The Adoration of the Shepherds: a popular subject in art

The subject of the Adoration of the Shepherds was extremely popular among painters during the Renaissance, and continued to be so in later centuries. During an age when very few ordinary people could read or write, and in Catholic Europe the services were conducted in Latin, there was a ready market for images that could involve lay people in their religion, and many Bible scenes were painted for display in churches.

The scene portrayed as the Adoration of the Shepherds concerns the passage in St Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 2, in which an unspecified number of shepherds are bidden by an angel to visit Bethlehem and see the Christ child in the manger. Very few details of the scene are provided by Luke, other than that the child would be found “wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger”. This therefore gave the artists plenty of scope for imagination in their portrayal of the scene.

St Matthew tells a different story, namely of “wise men from the east” who pay homage at the house in Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph are living, without any mention of mangers. This event has given rise to a separate strand of Nativity paintings, known as the Adoration of the Magi, in which gifts are presented in quite a formal manner. The “Shepherds” paintings tend to be far more intimate, due to the much lower rung on the social ladder occupied by its subjects.

Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, known as Giorgione (c. 1477-1510) was a Venetian painter who was a pupil of Bellini and a teacher of Titian. His “Adoration” (assumed to date from 1510) shows the holy family receiving the shepherds at the mouth of a dark cave, the main source of light being that shining from the child on the ground on to the faces of Mary and Joseph.  Mary is shown dressed in a resplendent blue and red gown, and the shepherds also seem to be remarkably well-dressed. The background is a typically bucolic scene that owes far more to Italy than Palestine. The message of new light being brought into the world is unmistakable and is one that the painting’s original viewers would have recognised instantly.  The painting is housed in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Antonio Allegri da Correggio (1489-1534) completed his “Adoration” in 1530. It is an interesting mixture of intimacy and formality, in that Mary is shown holding the child in her arms and smiling down at him, while at the same time the “heavenly host” hover in a cloud above the shepherds, one of whom is female. Another notable feature of this painting is that the light shining from the child lights up the faces of the shepherds and Mary, but not that of Joseph, who is a background figure barely distinguishable from the animals of the stable. The painting can be seen at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany.

Nearly  a century later, the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst also used light to great effect in his 1622 “Adoration”. Honthorst had travelled to Italy and been greatly inspired by the use of chiaroscuro (contrasting light and dark) in the works of Caravaggio. In his painting the light emanating from the somewhat large baby illuminates the faces of all the onlookers but throws everything else into shadow. The faces are delicately portrayed in soft hues and one feels the essential humanity of the scene. There is real wonder and adoration here, in a most attractive painting, which can be seen at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany.

There is an “Adoration” at the National Gallery, London, that was once believed to be by the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn. It depicts a softly lit scene inside a large barn, the beams of which stretch away into the darkness. The domesticity of the scene of the holy family is enhanced by the fact that some of the shepherds have brought their families with them, and the viewer can make out a young child being held up to get a better view of the Christ child, and a young boy with his dog. The painting is now reckoned to date from 1646 and to be by an unknown pupil of Rembrandt’s who would have been working in the master’s studio at the same time that Rembrandt was painting his own “Adoration” that can now be seen at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

There are many more depictions of the Adoration of the Shepherds to be seen in galleries across the world, notable examples being by Mantegna, Ghirlandaio, Reni (see illustration above), Poussin and El Greco. An atmosphere of peace and serenity is conveyed by virtually all of them, as well as the sensation that the shepherds represent ordinary, down-to-earth people being brought face to face with a momentous event.

© John Welford

Problems with St Luke's Nativity Census

St Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus centres round a census that apparently took place “when Cyrenius was governor of Syria”. This required Joseph and his heavily pregnant wife to journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem because Joseph “was of the house and lineage of David” and Bethlehem was “the city of David”.

This story has always struck me as being wildly improbable. For a start, the implication of it is that everyone in Palestine at that time knew who they were descended from, going back hundreds of years, and that they also knew where their distant ancestors came from.

All sorts of questions are begged here. How far back were you supposed to go before you hit on the ancestor in question? Above all, what was the point of having to travel to your “ancestral city” – always assuming that it still existed?

There is evidence that censuses were held in various parts of the Roman Empire, but their purpose was, as Luke implies, to enable taxes to be levied. This would be done by officials travelling from place to place to see what people owned, in terms of land, animals, etc, and making their levies appropriately. This sort of census would therefore be very much like the Domesday Book survey made by King William I in England in the 11^th century. There would therefore be absolutely no point in requiring people to move away from the property on which the tax would be due – they needed to be at home when the officials arrived so that all the property could be shown to them and the tax paid in person.

Another huge problem with Luke’s account is that taxation would be levied on heads of households and not their wives. Even if Joseph had to travel to Bethlehem, why on earth would he have had to take Mary with him? Surely she could have been looked after by neighbours while her husband was away? In her condition she could have gone into labour at any time on the journey, and surely Joseph would not have taken that risk.

Another difficulty with Luke’s account is that the dates do not make sense. Luke is clear that the events of the Nativity took place “in the days of Herod, the king of Judea”, and that the census was held “when Cyrenius was governor of Syria”. There is historical evidence that Cyrenius did hold a census in the newly established province of Judea, but this cannot have happened before 6 AD. However, Herod died in 4 BC!

The conclusion has to be that Luke twisted the facts to fit the story that he wanted to tell. That story involved the need to place the birth in Bethlehem but the home of Jesus in Nazareth, for reasons of fulfilling Old Testament prophesies. He may not have known about the historical impossibility of what he was saying, or he may have been relying on his readers not being interested in checking the facts for themselves, even if they had the ability to do so.

The difficulty for modern readers is that we tend to look for historical accuracy whereas that was not always the purpose of ancient writers. Luke may not have intended to deceive, and he probably saw nothing untoward in telling the story in the way that he did. From his point of view he was writing not so much a history as a historical novel, and the inaccuracies that it contained did absolutely nothing to invalidate the message that it contained. After all, if the story could include messenger angels and the “heavenly host” singing to startled shepherds, what did a few historical inventions matter?

© John Welford

The legend of the Three Wise Men

6^th January is the Feast of the Epiphany and is traditionally the date on which the “wise men from the East” in St Matthew’s Gospel reached Bethlehem and offered their gifts of “gold, frankincense and myrrh” to the infant Jesus. It is also the date on which all Christmas decorations must be taken down if you haven’t done so already!

Did the Three Wise Men ever exist?

This is a story that has grown in the telling over the centuries. For one thing, it is only because there were three gifts that there has always been reference to three givers – Matthew says nothing about this. The wise men have also been promoted to kings in many versions of the story, although the justification for this seems to come from references in the Book of Psalms to kings bearing gifts.

It is easy to imagine how the sketchy mentions by Matthew (and no-one else) might have been given more substantial form in later years. When the story was read in a 2^nd-century Christian gathering, as everyone hid in the catacombs for fear of being discovered by the Romans, a child might have asked “What were their names?” and so names were suggested . Another might have asked “What did they look like?” and an artist among the adults would have been inspired to paint them on the walls, using a measure of artistic licence.

As a result, the Christian tradition was that the three wise men were named Balthasar, Caspar and Melchior, and they were of different ages - young, middle-aged and elderly. One of them (Balthasar) was drawn as a black man. Traditions, once established, are hard to break, and so artists all down the centuries have followed the same conventions.

Cologne Cathedral and the Three Wise Men

According to tradition, the bones of the three wise men were preserved and eventually found their way to Germany. A special shrine was constructed and this became the central feature of the new Cologne Cathedral, which was founded in 1248, nearly 50 years after the bones had reached the city.

In 1864 the shrine was opened and the bones of three men were found to be inside, together with a coin dating from the time of the shrine’s construction. Strange to tell, the ages of the bones showed that the men had died at different ages, one being quite young, one being middle-aged and the third being elderly. This would fit the legend that the wise men became Christians and were martyred, presumably at the same time.

However, the huge medieval appetite for relics and physical links to the Bible stories gives credence to the notion that somebody made a quick buck by persuading the Church that three particular sets of bones (possibly dug up from a graveyard) were those of the three wise men. It would not have been the first nor the last time that a conman made a fortune from the gullibility of simple-minded people.

The three wise men, who have been accorded the status of saints by the Roman Catholic Church, may therefore never have existed or, if they did, their personal details owe a lot more to fiction than to fact. But it’s a good story, and where would the traditional school nativity play be without its three kings?

© John Welford

Should the Bible be continued?

What is the Bible? A collection of books, divided into two “Testaments” that describe the workings of God in the World, before and after the coming of Christ. But these books are not the only ones ever written about which this could be said. Even at the time of the “modern” Bible’s creation, in the 4^th century AD, there were many books that fought for a place in the canon. Some were accepted, others rejected outright, and yet more were given a shadowy acceptance as the “Apocrypha”, given respect by some branches of Christianity but not others.

When we look at the books that did gain admission, we find some strange bedfellows. In the Old Testament, for example, we have Esther and the Song of Solomon, the first of which is a thoroughly good story involving an assassination plot and the unmasking of a villain, but in which the name of Jehovah is not mentioned once.  As for the latter, it is not far short of pornography!

However, if these books were intended to show God at work, in many and various ways, why did we stop the process of Bible-building 1700 years ago? Have there been no texts written in more recent centuries that perform exactly the same function? Would it not benefit today’s Church-goers to hear words of witnesss read to them that relate more to today’s world?

I would like to suggest the Bible be expanded in this way, and the example of Wikipedia, by which individuals can make their own contributions to a body of knowledge, is an interesting one to follow. Indeed, a closer examination of some of the books of the Bible shows that they were given the "Wikipedia" treatment thousands of years ago. Isaiah and Jeremiah, for instance, are both mashups of texts, with later editors adding bits in as and when they saw fit.

So Yes, why not? A Bible that took account of the lives lived and knowledge gained over the centuries since the canon was established would be a better "testament" to the work of God in the world today than the set of ancient texts on their own. These days we understand that mental illness is not the work of “devils” and that homosexuality is a perfectly natural occurrence, and a recognition of these facts in our Bible might lead to greater tolerance on the part of religious people. 

I can foresee problems, however.  The very intolerance caused, in part, by rigid interpretations of scripture, has led to splits in the Church that make it hard to imagine that agreement on which testaments to add to the canon will be at all easy to reach. However, the very procedure of debating the canon afresh might have the effect of making people examine their beliefs in greater depth and reaching new agreements with their fellow Christians, which surely would not be a bad thing.

© John Welford

Was Jesus really born in Bethlehem?

“Everybody knows” that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. But how likely is that? My contention is that the Gospel writers made up stories that do not stand up to scrutiny.

Where was Jesus born?

The two gospel writers who gave an account of the birth of Jesus, namely Matthew and Luke, had a problem. This was that Jesus came from Galilee and was therefore a northerner as far as the Jews of Jerusalem were concerned. The distance from his home village of Nazareth to Jerusalem was more than 60 miles, which might not sound like much to a modern car-driving person, but it would have involved several days of travelling to someone on foot or riding a donkey.

The problem was that the Messiah was, according to accepted prophesies, supposed to be born in Bethlehem, the “city of David”, which is about six miles from Jerusalem. How could Jesus be born in Bethlehem but also be a Galilean?

Squaring the circle

Matthew and Luke both came up with ingenious solutions. According to Matthew, Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, but were warned that the child’s life was in danger. They therefore fled firstly to Egypt and then to Nazareth, which was presumably considered far enough from Jerusalem to be safe.

Joseph would have had to abandon his home and business in Bethlehem and start all over again in a strange place where he would have been thought of as a foreigner.

Luke tried a different approach, which was to assume that Joseph and Mary were residents of Nazareth who were forced to travel to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born. They did not return to Nazareth immediately but waited until Mary had been “purified” and then took the child to the Temple in Jerusalem before setting off for home.

In order to achieve these scenarios both gospel writers had to devise a complicated series of events, each of which is open to question.

       

It is surely beyond doubt that the two stories cannot both have been true, not least because one would have to ask why each writer had not thought fit to give the details that the other thought were essential. Apart from that, Joseph and Mary cannot have started both from Nazareth and from Bethlehem.

The question then arises – if one of the stories must be wrong, why does that not apply to both stories? There is no reason to believe either account to be more reliable than the other, so surely the logical response is to discount both of them.

Why did the Gospel writers tell different stories?

One fact that is surely true is that both Matthew and Luke were trying to tell a story that fulfilled prophecies and therefore pointed out the significant features of the birth of Jesus. The literal truth of what happened did not matter, so the story could be allowed to develop in whatever way seemed expedient for achieving the prime purpose of the narrative.

It must also be remembered that neither gospel writer was an eyewitness of the Nativity events and must therefore either have got their facts from the people who were present at the time, were repeating stories passed by word of mouth - possibly changing by "Chinese whispers" through many tellings, or made them up. Tradition has it that Joseph died before Jesus reached adulthood, which only leaves Mary as a possible witness. Also according to tradition, Luke got his facts from Peter. So, if Mary told Matthew and Peter what happened, why did she tell them two completely different stories?

Surely it is far more likely that Matthew and Luke made up stories to suit their purposes, and the truth of what happened had very little to do with it.

And was Jesus born in Bethlehem, as opposed to Nazareth? Given the hoops that the gospel writers jumped through to reach their conclusion, it does seem more than a little unlikely.

© John Welford

Could Abraham have had camels?

The Old Testament Book of Genesis, Chapter 12, tells the story of the calling of Abram, who would later be called Abraham. He is generally reputed to have been the founder of the Jewish Nation. In verse 16 mention is made of his possessions: 

“… and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels.”

This is one of 22 mentions of camels in the Book of Genesis. However, a question arises as to whether these early references to camels in the region of the eastern Mediterranean can stand up to scrutiny.

That is because of a discovery made in 2014 in what had been ancient copper mines between the Dead and Red Seas. Camel bones were found at a particular level that could easily be dated, due to the use of radiocarbon techniques. No camel bones were found at any level deeper than the one in question.

What this meant was that the domestication of camels in the region could not have happened prior to the 9^th century BC. That would have been far too late for Abraham, who was supposed to have lived at around 2000 BC.

This dating accords with the generally held view that the Book of Genesis was written in around the 6^th century BC, when there were probably lots of camels in the region. The writers would have had no reason to doubt that there had been camels there back in Abraham’s day.

But of course this view does not go down well with those people who hold that the Bible cannot be wrong in any respect. It must therefore be the archaeologists and radiocarbon daters who are in error!

© John Welford

The Star of Bethlehem

Many Christmas crib scenes show the Holy Family surrounded by oxen, asses, shepherds and kings, with the Star of Bethlehem shining down from above. The star is referenced in the account of the Nativity given in Matthew’s gospel, according to which “wise men from the east” had seen the star that announced the birth of the new “King of the Jews” and made their way to Jerusalem to ask for further directions.

The New Testament gives two accounts of the Nativity, in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and they are very different. In fact, there are hardly any points of agreement between them! Many efforts have been made to reconcile the two accounts, but the attempts often seem extremely forced and lacking in credibility.

So either Matthew or Luke must be wrong, or perhaps both are – after all, the authors of the works (whoever they were, and they were not called either Matthew or Luke!) were not eye witnesses and their prime concern seems to have been to tell stories that fitted supposed ancient prophecies.

However, there are features of the stories that might just have had a basis in reality, although this is more probable in the case of “Matthew” than of “Luke”. One of these features is the Star of Bethlehem.

It has been thought that references to a star being followed suggest a comet, and various suggestions have been made as to which comet this might have been. However, although a comet has a tail that might suggest an arrow pointing in a certain direction, it would not have “stood over the place where the young child was”, which is claimed in Matthew 2:9. 

This is also the case with any other sort of astronomical event, such as a planetary conjunction or a supernova, so that part of the account can be easily dismissed as fiction.

A supernova is probably the best candidate for being the star, and there is evidence that there was such an event at about the right time. Chinese astronomers during the Han Dynasty had recorded the sudden appearance of a bright star that lasted for several weeks until it faded from view.

A supernova is the explosion of a star that is considerably larger than our own Sun. If one were to explode relatively close to our solar system, then it would outshine everything else in the night sky and even be visible during daylight hours, even to the naked eye.

If a supernova had been observed in China, then it would certainly have been seen in Palestine. Just such an event was awaited by scholars who knew, from the Book of Numbers (24:17), that “there shall come a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth”. 

Not many miles to the east of Jerusalem is the Dead Sea, on the shores of which lived a Jewish sect known as the Essenes. These were zealots who were desperately awaiting the arrival of the Messiah who would free the Jewish lands from the yoke of oppression under the Roman Empire. A supernova explosion was all they needed to get extremely excited about the prospect of their hopes being fulfilled.

So were the wise men Essene zealots from not very far away? One thing to remember is that for “wise men” to be interested in the birth of a Messiah, they must have been Jewish – the idea that oriental “magi” would have made a long journey to the west to bring “gold, frankincense and myrrh” does sound extremely fanciful. 

There are certainly elements of Matthew’s Nativity account that do not hang together, but the Star of Bethlehem may be something that the author of the gospel got right.

© John Welford