NATIVITY LIE

Your Christmas Nativity Scene Is a Lie
There probably weren’t three kings. And Jesus ( Yeshua) wasn't blonde.
JONATHAN MERRITT- DEC 13, 2015

 A Bible passage describes how Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem to take part in the mandated census, but there “was no room for them in the inn.” But don’t let the English translation fool you: The word “inn” doesn’t refer to some kind of first-century hotel, but rather something like a guest room for visitors. The Bible does say that Jesus was laid in a manger, and in reality, in poorer places like Bethlehem, animals were brought into the lower level of homes at night to keep them safe from bandits.

So the most likely scenario is that Jesus was born in the home of relatives somewhere on the moss-less lower level of the house where animals were often kept. Admittedly, it makes for a less compelling scene than the one most nativities capture. There’s an appealing and fitting degree of vulnerability to these popular images: the holy family, huddled around a newborn, exposed to the elements, and illuminated only by the light of a bright star. The idyllic visuals may explain why this erroneous detail stuck, and was further cemented in the cultural consciousness by the lyrics of countless Christmas carols.

Speaking of which—people often sing that the “cattle were lowing” when Jesus was born. The lyric comes  from “Away in a Manger,” a popular carol first published in the late-19th century that propagates many cultural Christmas myths, including the idea that animals surrounded Jesus at his birth. But this is a detail added by a songwriter, not a scripture writer. Many nativities assume that sheep came with the shepherds and the wise men rode on camels, though this is conjecture. Even Pope Benedict XVI admitted, “In the gospels there is no mention of animals,” in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives. If animals were present, there’s no way of knowing which kinds.

The most common animal in most nativities is a donkey, which is based on the popular image of the virgin Mary riding the back of the beast and being led solely by her husband Joseph. Yet the Bible doesn’t say which mode of transportation they used. Scholars think Mary may have ridden a donkey due to her and Joseph’s meager economic means, but it’s also likely that they traveled in a caravan, which was common and much safer than traveling alone. Jesus being born into nature alongside God’s other creatures promotes a vision of harmony among all living things—but it’s possible there were no animals present at all.

The human characters in nativity sets pose even more problems than the animals. Many nativities feature a trinity of monarchs dressed in silk robes, elaborate turbans, and gaudy gold jewelry. But the Bible says only that “magi from the east” followed a strange star to visit the infant child. The word “magi” or “wisemen” originally referred to a class of priests, probably from Persia. They were often students of astrology, which accounts for why they noticed a galactic anomaly to begin with. If Jesus’s visitors had been royalty, the Gospel writers would likely have included such a detail. Instead, Renaissance artworks depicting king-like figures at Jesus’s birth likely contributed to this misrepresentation.

It’s also unclear how many magi there were. The Bible says these wisemen brought three gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh—which may have led to the idea that there were three. (Certainly, the beautiful Christmas hymn “We Three Kings” has helped circulate the idea.) Christian tradition has even given these “three kings” names: Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthasar, but all of this is conjecture. The endurance of the image throughout history may stem, again, from its poignancy. The sight of earthly kings bowing to the infant “king of the universe” is a memorable, if an ahistorical, one.
But perhaps the most detrimental detail perpetuated by most of these scenes is the complexion of the human characters in most Western nativities. The holy family is usually depicted with porcelain white skin and other Anglo-Saxon features like piercing blue eyes or rosy cheeks. It’s certainly the case for nativity sets sold at Sears.com, while Pottery Barn Kids’s nativity depicts a white Mary with a gorgeously crimped blonde hairdo. And Sam’s Club apparently sees whiteness as a selling point—their “14-piece Caucasian Nativity Scene” can be yours for $79.71. Not exactly what Irving Berlin meant by “dreaming of a white Christmas.”

Though Renaissance depictions of Jesus often cast him in a European light, white images of Jesus weren’t popularized in the United States until the mid-19th century, according to Edward Blum and Paul Harvey in The Color of Christ. “The transformation of Jesus from light to white in the young United States made him, on one hand, a cultural icon of white power,” Blum and Harvey note. While the previous problems with popular nativities are largely innocuous flourishes amassed over centuries, this one is more serious. It inadvertently reinforces the damaging cultural framework where lightness is correlated with purity and righteousness, and darkness is linked to sin and evil.
The Bible is actually silent on the matter of Jesus’s complexion (and the rest of the holy family’s), and the absence of these details is advantageous for the Christian faith. Some scholars have posited that “the silence of the Scriptures on the issue of Jesus’s skin color is critical to Christianity’s broad appeal with people of various ethnicities.” Still, historians do agree that Jesus was of Middle Eastern descent, which means he almost certainly had dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes.

All cultural traditions shift over time—especially those whose origins date back millennia. So it’s understandable that the standard nativity scene today has some dubious connections with the moment it aims to capture. Yes, the gist of the scene is all there. But in replicating these moments mindlessly year after year, there’s a risk in accepting subtle inaccuracies and convenient assumptions as historical fact. When it comes to donkeys or stables, the stakes seem fairly low. But in roundly dismissing these lesser flaws, it’s easier for believers and nonbelievers alike to also ignore the flawed rewriting of Jesus’s background. Which is to say rituals both big and small, religious or otherwise, deserve scrutiny—and that applies to more than just cats, lobsters, or zombies.
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JONATHAN MERRITT is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words are Vanishing – And How We Can Revive Them.

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8 Things Traditional Nativity Scenes Get Wrong About What It’s Like To Give Birth In A Barn
-by Lifestyle

1. Three words: Way more shit.
If a Nativity scene is going to accurately reflect what a barn birth is all about, it’s going to have to go heavy on the fake shit. Cow pies, rat turds, sheep pies, cat feces…Anyone who’s actually been there can tell you, there’s shit everywhere in a real-world barn birth, and it’s the most obvious detail that Nativity scenes miss.

2. There should be rabbit carcasses scattered around the Virgin Mary to keep the feral cats from trying to make off with the placenta.
The skinned rabbit carcasses you need to spread around to distract nasty, mangy cats from playing umbilical-cord tug-of-war with the mother are another key detail of real-life barn births that is sadly lacking in Nativity scenes. A more honest depiction would show a circle of tainted rabbit carcasses around the Virgin Mary and a group of cats mange-stricken with bald spots and missing ears hissing at one another while dragging the carcasses off to the outhouse to devour them.

3. The sheep should be gazing lovingly at all the hay, not the newborn baby Jesus.
Hate to burst your bubble, but sheep don’t give two shits about babies. They care about one thing, and one thing only, and that thing is hay. And there’s plenty of hay in a barn. Yet in every Nativity scene you see the sheep are all focused on the Christ child like he’s some sort of big pile of hay. Yeah, no. But nice try.


4. You’ve got to cover the baby Jesus with an umbrella so that barn pigeons don’t shit all over him.
In a real barn birth, if you don’t have that baby covered with an umbrella or a piece of plywood or something, it’s going to be covered in pigeon shit in about, oh, three seconds. No matter how many pigeons you shoot with a pellet rifle in preparation for the birth, there are always going to be enough of the birds left to coat that baby with a layer of shit before it’s even fully crowned.

5. In a real barn birth, the cows have to be put down with a bolt gun so they don’t trample the mother during labor.
This is just one of the many brutal aspects of farm life that Nativity scenes choose to conveniently ignore in their cleaned-up, Disneyland version of what it’s like to give birth in a barn. A typical Holstein cow weighs in at 1,300 pounds, and that’s 1,300 pounds you don’t wan’t anywhere near you when you’re laying on a cold barn floor in December trying to push out a baby and get the hell out of there. Putting the cow down with a bolt gun is as fast and humane of a way as any, but you still won’t be seeing Nativity scenes with piles of cows with crushed foreheads any time soon.

6. The angels would get all wrapped up in the milking equipment when they fly in.
A working barn has all sorts of tubing strung everywhere to transport the milk from the cows to the milk tank, and it doesn’t exactly make for easy flying. Any angels visiting a Christ child in a barn would be completely tangled up in a mess of milk-spraying tubes pretty much immediately.

7. If the barn isn’t properly limed, expect that kid to last three days, tops, before Barn Brain sets in.
A barn needs to be properly disinfected with a fresh dusting of barn lime, or that kid’s going to catch Barn Brain almost immediately. Nativity scenes never show a thick white layer of powdered lime covering every exposed surface in the entire barn, yet you don’t see many depictions of Christ with the enormous, bright-blue head indicative of a newborn stricken with Barn Brain. He must have avoided Barn Brain by a sheer miracle. Sure.


8. The closest thing to a “wise man” you can expect to show up is your neighbor’s dim son wandering into the barn to try to sell the laboring mother raccoon pelts.
There aren’t many folks just wandering around in the country in December sticking their noses into other people’s barns, save chicken thieves and your neighbors’ dim sons, neither of which are exactly “wise.” Where Nativity scenes got the idea that camel-riding shepherds randomly drop by to present your baby gifts after you give birth in a barn is a complete mystery. A Nativity scene including a statue of a dim-looking boy trying to sell the Virgin Mary coon pelts would be a much more realistic depiction of a barn birth than the statues of wise men dropping off Frankincense and myrrh. Once you see that, it gets pretty hard to suspend your disbelief.