Christmas, The Original Story
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"'Margaret Barker's interpretation of temple theology should not be ignored by anyone interested in Judaism and the origins of Christian faith.' John McDade, Principal of Heythrop College, University of London"
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In Christmas the Original Story Margaret Barker explores the nature of the Christmas stories and the nature and use of Old Testament prophecy. Beginning with John's account, it then goes on to include Luke and Matthew, the apocryphal gospels, and the traditions of the Coptic Church, to throw light upon wise men and their gifts, the character of Herod, Matthew's use of prophecy, the holy family in Egypt. This book also discusses the stories we get from the Infancy Gospel of Jesus and the development of the Orthodox Christmas icon, as well as the Christmas story and the Mary material in the Koran.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Margaret Barker, methodist preacher, lay theologian, and former head of the Society for the Study of The Old Testament, has made it her life's work to illuminate Christianity by trying to understand the context of the events in the Bible. In this work, she turns her attention to the Incarnation.
After dealing summarily with the nature of the Incarnation (neither a conception nor a birth), the first point that Margaret Barker makes is that the Incarnation must be understood in terms of the prophrecies it was fulfilling.
The gospels (she deals mainly with Luke and Matthew) are very selective in their recording of events, omitting many details which are of interest to us today - 2000 years later (a point completely missed by another reviewer on this site). The writers of the gospels recorded those details which were significant to their readers. This largely means, events significant in terms of prophecies. Jesus himself spoke of how he was fulfilling prophecy. Margaret Barker shows all this with reference to the Old Testament which we know, and to other prophecies which were known to people at the time, but are not in the present day Old Testament. These prophecies would have been familiar to the Jewish readers of the gospels, but are opaque to us today.
Turn of the century Palestine was thick with expectation of the coming of the Messiah. Different prophecies in the Old Testament had dated this time. Everyone paid attention to these prophecies, and to astrology. Herod knew that his time was up - he executed a group of priests who were secretly calculating the date of the coming of the Messiah, the King of the Jews.
Margaret Barker also shows how the Jews edited the Old Testament in order to alter texts which were being used as key texts by Christians. It turns out that the Greek text is closer to the original Hebrew than is the modern Masoretic Hebrew. This is proven by the contents of the Qumran texts (the Dead Sea Scrolls).
The second point of the book is how the Incarnation was in some sense a double Incarnation - not a term used in the book, I hasten to add. Mary also fulfills many prophecies relating to almah (the Virgin) in the Old Testament.
Throughout, Margaret Barker places at her disposal a dizzying array of sources, including texts from Qumran, works now forming part of the Apocraphya, the Qu'ran, and contemporary biblical scholarship.
This work does not purport to demystify the Incarnation - the most mysterious event of all times for any Christian - but it does cast a great light upon this great event, and all this in a short and accessible text. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
After dealing summarily with the nature of the Incarnation (neither a conception nor a birth), the first point that Margaret Barker makes is that the Incarnation must be understood in terms of the prophrecies it was fulfilling.
The gospels (she deals mainly with Luke and Matthew) are very selective in their recording of events, omitting many details which are of interest to us today - 2000 years later (a point completely missed by another reviewer on this site). The writers of the gospels recorded those details which were significant to their readers. This largely means, events significant in terms of prophecies. Jesus himself spoke of how he was fulfilling prophecy. Margaret Barker shows all this with reference to the Old Testament which we know, and to other prophecies which were known to people at the time, but are not in the present day Old Testament. These prophecies would have been familiar to the Jewish readers of the gospels, but are opaque to us today.
Turn of the century Palestine was thick with expectation of the coming of the Messiah. Different prophecies in the Old Testament had dated this time. Everyone paid attention to these prophecies, and to astrology. Herod knew that his time was up - he executed a group of priests who were secretly calculating the date of the coming of the Messiah, the King of the Jews.
Margaret Barker also shows how the Jews edited the Old Testament in order to alter texts which were being used as key texts by Christians. It turns out that the Greek text is closer to the original Hebrew than is the modern Masoretic Hebrew. This is proven by the contents of the Qumran texts (the Dead Sea Scrolls).
The second point of the book is how the Incarnation was in some sense a double Incarnation - not a term used in the book, I hasten to add. Mary also fulfills many prophecies relating to almah (the Virgin) in the Old Testament.
Throughout, Margaret Barker places at her disposal a dizzying array of sources, including texts from Qumran, works now forming part of the Apocraphya, the Qu'ran, and contemporary biblical scholarship.
This work does not purport to demystify the Incarnation - the most mysterious event of all times for any Christian - but it does cast a great light upon this great event, and all this in a short and accessible text. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In this book, Margaret Barker analyses the events, language and imagery of the Christmas story as told by the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and partially by the Infancy Gospel of James and excerpts from the Qur'an. Her aim is to demonstrate how early Christian readers and hearers would have recognised themes in the stories that pointed them to a `lost' world, whose richly symbolic understanding of the Temple of post-exilic Judaism held the key to making sense of the nativity.
That's the work's theme, in a nutshell. But it's really hard to know what to make of it, as is the case (for me) with others of Barker's books. On the one hand, unquestioned scholarship illuminates some of the symbolism behind the Christmas story in a fresh and potentially exciting way. On the other, the actual writing is dense, often lacking in cohesion and flow. It roams far and wide (so is sometimes unfocused), and ultimately fails to come to any real conclusion about the value of the `lost tradition' to which the abundance of evidence marshalled so tantalisingly points (possibly).
I also thought that the author's work wasn't really rooted in any strong socio-political context: we're never told why followers of `The Lady' (wisdom) lost out to others in the ferment of post-exilic Judaism, and it's surely questionable that everyone in Jesus' time was obsessed with the temple - an assumption seriously at odds with the Jesus of (for example) Marcus Borg's `Jesus: A New Vision', which sees the Lord as strongly opposed to the exclusivist priestly establishment of his time, which he criticised for hindering the poor and excluded from genuine, life-transforming encounter with their God.
Overall, then, a bit like panning for gold: flashes of brilliance, but lots of hard work sifting through to find it. Something precious there may be here, but a lot more work is needed to turn it into something useable.
That's the work's theme, in a nutshell. But it's really hard to know what to make of it, as is the case (for me) with others of Barker's books. On the one hand, unquestioned scholarship illuminates some of the symbolism behind the Christmas story in a fresh and potentially exciting way. On the other, the actual writing is dense, often lacking in cohesion and flow. It roams far and wide (so is sometimes unfocused), and ultimately fails to come to any real conclusion about the value of the `lost tradition' to which the abundance of evidence marshalled so tantalisingly points (possibly).
I also thought that the author's work wasn't really rooted in any strong socio-political context: we're never told why followers of `The Lady' (wisdom) lost out to others in the ferment of post-exilic Judaism, and it's surely questionable that everyone in Jesus' time was obsessed with the temple - an assumption seriously at odds with the Jesus of (for example) Marcus Borg's `Jesus: A New Vision', which sees the Lord as strongly opposed to the exclusivist priestly establishment of his time, which he criticised for hindering the poor and excluded from genuine, life-transforming encounter with their God.
Overall, then, a bit like panning for gold: flashes of brilliance, but lots of hard work sifting through to find it. Something precious there may be here, but a lot more work is needed to turn it into something useable.
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