Father Stephen De Young:

“Through the tender mercy of our God, with which the dayspring from on high has visited us;”

Notice that “visited” is in, again, the past tense. So, it’s already happened in Mary’s womb.

“To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

So the child grew and became strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his manifestation to Israel.

Now, it’s not stated here directly, but it seems a pretty obvious question to me: why do you run off to the desert? The parents don’t live in the desert. They live in the hill country, we were just told. Why do you go running off into the desert for most of his young adult life? Well, traditionally, and we know this from the Gospel of Matthew, what did Herod do when he found out that Jesus had been born? Killed all the infant children, and so St. John had to flee. His parents were actually killed to hide him, and he grew up in the wilderness by himself. Notice it doesn’t say John and his parents were in the wilderness or John and his mother were in the wilderness. We’re not going to see Zacharias and Elizabeth again.

So, he’s off in the wilderness by himself, by himself, traditionally from about two or three years old, but from very young childhood. And again, traditionally, according to our internal Church history, he was cared for there by the angels in much the same way that, remember, he’s sort of our new Elijah. Remember, Elijah went and lived by the brook in the Kidrun Valley and the ravens brought him food, God brought him water, sort of God cared for him in the wilderness. Same kind of image here for St. John that, he was cared for.

Interlocutor: Were Zacharias and Elizabeth killed trying to save John?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. He was actually killed in the temple, when they caught up to him and killed him. And the way we know that, is Jesus is going to refer to sort of all the martyrs of history. He’s going to say “All the blood of the innocent from Abel to Zacharias is going to come upon this generation.”

Some people want to interpret that as Zechariah the Prophet, in the Old Testament. There are a couple of problems with that. First of all, Zechariah the Prophet was a good 400 years before Jesus. So they just get a pass on the last 400 years of innocent blood? Just this piece, from the beginning of the world until 400 years ago, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. And I’ve even unfortunately heard some people try to argue, “Well, Abel to Zechariah, it’s A to Z.” The problem with that is that zeta, that’s a letter that starts Zacharias in Greek is not the last letter of the Greek Alphabet. It’s right in the middle, the A to Z thing, Alpha and Omega works that way, those are the first and last letters of the Greek Alphabet. And that works in English, the A to Z thing, but it doesn’t work in the original languages.

So that’s pretty clear evidence that this Zacharias he’s talking about is someone who must have just recently been killed, right? From the beginning of the world up until now is sort of the idea. And so, the Zacharias is talking about is this Zacharias who was murdered in the temple.

So chapter two, one of the more familiar passages of the Bible, especially if you’ve heard Linus recite it every year on Peanuts. I have a little Christmas ornament with Linus on it where you push a button in it, and he does Luke 2. I should have brought it now; I should have just had Linus read it for us [Laughter]. But as kids, we ended up memorizing this passage and reciting it to the joy of our parents every Christmas season.

And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city.

So, a couple of comments here. First of all, you notice we have specific names. We already saw that at the beginning of St. Luke’s gospel. And in the introduction, I talked about how St. Luke is writing in historical Greek. His style and syntax are very similar to that of Thucydides, who’s one of the great classical Greek historians. He’s kind of aping that historical style.

Okay, so St. Luke is, again, making the point, these are actual events that actually happen at a particular time in a particular place. And he’s identifying that time and that place. And so we know it’s in the reign of Caesar Augustus, he sends out a decree that the whole world would be registered. What’s that about? This isn’t like the US Census, where we try and figure out congressional representation. This is taxes, right? This is taxes. I want to find out how many people are living where in my empire, so I know how much money I should be getting from each province. I need to know how much money I’m getting from each province so that I can make sure I’m getting that much.

Remember we talked about how that got filtered down, right? You would tell the governor of the province, “I need this much money from you.” He would then get tax collectors working under him, and he’d tell them, “I need each of you to bring me this much money.” And of course, there was profit taking at each level. Everybody’s collecting a little bit extra so they could put it on the side.

But that’s why, this is for taxes, and that’s why everyone needs to go back to their hometown, because he’s doing it by province, by area. This is how much money I need to get, because that’s how many citizens, not citizens in the Roman citizen sense, but dwellers in that province there are.

Interlocutor: Could people get out of paying taxes by not going back to their hometown?

Fr. Stephen: It was a bad idea to try to get caught for tax evasion in the Roman Empire. That was a good way to get yourself crucified. So, you could try it, but you’d better succeed.

Okay, and so the other comment is who is this Quirinius who is governing Syria?

Interlocutor: Why couldn’t they collect taxes wherever they were living? I still don’t understand that.

Fr. Stephen: In part, it’s because, especially with the non-Roman citizens, do you remember when we talked about Nazareth, how we have no evidence that it existed? But that’s because it was one of these villages; it was not a settled city. These villages would sort of pop up. They pop up around farming areas. They pop up around natural resources, with workmen and that kind of thing. We’re dealing with peasants. Caesar knew where all the Roman citizens were, but he doesn’t just want to tax the Roman citizens. He wants to tax everybody.

They were big into taxation without representation. So, he wants to tax the peasants, too. And the peasants in most of the Roman Empire, including in Galilee, were essentially migrants in that way. They’d have to sort of go wherever they could find work. None of them own any land, so they’re having to…. “Well, okay. It’s wheat harvest season. So we’re all going to head over here and work the fields. That’s over now. We’re going to head over here and work at this.”

So you’ve got a highly mobile population, without the technology we have today, it was real hard to get a snapshot of everybody where they are right now. So, the best way to make sure you got everybody right, that you got everyone in a migratory population type of situation was to get them all to go back, sort of go back to home base, go back where they were from originally. Then you register them there, you could be pretty sure you’ve got everybody, give or take.

Interlocutor: If you’re looking at ancestors for example, where do you start? You start where your family came from, trace it all the way back. So if you say you are from Nazareth, who’s you mom, who’s your grandma, you come back and we can validate that, because this is being done under Roman officers. And they were very active in finding who belonged to whom.

Fr. Stephen: They were efficient as you could be with the level of technology they had at doing this.

So, one last note on this Quirinius, you will sometimes hear people—documentaries on a certain cable channel that I probably no longer have to name, say that, “Well, this isn’t true because we have no evidence that there was a Quirinius who was the governor of Syria.”

And it is true, we do not have any archaeological evidence of a Quirinius who was governor of Syria. However, what they don’t tell you there is that we do not know the names of most of the governors of most of the Roman provinces in the first century B.C., the first century A.D., the second century A.D., unless they show up in history for some reason, they do something important or there’s a battle in their territory or they wrote something. If we have a letter they wrote back and forth with Rome or something. But for the vast majority of them, we have no evidence whatsoever.

And to give you an idea of just how far that goes. There was no actual archaeological evidence of the existence of Pontius Pilate, until the 1960s, outside of Christian reference to him. Outside of people in the early Church talking about him being crucified under Pontius Pilate, outside of the biblical accounts. Finally, in the 1960s, they uncovered an inscription in Jerusalem on one of the Roman buildings referring to Pontius Pilate being the governor, in Latin.

So if that’s true of Pontius Pilate, who ended up being a pretty major figure in history, this Quirinius, who as far as we know, did nothing important other than happening to be governor in Syria when this census was taken—we wouldn’t expect necessarily to find a whole bunch of information about Quirinius. Being a governor of a province was a position of a certain amount of power, but it was sort of like being mayor of a city.

People could tell you who is the President of the United States. People who are relatively well educated in US history could tell you at a given time who was President of the United States. But most of them can’t tell you who the Mayor of Poughkeepsie was. Even people who live in Poughkeepsie probably can’t tell you if you go back aways, can’t tell you who’s mayor of Poughkeepsie, so same kind of thing, right?

Quirinius was just not a major figure. So, it’s not surprising that we don’t have archaeological and textual evidence yet. And just like with Pontius Pilate, tomorrow they could turn over a rock in Syria and find an inscription from Quirinius, and then that whole cottage industry of “Quirinius never existed” writers will have to find a new job.

But the important point is that at the time St. Luke wrote this, at the time he wrote this, by him referencing when Quirinius was governor, that would, to the original readers, tell them when it was because, remember, they didn’t have the year system we have now. He couldn’t just say this happened in 4 B.C. because they obviously didn’t have the B.C./A.D. system then.

Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child.

That “betrothed wife”, it’s kind of an oddball translation because the word there, that’s translated “wife”, really just means “woman”. So I mean to be completely accurate, now, given that word can mean “woman” or “wife”, normally with a possessive in Greek, if you were going to say so and so was somebody’s wife, you’d say that was “so and so’s woman.”

And that wasn’t a sexist thing, because the same is true of the word for man. The word means both man and husband. So you could say “a man”, or you could say “so and so’s man”, meaning their husband or “so and so’s woman”, meaning their wife.

But since the word “betrothed” is in there, it seems a much more natural translation to say “Mary, the woman to whom he was betrothed.” The woman he was betrothed to. That’s sort of like saying, “Oh, that’s his wife, who he’s engaged to.” Wait, what? [Laughter]

“Who was with child”, and that “with child” isn’t reminding us, the “with child” there means she’s sort of visibly pregnant now. We’re a few months in, as we’re going to find out. We’re very close to the time to give birth, by the time they complete this journey, this journey would have taken some time. They’re going on foot from Galilee down there. The point is she’s visibly quite pregnant.

So it was, that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Interlocutor: It says her firstborn, so do we have any accounts of anybody following after that?

Fr. Stephen: We have to be careful with that.

One other note before I reply to that, the verb there when it says “brought forth” is éteken, which is a form of what’s in the “tokos” part of Theotokos, this is that verb “to give birth”. And the word that’s used for firstborn is prótotokon.

When we hear “firstborn”, we’re assuming first as opposed to second or third. The technical term for this and prótotokonis used in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew phrase that literally means “which breaks the womb”, meaning there has been no child before it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there were more afterwards.

The English word “first” seems to imply that, but that’s not implied in the original.  And the reason for that term is that and we’re going to see they’re going to go to the temple with Jesus to dedicate Him.

But in the Torah, in the Mosaic law, what broke the womb, not just with human beings, but with animals, with livestock, whatever broke the womb was holy to the Lord and was to be dedicated to the Lord. In the case of animals, that “dedicated” meant sacrificed. When you had a bull and a cow, the first calf that was born, you were to take it and sacrifice it to God. And then the other calves that were born would then be part of your herd. Same thing with sheep. Same thing with goats.

Now, obviously, with human beings, they didn’t go and sacrifice the baby, but they symbolically did. The child was brought to the Temple and was presented at the Temple, at the altar. But instead of the child, they would sacrifice animals, an animal or birds if you were poor, just because they were cheap, were sacrificed instead of the child. And that substitution there goes back to, remember, Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is called to go and sacrifice Isaac, his firstborn son, but then instead they find the ram in the thicket. And so that’s sacrificed instead.

And this is why, when we church a baby, the baby is brought up to the altar. It’s not just to bless the baby because the altar is holy. We are symbolically offering that child back to God. That’s what we’re doing. So that goes all the way back to this idea.

So, all that is to say that word here is signifying about Christ, not birth order, but the fact that since He the one that broke the womb, He is now holy to the Lord. And so, it’s going to be appropriate, we’re going to see that happen, that now Mary offers him back to God. So that’s the point that’s being made there. Not so much that there are more later.

In terms of whether she had other children, we talked about that a little bit at the beginning of Matthew because, of course, St. Matthew uses that phrase that’s usually translated into English as “Joseph did not know her”, meaning have relations with her, “until she had brought forth her son.” And in English, a lot of people have interpreted that “until” to mean, “Oh, well, that means afterwards they did.”

And the word “until” doesn’t imply that. To steal an argument from St. Jerome, because somebody had the same issue in Latin, the Latin “until” sort of implied…. And so when he translated the scriptures into Latin, someone asked him about that and in his letter to Helvidius, he responded and said, “Well, go back to Genesis. It says that Jacob, when he hid Laban’s household idols, they were hidden even until this day.” Does that mean we just found them? No, “until” means “never found them”.

And, Moses’s body. He says, “Look at Deuteronomy.” Moses’s body, no one knows where it lays, until this very day. Doesn’t mean we just found it.

It’s the same “until”. The fact that he didn’t have relations with her until the baby was born just means that before the baby was born, he didn’t—it doesn’t say anything about what happened afterwards. The same way that this isn’t saying anything about what happened afterwards.

Now, we talked about last time real briefly, the fact that when Archangel Gabriel comes to Mary and says, “You’re going to have a child”, remember what her response is. “How could this be, because I have not known a man?” Right? Well, if she was engaged to be married, and was planning on getting married soon, why would she respond that way? Wouldn’t she just assume, “Oh, you mean after we get married,” right? “You’re going to have a son.”

The fact that she says, “How is that possible?” implies not only that she hadn’t yet had sexual relations, but that she wasn’t planning on it, because if she was planning on it, she would have just said, “Oh, okay, well, what do we do? We’re going to have a baby.”

Interlocutor: Where was James at this point?

Fr. Stephen: James was the oldest son of Joseph. So, he’s a young teenager at this point.

Interlocutor: So not with his father?

Fr. Stephen: No, he was with them. In fact, in a lot of the Orthodox icons of the flight into Egypt, for example, there’s this kid leading the donkey with Mary on the donkey and Joseph in the back. And that’s James, that’s St. James.

So, what history tells us, because all the sources going back to the early second century all say this, that St. Joseph was an older man, he already had children and that’s why he was entrusted to be Mary’s guardian to him, betrothed to him, because she needed to be connected to a man in some way. Because again, women had no rights. They couldn’t go get a job and support themselves.

She couldn’t be in the temple because she’d entered puberty. And so, a woman who’s menstruating can’t be anywhere near the temple. So she had to leave.

The plan would have been later on, later in life, she would have gone back. So, in between she needs someone to provide for her and look out for her. So, we have this righteous older man, who’s a widower, who has children.

In fact, St. James probably wasn’t that far off in age from Mary at the time, and she was probably a teenager. It wasn’t that far off. So, this is the perfect person to entrust sort of with her care.

And the Gospels themselves never spell this out. But we have it from these other sources and it’s perfectly consistent with everything we see in the Gospels, in that Joseph just disappears. He’s just gone. Which makes sense, because if he’s advanced in age already, that by the time Jesus is an adult, he had passed away.

Interlocutor: It’s not in Scriptures?

Fr. Stephen: That he had passed away? Right. So we’re going by other sources and then seeing if that’s consistent. If it contradicted what was in the Gospels, we wouldn’t say it.

But it’s also important because again, a lot of our Protestant brothers and sisters will say, “Well, if that’s not there in the text, then I don’t believe it. So, they must have had relations after they were married and these are Jesus’s brothers and sisters through Mary.”

I would point out, it never says if they’re going to say, well, we’re just going to go by what the Bible says, okay? It never says, never are those children referred to as Mary’s children. They’re only referred to as the children of Joseph and as Jesus’s brothers and sisters, they’re never referred… Jesus is referred to as the son of Mary. But James is never referred to as the son of Mary. Salome is never referred to as the daughter of Mary.

And to take it one step further, nowhere in the Gospels does it say they got married. They’re betrothed, and then Joseph disappears. And that’s why he’s known in the Church as St. Joseph the Betrothed. It never says they got married.

So, my response to that argument and it’s for modern Protestants, because the early Protestants didn’t believe that… Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli all believed that Mary never had any other children, every single one of them.

But my response to modern Protestants with that argument is, okay, let’s go by what it says. It doesn’t say they ever got married. So, if you’re going to come to me and say, “Well Mary must have had sexual relations with Joseph because they were married and that was their duty,” or something, first you’ve got to prove to me from the Bible they got married, which isn’t there.

Interlocutor: And of course, there’s nothing said about Joseph witnessing the crucifixion.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or any part of his ministry. Mary shows up early and often throughout Jesus’s ministry. The wedding at Cana, and all these different things. His mother is at the wedding at Cana. His mother, brothers and sisters. Nothing about Joseph.

So, the information we have goes back to at least the beginning of the 2nd century, at least the early 100’s. So, not that long after all this happened, less than 100 years after this happened, we have these historical accounts that are consistent with each other that tell us these things, these other things about Jesus’s family. And they’re completely in accord with and help explain things.

They explain why St. Joseph suddenly disappears. They explain these other issues. So it seems to me if we have historical data, if it’s not only consistent with the Scriptures, but helps us understand the Scriptures, helps make sense of it, I don’t see any logical reason to reject it any more than I would reject that St. Paul went to Spain. The Acts of the Apostles ends right before St. Paul’s first trial in Rome. But we know from history, that he went to Spain and then after that had a second trial in Rome and was martyred there. But none of that is in Acts.

St. Peter was killed in Rome. This is all church history stuff. And there’s sort of an odd approach for certain of our brothers and sisters where they’ll accept that Plutarch’s Lives gives us all this information about the life of Caesar Augustus. “Yeah, okay, that’s probably true, right?” All these things written around the same time as these other Christians, but all the Christian sources, that are talking about people in the Bible, for some reason, they’re all lying, right?

“Plutarch’s telling us the truth and all of these other ancient historians are telling us the truth, but all the Christian historians are lying and making stuff up for some reason,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It seems inconsistent to me.

I think we should treat historical documents outside the New Testament, they are outside the New Testament, I’m not saying we should include them in the New Testament or add to the New Testament, these are other things. But we should treat them the same way we treat other historical information from the same time period.

If I’ve got a second century source that talks about St. Polycarp, who is a disciple of St. John the Apostle, being martyred by the Romans, I don’t know a single Protestant historian who questions that that’s historically accurate. I don’t know a single one.

Well, the Protoevangelium of James that tells us that Joseph was an elderly man and James was his son from another marriage, actually dates from earlier than the martyrdom of Polycarp. Why is that a pack of lies, if the martyrdom of Polycarp is true?

Interlocutor: The other question this raises in my mind is that we’ve seen the miracles of Christ in raising the dead, in fact, today the Gospel, the little girl. Why would he not raise his father, and have his presence there?

Fr. Stephen: Well, there’s all kinds of people who died that he didn’t raise from their death. But I mean, Jesus, there were other people who I mean, obviously over this whole time, there are people dying, right? There are people who are sick, who he didn’t heal and people who he did.

So in part, we got to try and get into divine mind reading. Why this person and not that person? And a lot of times when we do that, we still do that today. “God, why did you heal this person and not that person?” or, “Why did you bless this person and not that person?” And usually that person is me.

“Why did you bless that person and not me?” Right? And that kind of thing. And that goes all the way, I mean, that’s in the Psalms, “Lord, why did the wicked prosper and the righteous are oppressed?” So, there’s a certain mystery there. There’s a certain mystery there.

It’s often easier, at least when it’s revealed to us, when it’s in Scripture, to understand why God does the things he does than it is to understand why he doesn’t do the things that he doesn’t do. But a lot of that we just have to sort of leave to God. We have to accept… there’s sort of an intellectual humility there.

I may not understand why God is doing what he’s doing. In fact, in my arrogance, I may think I could do a better job. “Well if I was there I would do this. Why is God doing this? Why is God not doing this?”

But we have to find the humility to say not only is it God who’s actually in charge. But he actually does a better job than I would do if it was me, because I’d be mean and fickle and reward my friends and punish my enemies. God shows a lot more mercy than I probably would. And that’s a good thing for me in the long run. So we have to kind of accept a certain amount of silence.

And that gets into something I’ve said a lot of times about the Bible, going all the way back to when we were in Genesis and reading about the creation of the world. We have a lot of questions, but God isn’t in the business of answering all our questions. He’s in the business of telling us what we need to know.

And finally on that, I think the best example of that is St. Paul, as we’re going to read, the thorn in his flesh, whatever that was. Says he had a thorn in his flesh, and he prayed and prayed and prayed that God would remove it, that God would heal him, that God would take it away. And the answer he gets from God is, what? “My grace is sufficient for you.” It’s not, “Well, here’s why I’m not doing it, and here’s why…”, it’s “My grace is sufficient for you.” And so, we have to accept that what God’s given us is sufficient for us, even when we don’t understand it.

Okay, so we see here, often this gets dramatized in our Christmas pageants, right? We have St. Joseph and Mary go out and knocking on all the doors. “Hey, have you got a room for let? New in town!” and everybody went, “No, go away”. And then finally they get to one and they say, “Oh, you could go sleep with the animals in the stable.”

It’s not quite so dramatized here in St. Luke’s Gospel. But you can expect if everyone descended from the line of David has to go back to Bethlehem to be registered, you could imagine, it’s pretty packed! Bethlehem is pretty packed at this point. The idea is that they couldn’t find normal lodgings, so they end up out in a stable somewhere, which would have been, and is if you go to Bethlehem and visit it, it would have been a cave, and that’s what’s depicted in the Icon of the Nativity. You see that the Theotokos in a cave because we tend to picture a stable with some little wooden… in our manger scene. It’s a little wooden shack next to the inn, and we picture the inn as a Mediterranean version of the Holiday Inn, or a bed and breakfast [Laughter].

Yeah, not quite what it was like. The animals were kept in a cave. It was usually a natural cave; they didn’t spend a lot of time carving out a cave for the animals. So this is basically… there was no place for them to stay and so they just found a place to take shelter for the night. That happened to be a cave where they were keeping animals. And so, the manger is a feeding trough. And this was, again, wouldn’t have been a wooden sort of constructed… you kind of see in the manger scene, your varnished nice little wooden creche. This would have been basically a rock that they’d worn a ditch into that you can come and pour the feed into the ditch in the rock, and the animals could eat out of it.

They didn’t have pets the way we do. They weren’t pampering the animals. This wasn’t cooked food. This wasn’t a healthy, balanced diet. Maybe they got some leftover slop type stuff, but mostly it was like some not so hot grain and oats and whatever they had, barley.

And so they basically, since they have to take shelter in this cave, they don’t have a place to lay the baby. There’s no changing table.

Interlocutor: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, but a lot colder. So, they just sort of push the food aside. The point here is, when the Son of God is born. This is the Lord. This is the Lord coming into his creation. This is the Lord coming to visit his people, as we’ve seen over the last chapter, this big auspicious moment is coming. The Messiah is going to be born, God is returning to visit his people, and the baby is sort of born in a cave in a shed in a little town in Judea. They don’t have a place to put them, so they put them in an animal food trough.

Now, people who run for president in this country, at least there was a tradition. Not so much anymore, but it used to be they used to compete over how poor they were in their childhood. Everybody was born in a log cabin out in the woods. “I came from nothing and worked my way up.” Current candidates, I don’t think that would work for, I don’t think Donald Trump could sell that he was born in poverty. I don’t think that would go over with anybody. But that used to be the thing. That was not the case in the ancient world.

Interlocutor: Doesn’t Hillary sort of portray herself as a carpenter’s daughter?

Fr. Stephen: Well, maybe, yes, she may be going for that. “I came from nothing, and now I’m…” But that wasn’t the case in the ancient world. You didn’t see anybody talking about, “Well, Caesar Augustus came from nowhere and rose up.” Quite the opposite! When you read the accounts of the birth of Caesar Augustus, there’s stars flying out of the heavens and people are prophesying and they went to sacrifice the bull and they opened it up and saw some great sign in the entrails of the bull that the ruler of the world is about to be born. And dah, dah, dah, all this kind of stuff. All this kind of stuff.

And so, the idea was this person from birth was destined for greatness because, remember, the Greeks and the Romans were basically fatalistic in their religion. The gods selected you either for greatness or to destroy you. One of the two. It was out of your hands. It was out of your hands. So the idea was, if this guy if we’re going to say Caesar Augustus is great, we have to say that he was chosen from his birth.

So, you would not find something like this at that time in history. This is the kind of thing that would normally be embarrassing. This would be the kind of thing that you wouldn’t want to admit if you’re trying to say somebody is great, if you’re going to say this guy is ascended into heaven and is now ruling over the entire creation, you wouldn’t start out with, “Oh, yeah, he was born in a food trough for animals.” You would not go there.

This is important, the reason I’m making such a point of this is that, again, some of our friends, like Bart Ehrman and other people who like to appear in documentaries on a certain cable channel, try to draw these parallels between these birth stories of Caesar Augustus and the story of the birth of Jesus. They try to say, “Oh, the Virgin birth is made up to try and make Jesus’s birth look miraculous. It’s like these stories of Caesar Augustus.”

Well… unless you actually look at any details. If you actually look at the details, they couldn’t be farther apart, right? They couldn’t be farther apart. This is the exact opposite of what you would expect if you’re going by the birth of Caesar Augustus, the birth of Tiberius, the birth of Caligula. It’s the exact opposite.

And it’s also the opposite—while I’m on this note, well, this has been discredited by pretty much every scholar in the world. It still shows up a lot on the Internet and on the occasional cable special, this stuff where they try to talk about Jesus birth as being similar to some kind of pagan religion. And this is another one of those cases where—unless you look at any of the details.

So just to give one example, one of the people who’s always on the list is they say, oh, well, there were other pagan gods who had a virgin birth, right? They’ll give you this list of pagan gods, and one that’s always on it is Adonis. So that’s why I’m going to use this as an example.

Adonis. Adonis was sort of a demigod. He was sort of half God, half human, and he was supposedly the most beautiful man who ever lived. That’s why, people don’t say it much anymore. but people used to back when people were more classically educated and read all the Greek classics and stuff, used to refer to a guy who was…. you know Charles Atlas was a modern Adonis. Because he was so muscular and so built.

But so they say, oh, see, Adonis, right. He’s half God, half man. He had a virgin birth. Okay, here’s how the myth of Adonis, how he was supposedly born: Zeus one day was outside of Rome, and how shall we put it politely? Spilled his seed upon the ground. Okay, because this is the kind of thing Greek gods go around doing. Spilled his seed upon the ground. And once it had been spilled upon the ground, a tree grew there and one day a woman came and sat under the tree and an apple from the tree fell into her lap. From the apple falling into her lap, she got pregnant with Zeus’s child and gave birth to Adonis.

See, that’s just like Luke 2, right? Unless you’ve actually read the myth of Adonis and read Luke 2 and then they have nothing in common.

Interlocutor: I have to say that story is nuts.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, right, so that’s just why I won’t belabor it by going through the other gods they mentioned. But I think that’s a typical example, right? That’s a typical example. So when you hear that kind of nonsense, none of it’s true. Nobody thought Mithras was born on December 25, etc. etc, etc. All that stuff is made up.

But to me there’s a problem there. Because not only are you not doing justice to the biblical story, you’re not even doing justice to paganism, right? You think the pagans would get upset when they do that. The pagans would say “That’s nothing like Christianity.”

So there really is no—the story Luke is telling is not based on pagan myths, clearly, it’s not based on the stories of the Emperor’s birth. It’s very different. If it’s based on them in any way, it’s a contrast. It’s showing us the opposite. Jesus is born from peasants. This is the most ignoble birth you could possibly have in the ancient world.

And for St. Luke, remember what we’ve just been reading? The two songs we just heard, that God is coming to visit his people in their “low estate”, right? He’s coming to them in their oppression, in their suffering. He’s entering into that with them, is the idea that St. Luke is trying to bring out, right? God isn’t a God who just stands above them. He’s not sitting on Mount Olympus somewhere. He’s not sitting on a cloud, right. But he’s coming to be with his people in their suffering, in their oppression, in their hardship, in order to save them.

That’s the point St. Luke is making here, by making that juxtaposition with this is God being born in a cave, in an animal food trough.

And based on time, I think we’re going to have to end here.

We sort of did a chapter, if you count part of chapter one and part of chapter two. But obviously, this is the fullest story we get of Jesus birth. So this is a fairly important Gospel passage, So it’s worth spending a little time on.

So thank you, everybody.