Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year to everyone! I know I have been radio silent for a good while but a new episode is coming soon, as well as some updates on other projects of mine, so stay tuned for that. However, I recently wrote an article on the Nativity for a magazine which turned it down, so, I thought I would post it here just for my listeners. Enjoy. -Darrick
The Nativity as a Political Event
Catholics have probably become used at this point to the use of Christ’s birth in political terms. I am thinking of those this past Christmas season who tried to portray the Holy Family as immigrants fleeing persecution. This is stupid, and offensive to sanctity of the event. But was there in reality no political significance to His birth? And not even in the sense that, if God really has entered into human life, it must have an impact on our political life, if we are to live as Christians, but one we might recognize as “political” even today?
Herod the Great, the king of Judaea at the time of Christ’s birth who features in Matthew’s infancy narrative, only became king because of his ruthless quest to push aside Hasmonean claimants to the throne, enlisting Roman support to oust the last of the Hasmonean dynasty from Jerusalem. Herod, you will recall, faced opposition from the people of Judaea not only because Rome supported him, but also because Herod was of mixed racial descent, his mother being an Idumean, a people from the region just south of modern Israel whom the Hasmoneans conquered in the decades before the Romans finally put an end to their independence.
Herod’s father, Antipater, aided Julius Caesar when he conquered Egypt in 44 BC and showered Antipater with honors (he made Antipater a Roman citizen, for example, granting him exemption from the hated Roman taxation). But Antipater made himself hated by the rest of the Judaeans, and after the assassination of Caesar, political opponents slew Antipater as well. Herod avenged him, and when Cassius came into Syria, interceding with him on behalf of the Jewish people, and then ejected Antigonus, a Hasmonean claimant to the throne, from Judaea. When the Second Triumvirate came to power, he gained the trust of Marc Antony, who made Herod and his brother Phasaleus Tetrarchs.
But then Antigonus returned with an army, supplied by the Parthian Empire. If you are not up on your ancient history, the Parthians were the successors to the ancient Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great. Rome first came into conflict with the Parthians during the late first century BC during the first Civil War between the generals Marius and Sulla. The Parthians proved to be implacable enemies of the Romans, defeating the general Crassus in 54 BC, a member of the First Triumvirate along with Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompey. His death ended the Triumvirate and brought about the second Civil War between Caesar and Pompey. The conflict with first the Parthian and then the later Sassanian Empires would last until the seventh century AD.
Eventually, of course, the final civil war between Antony and Octavian resolved in favor of the latter, with whom Herod also formed an alliance. Thus did Herod become King of Judaea, a client state of the Roman Empire ruled by Caesar Augustus, at the time of the birth of Christ.
This background can help us understand how the birth of Christ was a political event in contemporary terms. In his account, Matthew says that Herod the Great learned of Christ’s birth through the ministrations of “Magi from the east.” Now, Catholics and all Christians are used to thinking of this story in terms of the prophecy which Herod’s advisors warned him about concerning the Messiah, and the later part of the story where, realizing he has been duped by the Magi, slaughters all the young boys around Bethlehem under two years of age. The cruelty of the paranoid King Herod takes center stage in our imagination for understandable reasons, and led to Shakespeare writing the phrase that it “out-Herods Herod” in Hamlet for actors who hammed it up too much playing the Biblical villain.
But it seems to me there might be a significance to the birth of Christ we are missing in the story, specifically, in Herod’s motivation for wanting to kill the Messiah. Famously, Matthew says the Magi came from the East but does not specify exactly where in the East they came from. There are many traditions concerning these “wise men,” but there are some traditions which identify them with Zoroastrian priests from Persia—that is, from the Parthian Empire. (There is even an apocryphal gospel that claims the Magi were acting on a prophecy of Zoroaster.)
Without wishing at all to suggest what Herod did was anything but morally abhorrent, if you take the traditions of the Magi being Persians seriously, you can see how the birth of Christ might have seemed in the light of contemporary political events. Herod was a client of the Roman Empire, which reorganized the Middle East when Pompey the Great conquered the Seleucid Empire in 63 BC. Part of his remit as a vassal king would be to keep the peace but also ensure the borders of the Empire were secure against one of its most dangerous enemies, the Parthians.
If a group of priests from the state religion of Parthia showed up in Judaea, asking to worship “the King of the Jews,” what might such a client King as Herod make of this? Remember, this is someone who came to the throne by defeating a rival claimant sponsored by the Parthians. According to the accounts of Josephus and other ancient historians, Herod was a ruthless and cunning figure, willing to do whatever it took to acquire and maintain power. This is why the Romans relied on him: like his father, he proved he would reliably and ruthlessly attack Rome’s enemies.
This puts the “Massacre of the Innocents” in a different light. Herod’s actions were abhorrent—the killing of innocent children. But they were not the work of an irrational maniac. Assuming the Persian origin of the Magi, there was a definite political logic behind his actions. It might sound silly, but imagine for a moment, that a group of Islamic clerics came from Iran or imams from Saudia Arabia, wanting to venerate an American born Muslim as the Messiah who would lead American Muslims to political victory over their enemies. What would one make of such claims? How would our politicians, our military and security apparatchiks—cynical, amoral, and power-addicted lot that they are—react to such an event?
Christ, of course, did not come to wield political power in the normal sense of the term, because He was God—a man whose nature was perfectly united with that of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is the real story of the Nativity. That is where the analogy breaks down, obviously. But in purely human terms, political terms as we normally understand them, the evils that King Herod perpetrated made perfect sense. They always do, to those without knowledge of the Son of God.
