AN UN-FACTUAL CHRISTMAS LESSON

At the risk of being considered a Scrooge, I am submitting this post.

Most Christians can almost recite all the details of Luke's nativity story by heart. Also, we are generally well aware of some of the legendary details that have been tacked on to the Christmas story as presented in the Gospels. These include such things as Jesus' birth happening at midnight and the wise men arriving soon after the birth. But recently, I got a real surprise when I became aware of a brand new slant on Luke 2:1-20 filled with details that I had never heard before in my literally 70-plus years of attending church. At first I was really intrigued to learn more, but then I started to become a little dubious the more I considered it. My further investigations convinced me that the author must have gotten most of his details from some rather unreliable sources. So as a cautionary tale showing that you need to be well-grounded in Scripture and not accept new teachings without checking them out at the source, here are some of the main points he presented as facts:

    A. Only the sheep raised in the area of Bethlehem were considered acceptable for sacrifice in the Temple.

    B. Thus, the shepherds that were present in Luke's story were actually called shepherd-priests.

    C. Each first-born lamb was taken soon after birth and swaddled in strips of cloth and placed in a manger to prevent it from moving around and blemishing itself.

    D. The lamb would then remain in the manger until a priest could arrive and inspect it to see if it had any blemishes that would render it unsuitable for sacrifice.

My first suspicions were aroused when I considered that since this formed such a perfect parallel with Christ's life and death, why hadn't more pastors used it as a sermon illustration before? As they say, “If something appears to be too good to be true, chances are that it is.”

Secondly, I considered the reasonableness of the four statements above:

    A. If only sheep raised in Bethlehem were considered acceptable sacrifices, how could Israelites outside of Bethlehem present the first-born of their own flocks as required?

    B. The term “priest” was a rather specific term not even used for the Levites who served in the temple. How in the world would it have been applied to a class of people like shepherds, who were widely considered to be not only among the “simple” (Geldenhuys), “poor” (Craddock), “lowly and ordinary” (Marshall), but also considered to be basically dishonest (Ellis and many others)? Actually, these descriptions fit perfectly the sort of people that Luke goes out of his way to include in his account of Jesus' life. The only motive I can think of for some well-meaning person turning the humble shepherds into noble priests is to eliminate the suspicion that a shepherd's witness would not be considered unreliable.

    C. Anyone who has ever watched a zoo or vet show on TV (and my wife and I are addicted to them) will know that it is vital that newborn herd animals be able to get up and walk by themselves and nurse within the first 24 hours of birth or they will either soon die or be extremely sickly. So to immediately wrap them up to “keep them safe” is a sure recipe for death. Of course, that wouldn't be a problem if they were to be sacrificed within a day or two (more of that below). The other illogical point is that mangers were usually made of stone (there is actually a picture of one in the Winter 2021 edition of Biblical Archaeology Review magazine), and there was far more likelihood of a lamb injuring itself by thrashing its head back and forth in the manger than if it were just left on the straw or hay where it was born.

    D. In respect to my comment above, I wondered how soon a priest could actually visit all the birthing places in the region of Bethlehem. In addition, I couldn't remember whether the biblical laws stated that it was really necessary for the first-born to be unblemished for sacrifice. Finally, as far as I knew, sacrificial animals for the temple were almost always examined in the temple environs, not out on the field.

Then I scrolled through the internet, where I readily came across a number of sites, Catholic and a range of Protestant sources, that repeated the same basic scenario described above. But none of them gave any supporting evidence at all. So I turned to some more reputable sources for a change. The vast majority of the roughly twenty scholarly books I consulted didn't mention even one of the four points above. To me, this was at least some powerful negative evidence that something was not quite right. But there were two or three commentaries that gave hints as to where the first two contentions above might have originally come from.

Items A and B: It apparently all stemmed from a misunderstanding of a Jewish writing called Mishnah Shekalim (section 7:4) dating from approximately 200-225 years after the birth of Christ. The text of this verse can be found on a Jewish internet site called Sefaria, and the portion of interest refers to sacrificial “beasts which are found in Jerusalem as far as Migdal Eder and within the same distance in any direction.” Concerning this relatively late document, Raymond Brown in his exhaustive study The Birth of the Messiah states that “we are told that animals found between Jerusalem and Migdal Eder were used for Temple sacrifice, and this tradition has been invoked as support for the idea that the Lucan shepherds in the region near Bethlehem were especially sacred shepherds. I see no hint of that...Shekelim may be speaking of strays (perhaps escaped from the Temple pens) rather than of regular flocks.”
Secondly, where exactly is this town of Migdal Eder (translated as Tower of the Flock) located? It turns out that no one really knows for sure, but here are some educated surmises:

Fitzmyer in his massive two-volume commentary on Luke's Gospel says, “Gen 35:21 makes it clear that Migdal Eder is at some distance from Bethlehem...and Mic 4:8 uses it as a parallel name for Zion / Jerusalem.” Wenham adds that later traditions place this town either 3 miles SE or one-and-a-half miles east of Bethlehem. Since Bethlehem was located 5 miles south of Jerusalem, application of the Shekalim document would mean that these “special” animals had to be chosen from either those in the immediate area of Jerusalem (which would exclude all those near Bethlehem) or from any area located within about a 6-8 mile radius from Jerusalem (which would include a large portion of all Judea, not just Bethlehem).

So where did we get the huge leap of logic between the above data and the determination of Bethlehem as the only place from which animal sacrifices could be obtained? Chad Bird, one of the more responsible Bible commentators posting on the internet, lays the responsibility at the feet of Alfred Edersheim in the classic 1883 study The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah.

Item C: Next, what about the necessity of keeping the lamb swaddled in a cradle so that it wouldn't be blemished before being part of a First-Fruit Sacrifice? John Durham, in his commentary on Exodus, explains that “the firstborn animals were to be given on the eighth day, that is, only when the animal could safely be taken from its mother.” See Exodus 22:29-30. A swaddled lamb kept in a manger would have been long dead by that time.

Chad Bird calls this “the most audacious of the claims.” He goes on to say, “What is the evidence for this claim? There is none. Zero...What we have is the fictional creation of someone's mind.”

But, one might ask, couldn't the newborn lamb have been examined soon after birth by a priest for blemishes and then released to nurse for the eight days before being taken to the temple? The answer is “no,” since, as R.E. Reid explains in his helpful summary of temple sacrifice practices found in Dictionary of New Testament Background, lambs that needed to be blemish-free were to be examined by the priest in the temple the night before being sacrificed. The reason for this practice was that animals brought in from outside Jerusalem could be disqualified by even a small injury on the way there.

Item D: This brings up the larger issue as to whether first-born animal sacrifices even had to be blemish-free in the first place. Again, Reid in his summary of biblical injunctions regarding temple sacrifices shows that the only blemish-free sacrifices were those in the Morning and Evening Burnt sacrifices, Sabbath sacrifice, and Passover sacrifice. And in each of these cases, it was stipulated that a one-year old lamb was to be used, not a newborn one. When it comes to the regulations regarding the First-Fruit sacrifices (found in Exodus 22:29-30; 23:16,19; 34:22; and Numbers 18:12-19), there is no mention of the necessity for the animal to be free from blemishes. So the basic scenario that is circulating freely on the internet, and no doubt finding its way into numerous Christmas messages, is false from start to finish.

But does all of the above erase the picture of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God? Not at all. That identification is firmly established in NT passages such as I Corinthians 5:7; I Peter 1:19; and Revelation 5:9-13. The first of these scriptures makes it clear that Jesus' death was equivalent to the Passover sacrifice, not the First-Fruit sacrifice. In full keeping with that identification, Peter calls him free of defect and blemish, and the book of Revelation calls him “worthy.” These are apt descriptions of the OT Passover sacrifice, not the First-Fruits offerings at all. So commentators and preachers should save any Christ-lamb parallels for Easter, not bring them up at Christmas time.