It is perhaps the most compelling story ever written — a baby boy is born in a stable to a peasant couple living in a poor nation that for five centuries has been regularly overrun and oppressed by a bloody succession of conquerors from foreign lands.
He grows up in obscurity and yet today, despite never traveling more than a few hundred miles from his home, never going to college, never running a successful corporation, never holding a public office and never leading a powerful army, billions of people around the Earth celebrate his birthday and profess to at least try to live their lives as he did during the rest of the year. Regardless whether his claim to divinity is accepted, it is difficult not to recognize that this Jesus is the most influential person in human history.
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Among the great ironies of the Christmas season, of course, is how little so much of the traditional trappings of the holiday have to do with his life and message.
Most of the activities associated with Christmas did not originate with his followers. The idea of a celebration around the time of the winter solstice was not new when Jesus was born. Those who would later claim to be his followers borrowed from other religions such customs as decorating a tree and hanging mistletoe.
Not even the idea of a miraculous birth to a mother-goddess in the dead of winter would have sounded new or unique to millions of people in the ancient world who would never hear of Jesus.
Perhaps most ironically, scholars contend he probably wasn’t born in December, with the more likely month of his birth being October when Israel celebrated the Festival of Lights.
The “Christianizing” of Christmas and the holiday customs we know today came much later and had far more to do with legitimizing and popularizing the political and religious dominion of those who sought to rule in his name, if not necessarily by his principles.
So how is it that two millennia after he lived and died — with the wars and poverty and suffering that have afflicted mankind across the centuries since — so much of the world still associates the supposed day of his birth as a reason to celebrate?
The answer is perhaps found in the simple message he gave his followers shortly before his death: “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you.” That is a truth capable of blessing all men everywhere, whatever they think of its author. That it came from one of such humble birth so long ago is the enduring miracle of Christmas.
