Tag: Bethlehem
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The Frustrations of Travelling – What’s New?
If you think the 70 mile Christmas trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem, by donkey and foot, couldn’t have been much fun, compare it with the 50 mile trip from Edinburgh to Dundee in 1848 ….. You took train no.1, from Edinburgh Waverley down to Granton harbour on the south bank of the river Forth. You…
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‘O little town of Bethlehem’
This is my favourite Christmas carol, though I’m no longer ‘traditionally’ religious, and believe Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem. Why, some might ask, do I find this carol moving and meaningful? The reason is that its words and music symbolise and energise deep-seated archetypal contents in my psyche, which have profound meaning irrespective…
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The Nativity Stories (ii) More Questions
The chief supporting actors in Matthew’s story are the “wise men from the east”. “Magi” weren’t kings, but practitioners of oriental magical arts, which would have included astrology. In Acts 8:9 there is a ‘Magus’ called Simon who “astounded the Samaritans with his magic”. Predictably, he gets a bad press in Acts, but this is…
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The Nativity Stories (i) Asking Questions
Now that December has come, it’s time to revisit the endlessly enchanting nativity stories found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. I use the word “stories”, firstly because these are not historical accounts and, secondly, because there are two of them, even though the yearly ‘nativity plays’ join them up, and present them as…
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A Christmas Poem with a Difference
This impressive poem is capable of suggesting a variety of meanings, none of which will be “it”, and this makes it worthy of ongoing revisits. This brief post is in no way an ‘analysis’, but only a sharing of some thoughts which have arisen. Historically, the poem was written just after World War I, which…
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When and where was Jesus born?
What I aim to do is to jettison the last 2000 years of dogmas and creeds and to try to take an ‘unbaggaged’ look at Jesus. If we do this, it must immediately strike us that Jesus wasn’t a Christian – there weren’t any until around 45 CE. He was a 1st century Palestinian Jew,…
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