I’d like to talk to you about Jesus today.
So I went to midnight mass this Christmas and every time the priest started talking about the manger and Jesus and the shepherds and mostly the manger, I could not get Betsy’s voice out of my head and her talk about Jesus lol
On my best days, I’m completely agnostic, and on my worst I’m a bit of a Catholic basher, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures fascinating. And as it’s Christmastime, I thought I’d actually talk a little about what I know about the big J.C. We all know the story, but it’s really hard for people to get what’s going on nowadays because things are so different. I’m going to try to make a little chunks of the story something entertaining, and give you a glimpse at what I do when reading the Bible in an academic setting (which is incomprehensible for a lot of people apparently). Ready? Let’s get our Bible on! (Let’s use Luke ch. 2; he’s my favfav of the gospel writers. And let’s use the New King James Version translation; another favfav; read it here).
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.
The second sentence is unimportant except for actually telling the audience when this event is going on. It is quite literally like us saying “Well, it happened the same year that Steve Jobs died.” And the notion of registration and censuses are pretty different from our idea of it too. They’re not just counting people, they’re ranking people, specifically Romans, according to their monetary wealth and status; huge deal! Romans LOVED their rankings and keeping shit organized. They were pretty OCD about it. The Jews in Palestine at this time could not care less about this event, but because they were under an empire they just had to do what they were told. It’s as pointless as Ron Swanson winning the Woman of the Year Award… yeah, it’s that pointless! (This is just set-up to establish Jesus as a descendant of David, which is a little superfluous as Luke’s main audience were Greeks, rather than Jews; which is part of why Luke’s my favorite. He’s just writing a story for the Greeks, accuracy be damned!). Moving on;
