★★★

I’m a Bell fan, but I confess this wasn’t one of my favorites. If we’re gonna talk about this stuff, well, there are lots of interesting passages in the Bible about sex, sexuality, and the sexes. But Bell ignores all the interesting discussion, and zeroes in on two basic themes:

1. Sex is a reality of life. We’re not animals and we’re not angels. (I’d argue that we’re both, but I’ll save that for another time). The Bible says we’re higher than the animals, and we’re higher than the angels! Sex should not degenerate into animalistic urges, but neither should we pretend we’re sexless beings like angels. It’s a special, if confusing, gift.

2. But don’t do it until you’re ready for marriage. In the Bible, sex was the final, binding act of a marriage. It is not the ceremony that joins two people together forever, it is the carnal act, and this is God’s way.

So Solomon sat on the throne of his father David, and his rule was firmly established. 

//Solomon is recognized in the Bible as the richest, wisest king ever, securing the blessing of God. But he hardly endeared himself to his people, with the excessive slavery and taxation required to build his empire. Did God’s blessing go to Solomon’s head, so that in time he became greedy?

Often, Solomon is portrayed as one who strayed in the latter part of his life, but one wonders how much the rest of his story is politically contrived. Certainly, his beginning exceeds his ending in wickedness.

So King Solomon gave orders to Benaiah son of Jehoiada, and he struck down Adonijah and he died.—verse 25

To the priest Abiathar, Solomon said he deserved death, but because of his allegiance to David he would be spared. He was simply stripped of his power. When Joab (who was also loyal to Adonijah) heard what happened to Abiathar, he fled to the house of God and took hold of the altar. But Solomon showed no mercy:

King Solomon was told that Joab had fled to the tent of the LORD and was beside the altar. Then Solomon ordered Benaiah son of Jehoiada, “Go, strike him down!”—verse 29

Shimei’s fate began as a mere house arrest, with the threat of death if he ever left Jerusalem. But Shimei’s slaves ran off and he chased after them outside the city and …

Then the king gave the order to Benaiah son of Jehoiada, and he went out and struck Shimei down and killed him. The kingdom was now firmly established in Solomon’s hands.—verse 46 

One wonders how Solomon’s story would read if this Benaiah fellow had written it.

★★★★

Here’s a cute little book for you. I couldn’t resist, because it combines two of my loves: chess and religion.

This is a primer for children, beginning at the very beginning (how to move the pieces) and touching only the basics of strategy. There really isn’t much “religion” involved … just enough to give it a proper flavor for a Bible camp where Sheila was asked to teach. For example, the book begins with the story of how Noah sailed a ship and landed on a high mountain, where he was saved. Well, the chessboard is your world for this book, and if you don’t steer toward the mountain (the center four squares) you are going to be in trouble.

Sheila is a writer with a background in various Christian branches; her husband serves as the chess expert, being a former Utah State Champion. But it’s Sheila who was coerced into teaching chess at a grade school, and she’s since accumulated thirteen years of teaching chess at the primary and secondary levels. The experience culminated in this new training aid for children. It’s illustrated, complete, and simple, and contains a number of suggested learning games to reinforce the ideas. For example, kids are encouraged to play a game with nothing but pawns, to see who can be the first to get a pawn to the 8th rank.

Pick it up with a new chess set for your young reader this Christmas!

//Having pared the believable birth stories down from two to one—Matthew’s rendition instead of Luke’s—let’s now take a hard look at Matthew, and see if he really meant us to interpret his version literally.

Let’s begin with how Matthew crafts his story as a fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14, particularly the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the original Hebrew), which in translation erroneously changed the Hebrew word for “young maiden” into “virgin”: “The young maiden” thus became “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” Why is this virgin birth important to Matthew? Perhaps because Jesus’ competitor, the Lord and Savior of the Roman Empire, Caesar Augustus, the man who demanded to be called Son of God, shares a similar story. Suetonius, a Roman historian, tells how Augustus was born of the union of the god Apollo and his human mother Atia, after Atia’s husband received a vision of a miraculous child (he dreamed the sun rose from Atia’s womb). This mirrors the union of God and Mary in Matthew’s story, after Joseph learns of its divine sanction in a dream. Matthew is posturing that a greater Son of God than Augustus has arrived. My book about Revelation examines this competition between Christianity and the Imperial Cult in more detail.

With this competition in mind, let’s look next at the massacre of the innocents. The slaughter of children by Herod has an interesting origin, again relating to Jesus’ opponent, Caesar Augustus. Seutonius writes, [A] public portent warned the Roman people some months before Augustus’s birth that Nature was making ready to provide them with a king; and this caused the Senate such consternation that they issued a decree which forbade the rearing of any male child for a whole year.

Few critical Bible scholars consider the “massacre the innocents” by Herod to have really happened; a decree of this nature would surely be recorded by Jewish and Roman historians alike. Was Matthew’s birth story meant, then, merely to heighten the competition between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the World?

Another take on Matthew’s birth story tomorrow.

//We’re still on the topic of why most Liberal Christians do not believe literally in the virgin birth, and in the last two days, we’ve discussed the internal viewpoint and the honorific viewpoint. Let’s now look at the historical evidence.

A close look at the two birth stories in Matthew and Luke show them to be quite different, not only in the genealogy they trace back to David, but in the manner in which Joseph and Mary find themselves in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’ birth and what they do after the birth. In Matthew, they already live in Bethlehem but soon flee to Egypt to avoid Herod; in Luke, they travel to Bethlehem for a census, as ordered by Syrian governor Quirinius, and 40 days after the birth they go to Jerusalem, not Egypt.

So which of the two do we choose as “historical?” The problem with Luke’s story is that it could only be true if Jesus were born on or after 6 CE, for that is when Quirinius arrived from Syria, so such a census (of which we have no historical attestation) could not have been ordered before that. On the other hand, Matthew’s story implies that Jesus was born at least ten years earlier, since Matthew refers to Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE. One of the two stories is clearly fabricated; more scholars lean toward Matthew’s version, and date the birth of Christ around 4 BCE, for who would believe Mary would make a needless 90-mile journey in the final days of her pregnancy, as Luke describes? According to the genealogies given, only the Davidic Joseph had to be registered in Bethlehem, not the Levitical Mary.

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.

Today, I’d like to focus on what it means to say someone had a miraculous birth. We must remember that the New Testament is primarily a first-century collection of writings, portraying a first-century mindset. The virgin birth stories in the Bible were written in an age and for an audience who understood such stories to be not literal events, but a means of honoring great men, heroes, or gods. Hellenistic stories were rife with the idea of a god impregnating a human woman. The births of Caesar Augustus and Alexander the Great are good examples. Jesus was neither the first nor the last in a long line of miracle births throughout the known world.

Thus, when a pagan polemicist named Celsus attacks Christianity in his letter On the True Doctrine, he does not bother to address the impossibility of a literal virgin birth for Christ, but rather, whether Christ deserves such a tale told about him. Celsus states, in pretending to address Jesus, “After all, the old myths of the Greeks that attribute a divine birth to Perseus, Amphion, Aeacus and Minor are equally good evidence of their wondrous works on behalf of mankind–and are certainly no less lacking in plausibility than the stories of your followers. What have you done by word of deed that is quite so wonderful as those heroes of old?”