Mary and Joseph must have been great parents. Jesus’ followers were so impressed by his religious personality that they believed he was anointed by God ( Christos means “anointed” in Greek). Because Jesus became such a religious hero, the Nativity narratives in the Gospels, written long after his death, adopted mythic themes associated with the birth of special figures. Yet modern Jews believe that the birth of Jesus was not the birth of Christianity, a religion that did not emerge until after his death. The first Christians were Jews, and thought of themselves as Jews; it is therefore impossible to understand Christianity without tracing its Judaic roots.
This is not just interfaith boilerplate; it is responsible history. Rather than a “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity with Jesus’ emergence, scholars now call the first three centuries the era in which both faiths came to take on shapes we would recognize–they were, in these years, “the ways that never parted,” as scholar Annette Yoshiko Reed describes it.
Still, seeing the two belief structures with such equanimity hasn’t always been the ascendant view. According to Christian supersessionism, Judaism lost its legitimacy with the Jews’ rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. Yet Judaism is not just the prologue to a Christianity that renders it obsolete. For Jews, Christianity was a theological colonizer, usurping Judaism’s Scriptures and religious ideas. The 19th-century German Protestant theologian Gustav Volkmar wrote that “Christianity was born of the virgin womb of the God of Judaism.” By suggesting that God was a virgin until birthing Christianity, Volkmar implied that Judaism was not born of God; Christianity was God’s first and only offspring.
It’s not hard to see why this thesis could take hold: the story of the birth of Jesus stands in striking contrast to the story of the birth of the Jews as a people. The Nativity narrative is a relatively simple story of a family that resonates easily. Christianity begins on a smaller scale with the story of a mother, a father and their baby. There are dark touches–the slaughter of the innocents and the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt–but the sweeter scenes of crèches and angels and adoring parents hold a firmer place in the popular imagination.
The nativity saga of the Jews, however, is more complex, more demanding, broader . It is about all of us, and the work we must take on, rather than the story of the birth of a Messiah who would take the sins of the world on himself. From our birth in Exodus, we learn that God did not simply call us into being, but continually has expectations of us. We were brought into being as a people with a collective conscience. Thousands flee from slavery in Egypt, pass through the parted waters of the sea, are nourished by God’s manna and receive the Torah. And from generation to generation, the journey goes on as we await our Messiah.
From the story of the nativity of the Jews, we learn that life is inherently arduous but also sacred; our task is to repair and perfect God’s creation. What challenges do Christians undertake from the Gospels’ Nativity stories? Perhaps Christian faith in Jesus will be understood as the faith of Jesus, so the Jewish values of education and social responsibility that his parents inculcated in him will be renewed for Christians in their celebration of his birth.
