Connections between the adult Jesus and the baby in the manger aren’t easy to make. At first glance, the gospels don’t help much; whatever the gospel writers had in mind, producing complete biographies of Jesus wasn’t it. Mark omits Christmas altogether, and starts with Jesus getting baptized and launching his career. John has a short […]

By now, the Three Kings are well on their way to Bethlehem, and the Christmas season is drawing to a close. But the Three Kings (actually, ‘wise men’ according to Matthew’s gospel) aren’t just bringing their famous three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. They bring with them another set of questions that we have […]

Back in the beginning of the Christmas season, I wrote about the way the gospel Christmas narratives “roll the credits” by giving genealogical tables that link Jesus to Jewish history. In contemplating Christmas, we should never forget that the first Christmas was first and foremost a Jewish event. Mary, Joseph, the innkeeper, the shepherds, the […]

Back in the beginning of the Christmas season, I wrote about the way the gospel Christmas narratives “roll the credits” by giving genealogical tables that link Jesus to Jewish history. In contemplating Christmas, we should never forget that the first Christmas was first and foremost a Jewish event. Mary, Joseph, the innkeeper, the shepherds, the […]

The Blizzard of 2010 has crippled the glamorous borough of Queens; thankfully, I was visiting family outside the city when the snow fell and have now retreated to my rural retreat in the rolling Dutchess County hunt country.  There is plenty of snow up here, but we haven’t had to cope with the horrors the […]

Now it gets tough. That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so cutely in the manger is the biggest trouble maker in world history, and the shocking claims that Christianity makes about who he is and what he means divide Christians not only from atheists and agnostics, but also splits Christians off from […]

Yesterday I blogged about how theists and atheists are the not all that different from each other; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical and even spiritual meaning in life. Human life amounts to more than eating and scratching our various itches, and […]

Five go-old rings!Happy fifth day of Christmas, and welcome back to the 2010 Yule Blog, where we aim to keep the holiday fires burning right up through Twelfth Night on January 6.Yesterday King Herod’s massacre of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two shocked us out of the idea that Christmas is basically […]

So: they ‘wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.’  What is that supposed to be about?Manger is the French word meaning “to eat”; a manger is a place where you put hay and similar things for the animals in a barn to eat. The swaddling clothes were used to wrap up […]

It is not quite the most controversial verse in the Bible, but Luke 1:35 comes close. Mary has just replied to the angel Gabriel’s statement that she will be the mother of the Messiah with a question of her own: “How shall this be,” she says in the words of the King James Version, “seeing […]