The Man Who Gave Us Christmas

VOLUME 164

NUMBER 6

DECEMBER 1939

BY WINIFRED KIRKLAND

How many of us in the hurry and hubbub of the holiday season steal a few silent moments to consider where our Christmas comes from? Stories as beautiful as that of Christmas do not just happen; they have a source, they come from somewhere, they come from someone. When we stop to think and search for a sure but distant origin we shall find, contrary to the evidence of this mass-mad decade, that over and over again some far-off individual, man or woman, is responsible for giving the whole world some undying dream, a dream that can always be seen to have been long and courageously preserved within the dreamer’s own undaunted soul. Yet this far-off bravery too often fails to stir us, because we seldom pause to look back, and remember.

From year to year we join in the singing of the old familiar carols, forgetting who recorded the very first Christmas hymns that have set the fashion for all that have followed. From year to year we listen while some voice reads, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,’ without remembering how high and holy and humble some far-off man must have kept his spirit before he could have perceived the ineffable loveliness of the Annunciation and shared a young mother’s glory in a child-to-be. Every year we gather together, young and old, to construct the Christmas crèche. We arrange the sheep, we place the kneeling shepherds, we crown with a halo the baby’s head lying on the straw, but we forget the man who so revered the sacredness of commonplace things that he dared to describe a God laid in a cattle trough for a cradle. We forget the man who gave us Christmas.

We do not know Luke well enough to say ‘thank you’ to him across the centuries. But we might know him better, and Christmas might mean more to us, if we tried to discover what it must first have meant to the man who gave it to us, gave it in all its perennial freshness and beauty to a world racked with war in his day and still racked with war in our day, in spite of the soaring, singing message of the two thousand Christmases that have come between. While in no sense did Luke invent the Christmas narrative, one can with truth say that it was he who gave us Christmas, for it was Luke, and Luke only, who searched out and found and preserved a birth story too humble for prouder historians to touch. It is said of Jesus, the wayside preacher, that the common people heard him gladly. It may be said of Luke, the wayside doctor, that he heard the common people gladly. Was it these same common people who brought to Luke’s knowledge the story of the first Christmas, revealing to him perhaps the existence of some close-kept Aramaic document, or simply transmitting to him by word of mouth sacred and secret memories? The narrative of Jesus’ birth seems to have been unknown to the earliest Christian Church, concentrated as that church was on its Founder’s death and Resurrection. Who else but humble people, still open to wonder and awe, could have told those old tales of miracles and angel voices? Who else but Luke would have listened? Who else in that day and hour reverenced humanity enough to accept the story of a God born in a stable and to give that story to the world?

Copyright 1939, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Let us read once again the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel. Then let us pause to consider where our Christmas comes from, picture by picture, chant by chant. The most beautiful book in the world, so Renan has described the Gospel of Luke. And in that book, for sheer unearthly loveliness, the opening chapters are the most beautiful of all. Only a painter could have conceived the strange stark beauty of the scene in which the tall angel delivers his message to a wondering awestruck girl. In fact, some early statues of Luke represent him as an actual artist, carrying palette and brushes. Only a dramatist could have seen and made us see that doorway meeting of two rapt women, one young, one old, each bearing beneath her heart a little child. Only a man attuned to music like a harp could have given us those immortal chants uttered by Zechariah and Mary and Simeon. The first thing, then, that we know about Luke is that he was a genius. The second thing we know is that, from the first written word of his Gospel lo the last, Luke must have dedicated all his endowment to the delineation of an invisible Master, always, from Bethlehem’s manger to the supper table of Emmaus, alive and shining before his eyes.

II

We possess little enough information about Luke, but it seems to be generally accepted that he was a young doctor of Antioch, and a member of the Christian community there before he met Paul and joined that intrepid leader on his second missionary journey as his personal physician. Except for those intervals when his superior trusted him to carry out certain missionary undertakings by himself, Luke seems to have remained at Paul’s side, at hand during Paul’s two years’ imprisonment in colonial Cæsarea, and always within call during the longer incarceration in imperial Rome. There in Rome the two must have said a last farewell before Paul’s martyrdom. Paul’s description of his friend has become part of the world’s vocabulary: ‘Luke, the beloved physician.’

But this compressed account of a great Christian doctor who was to become a still greater Christian historian needs to be set against the more expanded background of Luke’s place and time if we are to have even the scantiest knowledge of the man who gave us Christmas. There is no period so obscure, so difficult to penetrate with accuracy, as the first century of modern times, now labeled A. D. But today these hidden decades are being penetrated with more and more patient research. Present-day scholars are suggesting fresh hypotheses about circumstances and people too long represented as already conclusively examined. Even Jesus himself comes alive with new challenge when the English scholar of today, Professor Thomas Walter Manson of Manchester, lecturing at Yale this very spring of 1939, presents a carefully documented and most stimulating new conception As for Luke of Antioch, there is a vast fresh area of deeply human conjecture opened by another scholar whose monumental study of the earliest foundations of our faith, The Four Gospels, stands on the shelves of every religious library. Canon Streeter, whose tragic airship death will be instantly recalled by many, holds that the historian Luke must have gone up and down the Palestinian countryside garnering from the humble people of field and village priceless jewels of teaching, parable, incident, preaching, that the Great Teacher scattered prodigally to the wind as he passed by. Barely twenty years later Luke followed after him. Streeter maintains that only by such sure and reverent tracing of Jesus’ footsteps could Luke have come by the wealth of biographical material that he alone of the four Evangelists has been able to retrieve from oblivion and preserve for our knowledge.

Streeter’s argument flashes a great searchlight of illumination upon Luke’s own soul. There must have been some strange and beautiful magnetism about the man Luke, or the lowly people of the harsh upland pastures of Judea and the sun-swept vineyards about Galilee would not have opened to him their most sacred memories of the eternal Wayfarer. If it be only guesswork to suggest that Luke actually went about gathering much material for his book from humble people who recalled Jesus, still it is guesswork based on the evidence of the type of material he gathered and the type of man he seems to have been. Certain great parables and great incidents which had deathless effect on all Christian idealism are found in Luke alone. What toilworn peasant on some solitary hillside poured into Luke’s eager ears the story of the Prodigal Son? What stooping trudgerby on some burning highroad straightened before Luke’s earnest inquiries and imparted to him the recollection of that thrilled long-ago moment when as a youth he had heard Jesus, steadfast on his last black journey, utter that scathing parable of rebuke to the taunting questioner who had asked, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ It must have been in some such way that Luke came by his immortal story of the Good Samaritan. What obscure witness of a horror twenty years past recalled and described to Luke the last friend and the humblest that Jesus made on earth, one forever remembered by every one of us, but recorded by Luke alone, the Penitent Thief? And where and how and when did Luke learn of a baby God cradled in a manger?

But one cannot press on into Luke’s mind and heart without first sketching what must have gone to the making of that mind and heart years before Luke had so much as heard of the hero of his great biography. Now just how did the wide-flung, powerful, but curiously disillusioned pagan Empire of Rome first, come to hear about the mysterious occurrences in one of its remotest provinces? The first news the pagan world received about the Man who was destined to change the very name of history from his day to ours was sudden and sharp and unbelievable. From a mysteriously radiant and intrepid little band of Hebrew fishermen, people began to hear about a dead Leader who had utterly transformed their lives by the new laws he had laid down for all living. This Leader had died a most shameful death as a crucified criminal. But no, he had not really died at all! In spite of careful burial and a tomb sealed with the official Roman insignia, he had come back! His humble friends had seen him! They asserted that he was with them at this very moment, alive!—as he could be with anyone, so they asserted, who desired him enough to obey his laws for living, a method and practice so fresh and surprising that throughout the Empire the new sect, everywhere spreading and finally upclimbing from the humble to the high, was coming to be called simply The Way.

Nobody at first took the trouble to write the story of Jesus of Nazareth, for the simple reason that he himself had said that he would come back. His first followers took that promise of his literally. Only slowly, as the years went by, did they realize that Jesus was speaking, not of his physical return, but of his abiding spiritual presence in his world. Then the Good News of Jesus the Christ, which had first been told by flaming preaching, began to be written down here and there, wherever the message had come to be known, in scattered fugitive documents, which slowly coalesced into four books finally accepted as authoritative by the small new congregations, often secret, now swiftly forming the habit of assemblage in the name of The Way. Thus humbly the Christian Church began, steadily shaping its liturgy, its chants, its prayers.

But the Christian Church was in existence before its Gospels, as we possess them today. Our Gospels are the account of those aspects of Christ’s life, and those words of his message, which had previously been tried and tested and proved to be vital by the usage of myriad little churches springing up all over the Empire, at first hidden away, for the most part, from the proud intellectual ruling classes. These classes at first regarded askance a new religious leader who had been legally executed on a charge of sedition against the brief but secure and comfortable international orderliness of that period.

But the first century was not yet half gone before the new faith was attracting the attention of some among the educated and the high-born. Of these, young Doctor Luke of Antioch was one. Another was his Excellency Theophilus of Rome. To this Theophilus Luke dedicated his twin books, his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. Luke addresses a preface to Theophilus indicating the nature of his researches and the purpose of his book: ‘Because many historians have undertaken a narrative of the mysterious events that form the basis of our faith, as these events have been transmitted to us by those who were actually present at them, I myself have now resolved to set down a record of the Christian message authenticated by all the investigation possible to me, in order that you and others like you may have a true and detailed presentation of matters you have hitherto ascertained by word of mouth.’

Thus there came into existence a book which to this day presents the supreme appeal of Christianity to all paganism past or present. The universality of the Christian faith is revealed by the fact that Luke’s book was written by a Greek to a Roman about a Jew.

III

But what, had gone into the making of Luke the man before he could become equipped to make his book? Luke had first been child and lad and man in Antioch before he had so much as heard of Jesus of Nazareth. Luke was perhaps a boy in his middle teens when in famous Jerusalem, two hundred miles distant, a certain mysterious malefactor was put to death. One cannot ascertain just how soon afterwards the news of this cruel death and the triumphant Resurrection from a felon’s grave reached the receptive ears of the young Luke, but by the year 50 Luke seems to have become a well-known member of the Antioch group of Jesus’ followers.

The Antioch of Luke’s day was a large and prosperous city, an important transportation centre for the long caravan routes, as well as the repository of a Greek culture established by Alexander the Great two centuries before. Antioch was a seaport; the boy Luke would have been familiar with ships and sailors. Many foreigners walked the streets of this flourishing metropolis; the boy Luke might have picked up the native speech of the villagers as they pressed into town, some of them speaking Aramaic, the language of Palestine, the language of Jesus. Luke, well-to-do and educated with all the liberality of Greek custom, probably had first-hand knowledge of the Old Testament, long before translated into Greek and widely circulated among Greek-speaking Jews, of whom there were very many scattered throughout the first-century Roman Empire. The large Jewish colony in Antioch was broad-minded in its outlook, and a young Greek also broad-minded in outlook would have had happy friendships that perhaps supplied Luke with his intimate understanding of Hebrew ways and customs. Luke’s writing shows him to have had an eager and adventurous delight in travel. We can imagine him when a boy as taking tramps of investigation in the environs of Antioch. But both within and without the city he would have observed want and suffering to which he would never have been indifferent. Gifted, educated, well-born, and well-to-do, Luke was free to choose his own career. He looked at suffering, and he chose to be a doctor.

In Luke’s after years he must often have recalled the peace and joyousness, the freedom and sanity, of his Antioch background, much as many of us today look back wistfully and gratefully to the world we knew before 1914. In Antioch, Luke in childhood and early maturity was privileged to form foundations of normal thinking and normal living. The Christian group to which he came to belong was dominated by the wise and kindly Barnabas, one of the first to trust and befriend Paul after Paul’s strange sudden conversion from persecutor to missionary. Barnabas had even brought Paul to Antioch. Barnabas’s warm welcome to all young Greeks was well known. In Antioch, Luke could also have known Silas and Mark. Early in his career as a Christian doctor he appears to have joined a relief expedition from the Antioch church to Jerusalem, carrying a cargo of wheat to that city stricken with famine. It may have been on this visit that Luke met people prominent among those earliest Jerusalem Christians — Peter, James, John; Mary, the mother of Mark, in whose upper room the Last Supper was celebrated; and probably that greater Mary, the mother of Jesus. Some dozen years later Luke again accompanied Paul to Jerusalem on a mission of kindliness, taking a gift of money to the Temple treasury. On one of Luke’s visits to Jerusalem, many people think he must have known Mary, the mother of Jesus, and from her received directly some of the most intimate details of his story of Christmas.

The second visit to the sacred city was from the first ill-omened. Paul had become most unpopular with the Jerusalem Christians because of his friendliness with the Gentiles. James, the brother of Jesus, who was at this time Bishop of Jerusalem, advised Paul to go slowly, to give proof of his fidelity, to placate his enemies. However, almost at once the dreaded circumstance occurred, and Paul was mobbed within the Temple precincts, to be rescued by the Roman guard and sent for safety, with an accompanying battalion of soldiers, to the colonial governor’s seat at Cæsarea and the fortress prison there. Paul was to remain in Caesarea for two long years, from 56 to 58. During all this time Luke was not only in constant attendance upon the prisoner, but ceaselessly working for his release. Vainly. At the end of two years Paul made his famous direct appeal to the Emperor, and was sent to Rome, never to be freed except by death.

For Luke and for us the two years at Cæsarea were to have priceless significance, for it is most probable that it was during this sojourn there, when Luke could move about freely even though in constant attendance upon a famous prisoner, that the third Evangelist gained his full knowledge of the birth story of Jesus.

If we let conjecture play a searchlight, back on the middle years of the first century we may perhaps presume humbly to guess where and how and from whom Luke came to his knowledge of the first Christmas. As one of the earliest of the great research scholars of history, Luke would have followed a procedure then rare, but now long taken for granted. Luke we know made certain visits to Jerusalem, and he may well have made more such visits than we know. It seems most probable that in Jerusalem he would have sought out Mary, the mother of Jesus. Luke’s own book of Acts explicitly states that Mary was one of the early church community in the holy city. If we try, we can surmise Mary’s own accents as an undertone to Luke’s Christmas chronicle.

At Jerusalem, Luke was within easy distance of the village of Bethlehem. From much internal evidence we know that he respected humble people, and listened to their reminiscences. It is not too far-fetched, then, to fancy his listening to some aging shepherd who recalled the angel hymn of his boyhood. In some such manner of direct first-hand research Luke may have supplemented an early Aramaic document describing the miracle of Jesus’ coming into the world. All scholars seem to agree that Luke actually had in his hand some such ancient scroll, the existence of which they maintain is supported by the arresting differences between the nativity stories and the rest of Luke’s Gospel. Chapter III opens to a fresh beginning; there is an abrupt break in continuity. There are also notable differences in style. There is a studied effort to use simple archaic Greek, as if the translator, who was also profoundly an artist in words, were trying to put himself and his reader back into the simple terms and manner of thought of a previous generation, hidden away in the hill country of Judea.

In Cæsarea, Luke would have had priceless leisure both to collect, his material and to make some preliminary arrangement of it. In Cæsarea, too, he would have had invaluable association with Philip, and with Philip’s four gifted daughters, ‘prophetesses’ — that is to say, accepted teachers and interpreters of the new faith. Undoubtedly Philip’s daughters would have known Mary in Jerusalem before they had come to settle in Caesarea. One cannot calculate what wealth of memories they might there have transmitted to Luke.

IV

But the man Luke, the man who gave us Christmas, what deeper guesses dare we make about him, about his own soul and about his patient perfection of that soul until he was equipped to become the perpetual proclaimer of glad tidings to men? Scholarship and Biblical research afford us only a rough scaffold on which to build our conjecture, a scaffold in itself frankly conjectural. In addition to the scant life history here given, it is supposed that after Paul’s death, which may have occurred in 64 as an earliest date, in 68 as a latest one, Luke eventually returned to Palestine, presumably to revise and complete his projected manuscript. At this time the longsmouldering Jewish revolt against Rome flamed to madness, and was tragically punished. The age-old citadel of the Hebrew religion was razed; of the Temple not one stone remained upon another. Luke’s Gospel is now dated about 80 A. D. Luke is supposed to have died in the province of Bithynia in the first nineties.

Indeed, all this is a fragmentary basis of fact on which to build supposition that dares to penetrate the personality of the man who gave us Christmas! But he has left the world a book which reveals himself as well as his Master. Research supplies us with certain probable facts, and we may employ human insight and sympathy in interpreting them. The bare facts of Luke’s life point to certain conclusions about his character. Even the most cursory examination of Luke’s Gospel and the most superficial study of his life suggest at once his singular fitness for giving the world its Christmas.

It was the ‘beloved physician’ who could describe motherhood in all the holiness of our Christmas narratives. It was one who had given all his being to the service of others, and who was never to hold a child of his own in his arms, who could set down the raptured words,

‘ My soul doth magnify the Lord.’ It was one whose life was consecrated to the relief of suffering who could describe with such exaltation Jesus’ miracles of healing. Long before he had ever heard of the mysterious man executed in a distant city, Luke, a joyous-hearted young Greek, must have chosen a career of kindliness. He had himself gone about doing good before he was equipped to write of all the wealth of kindly deeds and sympathetic words that he records in his life of Jesus. Of all four Evangelists, it is Luke who best reveals Jesus the man, friend always of the poor and the downtrodden, comforting even the despairing thief crucified beside him, as Luke alone tells us. It is a joyous human Jesus that Luke presents, probably because he himself had learned high joy in his close contact with an unseen Master. In spite of all its tragedy, Luke’s Gospel gives the reader a sense of unconquerable gladness, gladness like that of the two disciples on the walk to Emmaus when their Master returned to share a meal with them, an incident that Luke alone has saved from oblivion. Truly Luke was mysteriously fitted to transmit to us forever the joyousness of Christmas.

But it could never have been a carefree Luke who wrote down those strange sweet Christmas stories. It must have been a Luke who had drunk to the dregs the cup of despair, who had beheld evil triumph in holy places, and who had seen the dream Jesus died for apparently blotted out in blood. It was after Paul’s martyrdom — after, and not before — that Luke’s Gospel was finished and given to the world. It was after, not before, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. that Luke, the doctor-scholar, ended his consecrated research into the life of his Hero, and made it public. With all the world Luke had witnessed the downfall of the old stronghold of Judaism, and the hounding of Jerusalem rebels from one precarious hiding to another. He never completed the Acts of the Apostles to include Paul’s martyrdom. Was it that the ‘beloved physician’ was too heartbroken to add the final death-dealing chapters about his dearest friend? If Luke was perhaps thirty-five, already proved a successful doctor and a trusted teacher of the new faith when he joined Paul about 50 A. D., then, when he was reverently bringing his book to a close in the seventies of the first century, he must have been aging toward his own seventies. In spirit he may have shared Simeon’s delight in the vision of the newborn babe of hope. We know that the infancy narratives do not seem to have been generally known to the early church. It is Luke the doctor-evangelist who has made them a part of our Christian faith.

But what had these sacred stories of a holy little child meant to Luke himself in his darkening old age, in his darkening world? Persecution was rife. For all we know, Luke may have written in the very shadow of his own martyrdom; some ancient authorities say that he was martyred. From end to end of Palestine the armies of Rome had gone raging and avenging. No one could count the fallen dead that Luke’s pen might have recorded but did not. Instead, Luke, an old unbroken man, sent forth from the stricken world of his day to our stricken world of today the deathless hope of an angel hymn, and the deathless promise of a newborn child.