How Christian is Christmas?

historical Jesus would be amazed

His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and--most striking of all--his beliefs were not ours. Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first-century American, we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.

Biblical Scholar, Bart D. Ehrman

In Christmas celebrations, the mythologization process of historical Jesus is on full display. The historical man gives way to the mythical figure, often called the Christ of Faith - who, for some, sparkles with potency. This Christ was created over centuries, reaching back long before and after Jesus’ lifetime, in an ongoing process of molding Jesus to fit the church's needs, many of which were and are political. But the myth-making process isn’t controllable; sometimes, people or our collective psyche refuse to be manipulated. The savior is a powerful archetype that lives in our collective human instinct, and if it rises inside you, there is no doubt it’s real - and powerful - because it is.

Most scholars agree that Jesus was a historical man who was baptized and later crucified, but he wasn’t born on December 25. Some argue the church chose his mythic birthday because December 25 was already well established as the birth of a savior, Sol Victus, also known as Mythras, the god of the Roman Legion. On the longest night, he overcame darkness, and his light was reborn. It’s still a great metaphor - one I have felt deeply.

The theory is that the Roman church fathers chose December 25 in 336 because it caused only minor temporal whiplash. There is some proof of this, but it could easily have been that everyday people, already attached to the date, began merging the two before this, and the church caught on later. Often, mythologizing isn’t a top-down directive but a bottom-up merging from deep psyche. In any case, the Eastern church refused to honor that day until 375 CE, decades later. They preferred celebrating the virgin birth on the date of the Koreion, when the virgin Kore, a maiden form of Persephone, gave birth in Alexandria (Kore means unmarried), already an important celebration. We call that date Twelfth Night, which is still more important than Christmas to many Eastern Christians. The difference in emphasis is clear.

To the Gnostics, Manicheans, and the many other forms of Christianity that flourished before the proto-Catholics won the often violent battle over whose myth was official, mythic Jesus was someone else. To them, he was pure spirit that entered Jesus’ human body at baptism, so he had no birth. A big argument at the time was whether Jesus was human, divine, or both. Heretics (people enthralled with the wrong myth) died over that.

Jesus’ myth was created one layer at a time, over centuries, probably not wholly as a manipulation of the church. The story of his virgin birth could have arisen from deep psyche into the minds of believers as inspiration because the story already existed before Jesus. Inspiration is compelling, captivating, and numinous, like some dreams are. People have archetypal depths. But some church fathers, gaining power for the first time, could easily have been more cynical. The mix of motives then would be as varied as they are now. Nothing changes under the sun.

To fit the well-established savior pattern, Jesus had to have a miraculous conception by a virgin. In the ancient world, this had nothing to do with physical virginity. Holy temple virgins practiced healing by dispensing the Mother’s grace through sexually loving men back to health, especially after one was involved in the violence of war. Harlots were sacred prostitutes. Their loving compassion made men fit for society again. These priestesses had children who were called virgin-born (parthenoi) and sometimes considered semi-divine. All those stories about Mary Magdalen being a prostitute probably point to why she was so spiritually advanced compared to the other disciples. The depth of soul it would take to be a harlot is profound. Dr. Ruth, step aside. Also, the savior’s virgin birth had to be heralded by wise men and marked by a star. Later, the savior had to be tempted by evil, die upon a hill, and appear after death before ascending to the heavens. These plot points are necessary for people to connect to the numinous archetype.

All the things I love about the holiday—Christmas trees, Yule fires, gift-giving, mistletoe, holly, feasting, and caroling—come from older myths that people refused to give up, though periodically, the church fathers tried. Puritans in Massachusetts outlawed the celebrations as having nothing to do with Jesus. That’s just one example. History is full of the church’s disapproval of Christmas. But the people refused; our mythic needs run deep and are personal.

After traveling from Los Angeles to New England to visit my mother, I woke in my childhood bed early one Christmas morning, tuned to a numinous love. As I slept, a miracle birth had occurred. The darkest part of my life was past; a new light was born. At 36, I’d finally become an adult. The man beside me was kind, decent, and, for the first time in my life, not a repeat of my abusive father. I looked out the window at the winter scene. The Merrimack River was frozen. New snow dusted the pine forest on the opposite bank. Dawn crested the treetops; her rosy fingers touched the ice and bounced into my mind’s eye. Light exploded within and without. Dust motes danced in golden hues. Surrounded by love, I raised my hand to touch them. It was a potent moment full of mythos, poetry, and realization. The next part of my life had begun. I would marry the sleeping man beside me. Had I been more Christian, I would have understood that moment in those terms, but I understood it in terms of recovery instead because that was the myth I was living.

When we mythologize, we are at our most sublime and dangerous. The more fervently people believe a myth, the more it sparkles with the numinous. It’s easy to think a god is speaking to you, wants what you want, hates what (or who) you hate, or is telling you that Jesus wants you to stop all abortions or there is no room in a Christian country for gay or trans people or immigrants. If Jesus is speaking to you, it’s coming from the deep human psyche, a repository of human memory - where heroic saviors live, move, and have their being. There is no other place. The myths we create mesmerize and cause events in the world. Since the gods are amoral, our role is to be the moral counterweight, to say: No, that hurts people. We are gatekeepers; our role is to discern.

The archetypal depth tends to reinforce the stories we tell, both personally and culturally. We recreate our trauma until we can forgive - let the story go. Until then, it relentlessly returns as circumstances - in the form of, say, serial replays of your abusive daddy-lover - or your elected officials. Until we have clear-eyed discernment, we are at the mercy of these forces - which people can and do manipulate.

So, let the season sparkle. I know I will. But don’t grovel before any gods because of your humanity. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. We have a role to play. Love is the answer—always—radical love. The Bible credits the historical Jesus with saying something like that. But then, Jesus was a radical; that’s why he was crucified.