-104. Faith Baptist Bible’s David Larson went an impressive 34 for 44 shots to score 70 points, too! Imagine scoring that many points and being a footnote to the story.


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