Last night was our Lessons & Carols service, replete with many Christmas songs, common and obscure. We revisited "Adam Lay Ybounden" and "Jesus Christ the Apple Tree," which I've written about before.
A new one for me was the "Cherry Tree Carol," an English carol possibly derived from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. In the carol, Mary asks Joseph to pick a cherry for her, because she's pregnant. The original version interjects with Joseph bitterly saying the man who got Mary pregnant should get her a cherry, at which point the Jesus-fetus speaks up in utero and commands the trees to bow to His Mother. Joseph is suitably chastened. The version we sang at church was more sanitized, but still has the trees bowing so Mary can get her own fruit.
Obviously, no one thinks this actually happened. There's the simple fact that no ancient Galilean likely ever encountered a cherry tree – the P-M version was a date tree. But going beyond the details, this sort of story is clearly mythical – it shows beliefs about the divinity of Jesus and about Jesus' supremacy over nature. (See also other non-canonical stories where someone was healed by baby Jesus' dirty diaper, or "The trees of nature fruitless be compared with Christ the apple tree.") And I'm fully confident that 95% or more of the congregation heard the tale in this mythic context – they don't believe that Joseph and Mary literally had a spat in an English orchard which was resolved by a voice from Mary's torso and a subservient fruit tree.
What amazes me is that this context doesn't extend to other stories. Every early culture had myths explaining the things they didn't have the science for – why is the sky blue? Why do the seasons change? Why do Those People hate us and we hate them?
So consider this reading from Lessons & Carols:
The Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you among all animals
and among all wild creatures;
upon your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
Now, the Lessons & Carols service introduces this with the heading, "God tells sinful Adam that he has lost the life of Paradise and that his seed will bruise the serpent’s head." Ask any Christian and they will tell you this is the protoevangelium, though they might not know that word for it. It's considered the first prophecy of Jesus (offspring of a woman, e.g. virgin birth) overcoming Satan (offspring of the serpent).
But when I hear this reading, I hear a mythic story that answers basic questions about the world from an early culture:
- Why don't snakes have legs?
- Why do snakes bite?
- Why are women and children scared of snakes?
The same has long struck me about the main prophecy construed to be of the virgin birth, Isaiah 7:14. Isaiah is trying to convince Ahaz to hold out against the king of Assyria. Isaiah offers to let Ahaz pick the sign from God that would convince him; Ahaz declines, to Isaiah's frustration, so Isaiah declares that God will pick a sign himself.
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The young woman will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. He will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.
There's much debate about whether this was a literal child of someone Ahaz knew, or Isaiah's own child, or merely a timeframe – i.e. "the time it takes a child to be conceived, born, and old enough to eat solid food." Regardless, though, there's a clear and obvious present interpretation to what Isaiah wrote. If he's intending to prophesy a virgin birth eight centuries later, he certainly hid it well.
Christians do this so much there's actually a term for it: dual fulfillment. It's the idea that something can have a present, obvious meaning and a hidden secret meaning that's revealed to be a prophecy only with the perspective of time. The trouble with that is, nothing tells you the hidden prophecy is there, so you only "find it" once you have a later event that somehow symbolically hearkens back to the old story. Such a belief makes it very easy to find whatever hidden prophecy you like.
Maybe there's a dual fulfillment to the fact I had orange juice this morning, but it will only be known when I retire to an orange grove in my 70s.
(Another explanation of some of these is that the document was actually written after the prophesied event, but it was written as if it were a prophecy and thus "encoded" using language from its supposed timeframe. Isaiah clearly predates Jesus, so that's not the case here, but it is a widely-held theory that this passage was written after the fall of Assyria.)
And all this so that they can claim that Jesus "...is He Whom seers in old time / Chanted of with one accord; / Whom the voices of the prophets / Promised in their faithful word." We're humans, wired to see patterns, and it's well known that we find them even when they don't actually exist. Christmas and the prophesied coming of the Christ-child are a prime example of this fallacy.
Myths are useful, even necessary. But know that they're myths, and guard against finding connections that aren't there.
Hail Satan! Amen.