Christmas in the First Century BCE

When we attempt to grasp the meaning of Christmas today we approach a conceptual event loaded with 2000 years of traditions, cultural baggage, misconceptions, faux images, and layered worldviews. It’s difficult to pull back the layers and see the event in the way first century Jews would have understood it. I think there are three primary ways – all interrelated – in which one would have understood the Christmas story: 1) coming of the Messiah, 2) fulfillment of Yahweh’s covenant to Abraham, and 3) the end of exile. I want to focus on the latter because I think it was the most relevant to the first century Jew.

The Babylonian exile (597-539 BCE) was one of the most important events in the history of Israel. It was seen as the time when Yahweh had abandoned his people because of their sins, allowing gentile enemies to conquer the Promised Land, destroy the house of God, and rule over Yahweh’s people. Yet God through his prophets had promised an eventual end to this exile and salvation for Israel from its enemies. Indeed, the Israelites did eventually return to Palestine, but while the physical exile had ended, the Jewish people believed that the spiritual exile had not ended. While Yahweh had returned his people to their homeland, there were things that indicated that the exile was not yet over. What things? For one, Israel was still being ruled over by pagan gentiles (first the Persians, then the Greeks, the Syrians, and, in the first century, the Romans). For another, the Temple had not been rebuilt to its former glory. Most importantly, many of the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah had yet to be fulfilled, particularly those that foretold the return of Yahweh to his people. So what was preventing the complete ending of exile? The answer was sin against God. The very thing that caused exile in the first place. The first century Jews believed that exile continued because God had not yet fully forgiven Israel for its corporate sin.

So note the proclamation of Gabriel to Zechariah concerning John the Baptist in Luke 1:16-17 (cf. Mark 1:1-3):

“He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

This prophecy concerns the corporate forgiveness of the corporate sin of Israel still in exile. This is about Israel repenting of their sins because Yahweh (the Lord) is returning to his people as he promised that he would (Isaiah 40:3; Malachi 3:1-2). This is about the end of exile.

Now note the prophecy of Zechariah at the birth of John (Luke 1:68-79):

“Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago), salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us — to show mercy to our ancestors and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham: to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.”

Again, Yahweh is returning to his people, Israel. He will bring salvation, specifically salvation from Israel’s enemies, i.e., the gentile rulers, i.e., Rome. John is preparing the way for this salvation by telling the people to repent of their sins. Yahweh is offering the forgiveness of sins to his people to end exile, and he is doing it primarily first through the ministry of John.

For the first century Jew who had ears to hear and eyes to see, he would have understood the Christmas story first and foremost as an end to Exile. That Yahweh was forgiving the sins of his people and returning to them to bring salvation by delivering them from their enemies. A first century Jew would have understood references to “forgiveness of sins” as denoting the specific sins that caused and continued the exile. “Salvation” would have been understood, not as an individualistic rescue of “going to heaven when you die”, but as a corporate rescue for the nation of Israel from its pagan enemies. There are various subset issues of this conception, but it would be the general thrust of how the original audience would have understood the good tidings of great joy.