The crib invites the viewer to get closer, almost to breathe warmly onto the figures. Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

Adolf Hitler, who fancied himself an authority on many other things besides genetics and grand strategy, had a theory about Jesus. Martin Bormann, the diarist of Hitler’s table talk, says that the great leader twice declared that the real father of Jesus was aGallic legionary.

This genealogy made it easier, naturally, for Hitler to make his underlying point: that Jesus was an Aryan fighter against the Jews. It’s unclear to historians whether Hitler considered himself in any sense a religious believer or whether he was simply a cynical manipulator of religious belief.

However, the interesting aspect about Hitler’s theory of Jesus is not the degree to which he was prepared to twist history to suit his purposes. Rather, it’s how his closed mind picked up a truth about the Christian nativity stories, a point sometimes missed today.

The stories themselves, as told by Matthew and Luke, have been pored over, detail by detail, by historians and biblical scholars. The result is that hardly a detail has been left unchallenged in terms of its historical truth.

Christians, from the very beginning, have themselves been puzzled by the different genealogies given by the two evangelists. Both trace the line back to David (Luke goes back even further – to Adam) through Joseph, while implying that Joseph was not the actual father. Matthew is even more peculiar by the conventional standards of piety. His genealogy includes a number of women, each of whom (apart from Mary) makes her biblical reputation thanks to a sexual escapade with a non-Jew.

The scholars have gone beyond the obvious textual curiosities and pointed out other anomalies and coincidences. Luke places Christ’s birth in the final year of the reign of Herod the Great and, simultaneously, the year of a Roman census, which he says required the family to transplant itself from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

But Herod died 10 years before that census, itself established for tax purposes. The census should not have required more than the presence of Joseph and then only to Sepphoris, the provincial capital for the district in which Nazareth was to be found. If Joseph had owned property in Bethlehem (the ancestral city of the house of David), requiring him to go and register himself there, why then was he so desperate for shelter once he arrived?

The scholars have also pointed to similarities between the miraculous divine conception of Jesus and other such stories in Jewish, Greek and Roman lore. The divinity of the Emperor Augustus, under whose reign Jesus was born, was itself claimed on the basis of a serpent who glided up to and entered his mother while she was asleep.

It’s on the basis of details like these that some scholars have dismissed the nativity stories as myth, while pointing out that several details cherished by Christian tradition (such as the presence of an ox and a donkey in the manger) aren’t even mentioned in the gospel.

Stories don’t just have elements; they have a point

On this view, Matthew and Luke are engaging in spin, not history. What they’re up to is no different from what Hitler was doing: making up the past for their own special purposes. They were using conventional political propaganda (the divinity of emperors) and adapting it to assert the power of their lord.

Debunking tradition is always satisfying but, in this case, the satisfaction is short-lived. The cynical reading of the stories runs into a major difficulty.

The gospel writers thought of themselves as doing theology, not history. They were aware of being selective to establish a consistent, pointed narrative. Had their point been to establish Jesus on a similar footing as Caesar, the stories would have been different.

They would have established Christ as showing, like the other offspring of the gods, a worldly power evident from the very beginning. That is, indeed, what is displayed ostentatiously in some of the infancy stories in the apocryphal gospels: a child Jesus who asserts himself at other people’s expense, even maiming them. But Matthew and Luke eschewed such stories, Mark and John ignored the infancy completely and the alternative biographies were considered and rejected by the early Church.

The real problem with simply pointing out the similarities with other miraculous divine births – and stopping there – is the wilful forgetting of what stories are.

Stories don’t just have elements; they have a point, which makes all the difference to what the elements mean.

The story of creation in Genesis has many elements similar to creation stories in the Middle East; but the Hebrews used those same elements to argue against the Babylonian world-view.

The gospel draws on familiar tropes about gods and men to make an argument about the nature of divinity: that its power cannot be understood to be the same as an emperor’s power. It’s not that it’s far greater – divine power to be measured in tetrabytes versus the emperor’s gigabytes. It is a different kind of power altogether.

Hitler, for all his blindness, seems to have recognised this. Perhaps all those years as a failed artist had nonetheless left him sensitive to the story told by the nativity: that divinity is present in the experience of fragility, not in the triumph of the will. Hitler is said to have despised Christianity as a religion for losers.

There is, of course, a different way of viewing the nativity scene. It took a former medieval playboy, who never quite abandoned his excitable ways, to show us how.

When Francis of Assisi popularised the Christmas crib he did so in a particular political and religious context. In politics, lords and masters insisted on distance and awe from their inferiors. In religion, the popular Cathar movement was insisting that the physical world, including human flesh, was irredeemably evil.

The crib upends both attitudes. Whereas political monuments and portraits typically ask the viewer to look up – literally as well as metaphorically – the crib invites the viewer to get closer, almost to breathe warmly onto the figures. It solicits tender affection and soft singing for the motley figures, who seem both uniquely realistic while pointing beyond themselves.

In Francis’ time, the crib was associated with a European rediscovery of the divine worth of everyday life and affections.

It did not stop the Inquisition, of course, just as it did not succeed in stopping the chain of subsequent massacres, jingle all the way to the Holocaust.

However, it remains a living icon of a different sort of power, arising out of empathy, a thermometer for the heart.

ranierfsadni@europe.com