In 60 AD, having been called "a veritable plague" by his fellow Jews, Paul of Tarsus was dispatched under armed guard from Judea to Rome to be tried, as he demanded, in Caesar's tribunal.
The event that led to it, the cross-examination by the procurator Porcius Festus (recorded in Acts 25, 26), is not usually considered a Christmas story. But, like Herod's massacre of the innocents and the Church's former Feast of Fools (January 1), it is.
It raises some of the same sharp questions about Christianity's place in the world that the Nativity once did but which, arguably, because of excessive sugar-coating, it no longer does. This is the scene in which Paul, chained and, no doubt, in a physical and mental state that reflected his two years' imprisonment, faced Festus and his worldly Jewish friends, Agrippa II, the Herodian king, and his sister Bernice.
Within a few years, Agrippa would be a close friend of Titus, son of the Emperor Vespasian, while Bernice would openly live with Titus as his mistress (having already had three husbands, two of them kings, another the son of an important financier, and surrounded by gossip of an incestuous relationship with Agrippa himself).
They were sophisticated pro-Roman Jews. Their father had been a champion of Hellenism, a Jew with a Roman education. They themselves observed many ritual requirements of Judaism: Agrippa, familiar with Mosaic law and ready to discuss it with rabbinic teachers, insisted on the circumcision of his sister's non-Jewish husband; Bernice, among other things, is known to have fulfilled a Nazirite vow in the Temple.
But theirs was a faith circumscribed by what they took to be natural good sense. She exercised near-complete sexual freedom, perhaps essential for a woman of her status to maintain balance in that politically unstable world, but also driven by apparently genuine affection in her relationship with Titus. Her brother, usually ready to please his Jewish subjects and even to invent 18,000 street-paving jobs to keep workmen in employment after the temple was finished, sided with the bulldozing Romans after the Jewish rebellion of 66 AD. (He later acquainted himself with various historical accounts of the Jewish war, praising that of Josephus for its accuracy.)
These were the two glittering personages that rose with Festus to confer privately after Paul had given an impassioned account of his conversion and faith. In conference, they agreed Paul was harmless and would have set him free had not Paul insisted on going to Rome.
It was a highly patronising judgment. A few moments earlier, face to face with Paul, Agrippa had enquired ironically if Paul was trying to convert him. Festus was more blunt ("Paul, you are raving") and, like those Maltese who blame scruples and neurosis on "too much philosophy", blamed Paul's condition on excessive study.
Paul retorted that he wished everyone was in his condition - except for the chains, he punctiliously added, with a steely glint of humour to match theirs.
There is something archetypal about this scene, given in such detail in The Acts of the Apostles (which gives a rather brisker treatment of Paul's several interrogations at the hands of Felix, predecessor of Festus): the worldly men of affairs, sophisticated and reasonable, raising first their eyebrow at the man of foolishly zealous faith, then their hands, when he wilfully leaves them no alternative but to send him to his death, if necessary.
Certainly, it resonates with some accounts of the early Christian martyrs. Time and again, the trials paint a portrait of humane, civilised officials attempting to make foolish people see sense and go through the motions of taking an oath by the divine power of the emperor. In every case, each generous offer to think it over is turned down flat and the reasonable official has to read out the death sentence.
The Christians were turning down the emperor for a strange power. It gave no visible reward for good behaviour. It simply was their life.
They worshipped a deity's word that had been given to them as flesh. In taking that promise seriously, they found their own flesh becoming that word, themselves born anew, so that to break their end of the promise was to break their own bodies and destroy their own identity.
Today, in our part of the world, Christians are not politically interesting enough to be martyred, alas not even bishops. But the scene with Paul recounting his rebirth to Festus, Agrippa and Bernice remains relevant, perhaps more than ever.
In listening to Paul speak of the birth of Christ in him, of his flesh becoming Word, something is conveyed that a lifetime of over-familiar Nativity traditions has inoculated us against: a shocking claim about personal identity that made Agrippa dodge a question about his faith and Festus cry out that it was madness.
ranierfsadni@europe.com