Stranger Things Have Happened

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man can invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions, most stale and unprofitable.”

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity (1891)

All sorts of strange coincidences, plannings, cross-purposes, and wonderful chains of events working through generations to achieve the most outre results are surely going on in this random city.

And so 2016 draws to a close, and a great sigh of relief ripples across vast swathes of the globe like a Mexican wave chasing the instant of midnight from each time zone to the next. The consensus is clear: this has been one topsy-turvy trip round the sun, and one the world at large is glad to see the back of. There’s been one political shock after another, an endless torrent of celebrity deaths, and I understand one or two unexpected things happened in the world of sport as well (though frankly that entire realm of culture is extremely obscure to me) – not to mention that business about Harambe the gorilla that seemed to provoke a good (one might tentatively suggest disproportionate?) deal of agitation.

If I come across a tad disinterested, that’s probably because, as I frequently mention when the surprising and on some counts distressing extraordinariness of the past year’s events arises in conversation, the primary reaction to said events with which my brain likes to amuse itself is the notion that this is all going to make an extremely interesting history textbook in fifty or a hundred years. Will 2016 be seen as a blip or a genuine turning point? How will posterity’s judgement of our times differ from our own? Will anyone even believe that so many beloved celebrities really did all depart this life within the same twelve-month period?

That last question might not be as silly as it sounds. Excuse me while I lapse into all-out Classicist mode, but I am somewhat reminded of Tacitus’ Annals, the fourth book of which I had to read for my Latin class in my second year at university. In the Annals, Tacitus narrates the history of Rome from the death of the Emperor Augustus, and he does it – the clue’s in the title – on an annual basis, recounting each event according to the year in which it occurred rather than its significance in any longer storyline. This approach, like any, has its pros and cons. I certainly wasn’t too pleased with it when I embarked upon translating an interesting and actually quite moving story of a guy called Sabinus being framed and executed for dissent, only to find Tacitus quite consciously leaving aside the matter of his accusers’ fates to tell a distinctly less thrilling tale pertaining to the taxing of ox-hides in Germany.¹ Still, it does at least mean we can be sure of the year in which any given event occurred – although we often can’t be much more precise than that, because it isn’t totally clear whether the author sticks to arranging his material in chronological order within each year, or not. For example, Tacitus displays a clear if not overwhelming propensity for recording a year’s celebrity deaths towards the end of his account of that year.² Is that because the end seemed as good a place as any to slip them in, regardless of when within the year they actually occurred? Or is it because people were genuinely more likely to die towards the end of the year?³ Perhaps because it was cold and they were old. (Real academic theory.⁴)

My point, then, is this: if we today look at what Tacitus recorded and think, well, it can’t possibly have been the case that the well-known inhabitants of early Imperial Rome were especially prone to expiring near the end of each calendar year – that just seems too unlikely – why shouldn’t some future historian carefully scrutinising our own times conclude that it can’t possibly have been the case that the well-known inhabitants of the modern west were especially prone to expiring within one specific calendar year, namely 2016? That just seems too unlikely. It’s certainly caught us all by surprise, who are actually living through it. If someone had sat down at the start of last January and written a list of predictions for the coming year that had included even half of the events that have been busy shaking the world these past three hundred and sixty-five days, he or she would surely have been dismissed as a lunatic, an imbecile, or possibly some sort of extreme pessimist.⁵ And yet here we are.

Our hypothetical future historian will probably, of course, have access to much, much better evidence against which to test his or her theories than any scholar of the early Roman Empire does today, but suppose otherwise. Suppose there is some disaster and the historians of two thousand years hence are left trying to piece together the events of 2016 from a few written accounts of uncertain reliability. Might they not start to suggest that such accounts were arranged for emphasis, not accuracy; that the writers shoved in more shocking events than really occurred to make some point or other; that it all just looks too implausible and we should see it all as a mythologised retelling shaped by the author’s personal biases?

2016 shows that Sherlock Holmes was right: reality is, very often, more unbelievable than the fiction that purports to imitate it.⁶ Perhaps it’s a little strange, then, that we are so sceptical of the abnormal. I’m not by any means advocating gullibility – believing anything regardless of evidence is as unacceptable as believing nothing regardless of evidence – but the events of the past year have surely cast at least a little doubt over the capabilities of human rational faculties to determine which occurrences are or are not plausible. Scepticism about almost any unlikely-sounding claim can be readily met with a declaration that stranger things have happened.

Good job, Sherlock. Now tell me, from where do you buy your lovely hats?

Plus, that’s just in the sphere of stuff that actually conforms to the known laws of physics and nature. What about when we slide the possibility of divine intervention into the picture?

Now, there are lots of good reasons to trust what God says as recorded in the multi-author, multi-genre anthology we like to call the Bible; an apologetic effort to that effect is not the purpose of this post. Rather, my point is that it seems a little odd that, even as Christians, we often approach the Bible wearing the exact same human-rational-faculties glasses that make us doubt the chronology of Tacitus’ Annals. We have to make concerted efforts to counteract their effects: it doesn’t seem terribly likely that a man survived in the belly of a giant fish for three days,⁷ or that the sun once stood still in the sky to enable a battle to finish,⁸ or that the universe was created in six days,⁹ but we’re aware that this is God’s word and both deserves and demands our full credence and trust, so we tie ourselves in knots trying to reconcile it to what we understand about the way reality works. And we land in all sorts of places: such-and-such is a fable, or a poetic metaphor; such-and-such makes sense if only one surrounds it with the correct historical context, or construes this or that Hebrew word in a sense different to the traditional one; such-and-such is beyond our understanding but happened in a totally literal sense and everyone should shut up and get over it.

I think we’re missing the point a bit. If our own perception of what’s plausible is confounded even by the surprising events of 2016 – which, despite the vitriol and despair in your Facebook newsfeed yelling the contrary, don’t actually break any physical or natural laws of how the universe works – why should we trust it to scrutinise the supernaturally-effected occurrences described in the Bible? If the simple happenstances of natural, explicable reality can yield such unlikely-seeming results, shouldn’t we anticipate that the direct, explicit, exceptional actions of a God almighty over the whole of that reality should yield even unlikelier-seeming ones? Would it not, in fact, be more of a surprise to us if they didn’t? The grounds for our interpretation of any particular passage should have nothing to do with whether we think the events it describes sound likely or not; indeed, if they do, it surely reveals that we are sinfully privileging our own rationality over God’s trustworthiness. If you read Genesis 1 with an awareness of God’s omnipotence and the severe limitations of our human rational faculties and still conclude that it’s a fable or a poetic metaphor, that’s another matter, but I don’t see that there’s any ground, as a Christian, to resort to such explanations just because a six-day creation doesn’t strike you as particularly plausible.

Stranger things have happened.

A man rose from the dead, for instance.

Footnotes

¹ Sabinus’ story starts in the sixty-eighth chapter of the book, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0078%3Abook%3D4%3Achapter%3D68, and is probably the most interesting bit of it, even including the tale of the senator who threw his wife out of a window.

² In, for example, 4.15 (new year starts 4.17) 4.44 (new year begins 4.46), 4.61 (new year begins 4.62). Remember, of course, that the chapter divisions were added later, but hopefully they give some sense of how close the death-records tend to be to the beginning of the account of a new year.

³ For the record, I’d consider the first theory more likely, but for slightly different reasons to those I discuss here. In any case, that doesn’t impinge on the point of this post.

⁴ Though I’m not going to cite it, because this isn’t an academic piece and you can’t make me. Just take my Latin lecturer’s word for it, OK?

⁵ I’m thinking primarily of the deaths here. Not a political comment.

⁶ Don’t you just love it when copyright law doesn’t apply? The whole of the short story from which my opening quotation is taken, as well as lots of other Sherlock Holmes tales, is freely available online: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/CaseIden.shtml.

⁷ That’s from the book of Jonah, in case you never went to Sunday school: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jonah+1&version=ESVUK.

⁸ As recorded in the book of Joshua: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua+10&version=ESVUK.

⁹ Aw, come on, you know this one. That’s right, it’s Genesis 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+1&version=ESVUK.  

Christmas Conversations with my Internal Theological Snob

“Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot …

But the Grinch, who lived just north of Whoville, did NOT!

The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!

Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.

It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.

It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.

But I think that the most likely reason of all,

May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.”

Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957)

Me:      I love Christmas.

Her:     I hate Christmas.

Me:      I love carol services, and everyone being off work, and pretty lights all over the place, and carol services, and all the exciting only-this-time-of-year comestibles, and wrapping presents, and carol services, and updating my special Christmas playlist, and carol services…

 

Ooh, pretty lights...

Her:     Blimey, did you mention carol services yet?

Me:      All right, there’s no need for that tone. I like carol services, OK? We did three of them last Sunday and it was great.

Her:     It was hard work, you mean. Do you even realise how many Christmas carols are absolutely choc-a-bloc with lyrics that have practically nothing to do with the actual wonder of the incarnation?

Me:      Actually, I tend to leave that sort of thing to you, my dear Internal Theological Snob. You are, after all, awfully good at it.

Her:     I try to be. Frankly, by the end of last Sunday, I was so burnt out I was barely paying attention to what we were singing. Only my most basic heresy filters were running properly. All that rubbish you’d been having us affirm about snow and silence and stables was clogging the system.

Me:      Look, I hardly think we can call the suggestion that it was snowing in Bethlehem when Jesus was born heresy. I mean, I’ll admit it’s not very likely from a historical standpoint, and it’s not in any way Biblical either…

Her:     You’re really not selling this. ‘Not in any way Biblical’ sounds to me like the beginning of a very slippery slope heading somewhere in the direction of, oh, let me see, heresy. But besides that, the key thing to grasp is that it’s missing the point. The meteorological situation in the Bethlehem area is of literally no importance to the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ birth.¹ This is God becoming man we’re talking about, the very second Person of the Trinity through whom all things were created and are sustained taking on the entire nature of a puny human being, giving up reigning over every atom of the cosmos in eternal, unsurpassable love and joy in order to go through all the unpleasantries and indignities of fleshly existence, in order to suffer and indeed die, to undergo hell on behalf of the very human beings who variously failed him, betrayed him, ignored him, or hated his guts, that they might be inducted into the very eternal love and joy he had given up, not according to their own non-existent merits, but by the free gift of Jesus’ own moral perfection, in accordance with the Law that everybody else broke, whereas he endured and obeyed and triumphed over all the evils of the present order and on that account is crowned with the highest honour in the universe and will return to set all things to rights, in unspeakably great glory, yet still bearing the human form he took on, such as it is having been raised imperishable, and –

Me:      You might want to take a breath at some point.

Her:     But do you see my point? We could be singing about that, and instead we’re singing about how terribly cold and snowy it was (or rather probably wasn’t) in Bethlehem. Who cares?

 

Angels: highly relevant. Snow: not relevant in the slightest.

Me:      Yes. I do see your point. Believe me, I do. I do listen to you, my dear Internal Theological Snob, and you talk a lot of sense.

Her:     You think so, huh? Let’s see. Thoughts on the innkeeper everyone goes on about?

Me:      In all likelihood didn’t exist. κατάλυμα (katáluma) suggests a guest-room in a house more than an inn.²

Her:     Very good. And the stable?

Me:      Possible, certainly, but there’s no mention of it in the Bible. Some early traditions feature a cave.³ I reckon the most likely possibility is that the feeding-trough Jesus was laid in was in the main room of the same house whose guest-room was too full.⁴

Her:     I’m impressed. And what about the idea that Mary went to Bethlehem on a donkey?

Me:      An import from the Infancy Gospel of James,⁵ which we can be pretty sure wasn’t in fact written by James, and is in any case about as canonical as that dreadful poem about footprints in the sand.⁶

Her:     I don’t get it. If you know all this exactly as well as I do, why on Earth do you put up with having these superfluous improbabilities chucked at you over and over again as if they’re what Christmas is all about?

Me:      Well. Sometimes I wonder. The emotional high of the festive atmosphere, much as I enjoy it, can only make up for so many annoyances. I was exactly as frustrated as you were when someone mentioned that ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ had been voted the nation’s official favourite carol,⁷ or when I realised that one of the verses of ‘Past Three O’Clock’ is literally about cheese.⁸ I get as wearily, hollowly sad as you do when I realise that many parents who would tick ‘Christian’ on the census will spend more time this December telling their children lies about a fictional character loosely based on a fourth-century bishop from part of what’s now Turkey⁹ than truths about their Lord and Saviour. I’m exactly as sick as you are of the commercialisation, the endless adverts promising that some elusive ‘perfect Christmas’ is attainable if only one spends enough money on the right things, the vacuous popular music pumping from every shop’s sound system, the ludicrous overspending and overeating all excused on the festival’s account. Don’t think I don’t notice it. I’m pretty sure we all do. And it’s positively maddening.

Her:     So you were lying earlier. When you said you love Christmas, you were lying.

Me:      No, I wasn’t. And part of that is, yes, I really enjoy the festive atmosphere, and I relish the opportunity to partake in seasonal activities like eating mince pies and listening to Pentatonix’s version of ‘Mary, Did You Know?’¹⁰ that for some reason aren’t socially acceptable at other times of the year; their very shortlivedness lends them an extra layer of delightfulness. But another part of that is, if one is prepared to wade through the superfluous improbabilities of snow and silence and stables, there are moments that make it worth it.

Her:     I’m not convinced about that. An example, if you please.

Me:      Certainly. One of the reasons I like going to as many carol services as possible is to encounter as many obscure verses of lesser-known carols as possible; some of them express the marvelousness of Jesus’ birth in very lovely and startling ways. So, if you remember, the second carol service we were at last Sunday featured ‘See Amid the Winter’s Snow’, which includes the following:

Lo, within a manger lies

He who built the starry skies,

He who, throned in height sublime,

Sits amid the cherubim.

What do you make of that?

Her:     Oh wow. So my brain is going, like, Isaiah 6 and that whole amazing glorious vision of God’s utter majesty and how Isaiah totally fell to pieces at the notion that such a sinner as himself had seen YHWH, and then how a chunk of that chapter is quoted by John, who states that Isaiah saw Jesus’ glory specifically, and the very thought that a God as great and powerful and awe-inspiring as that could take on such a small and unimpressive form as a baby in an animals’ feeding-trough … oh, the humility of Christ, and now I’m all over Philippians 2 as well, and scooting back to Isaiah and the burning-coal-on-the-lips thing, his power to cover over our sins so that we might be able to stand in the full glory of his presence…¹¹

 

“Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.’”

Me:      I know, right? Not such a bad song once you get past that first bit about snow, is it?

Her:     Well, no, but you have to put up with all that rubbish to get to the good bit.

Me:      And there is manifest the trouble with you, my dear Internal Theological Snob, namely that you might talk a lot of sense, but you’re a right misery-guts. You do it all year round, not just at Christmas: picking apart every statement made by anyone that drifts onto even slightly theological territory in order to assess its Biblical soundness –

Her:     Hey, it’s called discernment.

Me:      And discernment’s great, and I’m very glad you do it, but I often think you take it too far. You’re too critical, too inflexible, and too judgemental of brothers and sisters in Christ who haven’t reached the same conclusions as you. You’re a snob, Internal Theological Snob. All that stuff about the innkeeper and the stable and the donkey – you’re concerned with presenting yourself as clever as much as with preserving Biblical truth. You think you’re always right and you like to show off.

Her:     Oh, confusticate and bebother it, I do. I am a snob. God forgive me.

Me:      He has. The fact that you know you need it is why I keep you around.

Her:     Thank you. Though I should probably tell you I still hate Christmas.

Me:      And I don’t blame you. Maybe one of these years I’ll get fed up enough with all the bits I don’t like that I’ll stop bothering trying to pick out the bits I do. But this year has not been that year.

Her:     Well, I’ll keep trying to persuade you, I’m sure. But in the meantime, shall we end with another obscure verse of a lesser-known carol?

Me:      An excellent plan. Did you have one in mind?

Her:     Indeed, namely the much-neglected last verse of the Calypso Carol:

Mine are riches from your poverty,

From your innocence, eternity,

Mine forgiveness by your death for me,

Child of sorrow for my joy.

Me:      Top choice. A hearty amen to that.

Footnotes

¹ A point also made in hilarious fashion by Lutheran Satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR67HSs4RPI.

² This is the word often translated ‘inn’ in Luke 2:7. There are two other occurrences of it in the New Testament, in Mark 14:14 and Luke 22:11; in both these cases it refers to the room where Jesus ate the Passover meal for the last time and instructed his disciples to take bread and wine in remembrance of him.

³ This was apparently the view of Justin Martyr and of Origen, and is preserved in some church traditions today.

⁴ For a full rundown of the basis for this view, as well as some more detail on the previous point, this article is pretty top notch: http://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-was-not-born-in-a-stable/.

⁵ If you fancy some more information or a peer at the actual text, this seems as good a corner of the Internet as any: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/infancyjames.html. The document also contains another manifestation of the Jesus-was-born-in-a-cave tradition.

⁶ Adam4d will tell you exactly why it’s so dreadful: http://adam4d.com/footprints-sand/.

⁷ Admittedly, I’m not sure where said someone got that information, because Classic FM puts ‘O Holy Night’ in the top spot: http://promo.classicfm.co.uk/nations-favourite-carol/. ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ is only a couple of places behind, though.

⁸ Verse Five, to be precise. I’m not kidding. Look: http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/past_three_a_clock.htm.

⁹ Namely Santa Claus, in case that wasn’t clear. It’s quite good fun reading up on his history; the following seems as decent a place to start as any, should you feel so inclined: http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/HTML/Santa_Claus.htm.

¹⁰ This is probably my favourite Christmas song and nobody does it better than Pentatonix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifCWN5pJGIE.

¹¹ If you don’t know what my Internal Theological Snob is on about, go and read this jazz. And even if you do, go and read it anyway. It’s so important to get our heads around the fact that the baby in the manger is the same being as the Lord on the throne. So here’s the Isaiah, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+6&version=ESVUK, and the John, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+12&version=ESVUK, and the Philippians, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=phil+2&version=ESVUK. (And yes, I realise that Isaiah talks about God being enthroned between seraphim rather than cherubim as in the song, but I tend to feel the point still stands.)