I begin again to write the first of three days. I will report first my experience of Christmas Day 2008. The day commenced with Midnight Mass, which had already commenced at 11 pm British time, celebrated by the Pope at St Peter’s in Vatican City, and it ended for the purpose of this writing with The Messiah by Handel from the Barbican Concert Hall in London. The morning commenced with Carols requested by listeners.
The event of unique importance for me and for everyone was an investigation spread over two hours by Channel Four by an academic religious and cultural historian trying to establish if any part of the Christmas story had a historical basis. Such a programme will have been enjoyed by Jew and Muslim theologians and some believers, and would have been banned in parts of the USA. It will have horrified evangelical churches throughout the world who base their beliefs and teachings upon scriptural writings. However while the programme raises major questions about historical accuracy which could lead top some questioning and losing their faith, it is not a programme about faith or the power of faith and the mind over the physical and the material.
Had such a programme been about Mohammed and the Muslim faith all those connected with the programme would have been declared enemies meriting immediate elimination.
I forgot the time difference between here and Italy and when just before midnight I went in search of midnight mass on the box and caught the last part of a live red button relay from St Peter’s on Sky channel News. I watched to reflect on the lives of my care and birth mothers and their faith, and on decisions regarding my approach to aspects of their lives in the future.
Christmas Day, morning commenced with Classics FM carols while I decided how I was feeling and what kind of day I should experience given the great cook after the great defrost the previous day and a refrigerator filled with plates of cooked but, cold chicken, slices of beef, salmon fish cases and breaded fish.
God Rest you merry Gentleman I bringing you tidings of Joy; Joy to the World.
Away in a Manager for William aged 4 years. Hark the Herald Angel’s Sing.
Twelve Days of Christmas for Patrick aged eight years from Ireland.
Sleigh Ride but is it a Carol?
Christmas Carol John Rutter.
Overture French Carol. The Holy and the Ivy.
Ding Dong Hosanna in Excelsis Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
Bach -Christmas Oration
Sussex Carol-Kings college.
Hallelujah-Handel.
Winters Snow, Oh Holy Night.
Mary’s lullaby John Rutter,
Jingle Bells.
It was time for other things and for lunch. I had bathe, shaved, did my hair, put on fresh clothes and shoes. I was not expecting callers but it was Christmas Day.
In the evening there was a choice of viewing, not the unlimited choice one might have expected with such a captive audience for one day of the year when everything everywhere providing entertainment was closed.
I had marked down as priority the latest Robert Beckford demolition of the academic historical basis for the Christian adherence to the scriptures. Robert Beckford has provided similar programmes over the past four years with Who wrote the Bible in 2004 and attempted to show that what is known as the Bible, especially the New Testament has been the subject of selectivity, including some early texts but excluding others, and was also written by those who often not contemporary witnesses of the situations described and overall was rewritten according to changing needs and circumstances of those controlling the religions. The film appeared on Christmas Day
Two years later on Christmas Day Channel Four showed the second programme which provided the evidence that Jesus was created to John the Baptist and that his family unit consisted of four brothers and two sisters and that his Ministry passed to his eldest brother James and also covered his actual relationship with Mary Magdalene
Last year the Christmas Day programme investigated the historical evidence for aspect of the story of Jesus in earlier religions.
In addition in 2006 Channel Four showed a programme called Ghetto Britain and the BBC also showed programmes on colonial history from the Afro Caribbean perspective, and also in 2006 there was a film about religion and the cinema entitled The Passion: Films and Fury.
Earlier this year a film, the Secrets of the Disciples showed how Judas became demonised and the role of the female Apostles. I obtained the following information about Robert from his official site.
“ Dr Robert Beckford is an educator, author and award-winning broadcaster. An educator for most of his life, he first taught adult literacy at Bournville College in Birmingham in the early 1990s and progressed to become the first ever tutor in Black Theology at Queens College, Birmingham (1992-8) where he taught trainee priests and ministers for the Anglican and Methodist churches.
He began teaching at the University of Birmingham in 1999, working first as a Research Fellow with black offenders at Birmingham Prison and then moving to the faculty as the first Lecturer in Black Theology in 2001. He spent two years as the Reader in Black Theology and Popular Culture at Oxford Brookes University, and is currently teaching as an associate lecturer at Cambridge University.
Robert is the author of five academic texts in the field of religion, culture and politics, including a study of Rastafari and Pentecostalism (Dread and Pentecostal 2002), Gang Culture in Birmingham (God and the Gangs 2004) and a Theology of Reggae-Dub (Jesus Dub 2006). His current research explores the role of documentary film as resistance to the bewitchment of black British Christianity by a-politicism and anti intellectualism (Documentary as Exorcism, Continuum 2010).
A firm believer in teaching for social change, Robert has retained a commitment to teaching outside of traditional contexts, including community groups, care homes and male prisons. An extension of his organic approach to intellectual matters led him into broadcasting in 1999.
Robert has presented a plethora of documentaries on radio and television and made his debut in the Trevor Phillip’s series, Britain’s Slave Past. He quickly moved on to work on number of programmes with BBC 4 including Ebony Towers (2001). Robert presented his first mainstream feature length documentary in 2002 for BBC 2 on the story of Jamaican Independence (Blood and Fire) and earned a BAFTA for diversity in educational broadcasting for a six part series for BBC Religion (Test of Time 2002). He began working with Channel 4 in 2003 and struck up a dynamic partnership with the commissioning editor, Aaqil Ahmed.
To date Robert has averaged an impressive two films per year with Channel 4, becoming a regular fixture on the prime time television slots of Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. He even found time to present a weekly BBC West Midlands Radio Show in Birmingham 2006/7. As one of the most prolific black documentary presenters in Britain, his credits include God is Black (2004), Empire Pays Back (2005), The Secret Family of Jesus (2006), The Great Africa Scandal (2007), The Secrets of the 12 Disciples (2008) Decoding the Nativity (2008)and The Dark Ages and the emergence of an English inclusivity(2009).
His films for channel 4 have earned him a ‘controversial’ label which he interprets as, ‘a cultural field that can only locate black men as athletes, entertainers or problematic.’
Secure with his modest success, Robert has worked to develop talent within the African and African Caribbean community, including Andy Akinwolere (Blue Peter)and Jazz artist Soweto Kinch. Robert is currently turning his hand to TV drama and is currently collaborating with playwright and actor, Kwame Kwe-Armah on a gritty but redemptive urban series.”
The Wikipedia article give the impression that he is still the Reader In Black Theology and popular culture at the Oxford Brookes University, based on the former City Technology college and which became the alternative University in the City and for the County, on Headington Hill having taken over the estate of Robert Maxwell at Headington Hall which was opposite the former technical College during my first year at Ruskin and then when I lived for just over a year at Headington.
In the present programme there is not much of the present Christmas Nativity story which remains unchallenged. I spent the greater part of Saturday morning two days later trying to view the programme again using the Channel Four player in order to ensure that I was able to follow up the programme with other research
Who was Mary and where did she live is the first question behind this programme? The first problem is that Nazareth does not appear to have existed as place until several hundred years after her death but there is the remains of what would have been the largest urban area in Galilee at that time and which was the scene of much trouble between the local inhabitants of the Roman occupiers which much rape of young women and boys.
This brings to one of the central beliefs of Catholicism but a lesser extent of other Christian faith except the Evangelical: The virgin Birth. The programme presents the issue that as an orthodox Jew given that the New Testament indicates Mary, Joseph and Jesus were, had Mary become pregnant outside of marriage because of a loving relationship she and her lover would have been stoned to death. The programme argues that the more likely option was the she along with others was the subject of rape by Roman soldiers and there is recorded references to Jesus being the son of particular Roman soldier and that the child was accepted by Joseph as his own.
There is also the matter that one of the writers of the New Testament scriptures which were accepted into the Catholic and subsequent Christian Bibles goes to great length to demonstrate the Joseph was 27th generation descendent of King David of Bethlehem, and important thing to do because of the Old testament prophecy that the Messiah be a descendent of Davis and would be born in Bethlehem. Given the evidence which Beckford collated for his earlier programme that Jesus had brothers and sisters, the argument that Joseph was in fact the normal father must also be considered a strong possibility.
Just as December 25th is the day of a pagan festival, the year of broth remains debatable for reasons related to the reign of King Herod and the reference to the reason for the trip to Bethlehem was the census. The census took place when Jesus was about ten years of age and there is no evidence that Jews would have been required to move to their ancestral home places assuming that they knew there these were. The whole Bethlehem nativity is a theological creation to show that the prophecy had been fulfilled.
Moreover of the two scriptural reference one refers to Jesus born in a house/home and the other, presuming the tie in with Bethlehem that there was no room in the Inn. The reference to Stable and feeding troth (manger) are only in one scripture and can be argued as part of fitting the birth into the Messiah prophecy. If one examines the houses used by Jewish citizens at that time then the birth warmest have taken place in the best and warmest room within the property and which would have shared animals.
The Nativity as performed by children in schools throughout Christian based countries provides a picture of a birth with Joseph, Shepherds and visiting kings. However the reality that for a birth at time the men would have played no part until the cleansing ritual would have been completed. The Shepherds represent the the ordinary Jewish people at that time who in fact only grazed their sheep between March and November. There is also only reference to wise men from the East who later became kings and one black. This was a later addition to reflect the development of Ethiopia which a Christian country several centuries later and the largest and second most powerful country at the time. Most Catholic and Christian theologians regard this part of the nativity as a development, flowering one put it, which became a picture with the Renaissance.
Robert then produces the conclusion from with which eh started. The story of the Nativity as it has come to be handed down through the Christian church is a theological creation to help the development on what became a new religion in the centuries following the death of Jesus. The writers of the New Testament scriptures about the birth were not historians or contemporary witnesses but they were writers recording their beliefs and their faiths to be passed on to others. For Catholics and Christians there is the divinity of Jesus through his birth and his resurrection after human death offering eternal salvation.
To understand the power of this concept listen to the Handel’s Messiah as I did on Christmas Day evening with Sir Colin Davis conducting the London Symphony Orchestra for the last time before becoming its president, a position which has not been filled for close on two decades. But if one really wants to understand the nature and power of faith then I reflect on the years, the months, the weeks and the days and then final moments of the death of my mother
The event of unique importance for me and for everyone was an investigation spread over two hours by Channel Four by an academic religious and cultural historian trying to establish if any part of the Christmas story had a historical basis. Such a programme will have been enjoyed by Jew and Muslim theologians and some believers, and would have been banned in parts of the USA. It will have horrified evangelical churches throughout the world who base their beliefs and teachings upon scriptural writings. However while the programme raises major questions about historical accuracy which could lead top some questioning and losing their faith, it is not a programme about faith or the power of faith and the mind over the physical and the material.
Had such a programme been about Mohammed and the Muslim faith all those connected with the programme would have been declared enemies meriting immediate elimination.
I forgot the time difference between here and Italy and when just before midnight I went in search of midnight mass on the box and caught the last part of a live red button relay from St Peter’s on Sky channel News. I watched to reflect on the lives of my care and birth mothers and their faith, and on decisions regarding my approach to aspects of their lives in the future.
Christmas Day, morning commenced with Classics FM carols while I decided how I was feeling and what kind of day I should experience given the great cook after the great defrost the previous day and a refrigerator filled with plates of cooked but, cold chicken, slices of beef, salmon fish cases and breaded fish.
God Rest you merry Gentleman I bringing you tidings of Joy; Joy to the World.
Away in a Manager for William aged 4 years. Hark the Herald Angel’s Sing.
Twelve Days of Christmas for Patrick aged eight years from Ireland.
Sleigh Ride but is it a Carol?
Christmas Carol John Rutter.
Overture French Carol. The Holy and the Ivy.
Ding Dong Hosanna in Excelsis Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
Bach -Christmas Oration
Sussex Carol-Kings college.
Hallelujah-Handel.
Winters Snow, Oh Holy Night.
Mary’s lullaby John Rutter,
Jingle Bells.
It was time for other things and for lunch. I had bathe, shaved, did my hair, put on fresh clothes and shoes. I was not expecting callers but it was Christmas Day.
In the evening there was a choice of viewing, not the unlimited choice one might have expected with such a captive audience for one day of the year when everything everywhere providing entertainment was closed.
I had marked down as priority the latest Robert Beckford demolition of the academic historical basis for the Christian adherence to the scriptures. Robert Beckford has provided similar programmes over the past four years with Who wrote the Bible in 2004 and attempted to show that what is known as the Bible, especially the New Testament has been the subject of selectivity, including some early texts but excluding others, and was also written by those who often not contemporary witnesses of the situations described and overall was rewritten according to changing needs and circumstances of those controlling the religions. The film appeared on Christmas Day
Two years later on Christmas Day Channel Four showed the second programme which provided the evidence that Jesus was created to John the Baptist and that his family unit consisted of four brothers and two sisters and that his Ministry passed to his eldest brother James and also covered his actual relationship with Mary Magdalene
Last year the Christmas Day programme investigated the historical evidence for aspect of the story of Jesus in earlier religions.
In addition in 2006 Channel Four showed a programme called Ghetto Britain and the BBC also showed programmes on colonial history from the Afro Caribbean perspective, and also in 2006 there was a film about religion and the cinema entitled The Passion: Films and Fury.
Earlier this year a film, the Secrets of the Disciples showed how Judas became demonised and the role of the female Apostles. I obtained the following information about Robert from his official site.
“ Dr Robert Beckford is an educator, author and award-winning broadcaster. An educator for most of his life, he first taught adult literacy at Bournville College in Birmingham in the early 1990s and progressed to become the first ever tutor in Black Theology at Queens College, Birmingham (1992-8) where he taught trainee priests and ministers for the Anglican and Methodist churches.
He began teaching at the University of Birmingham in 1999, working first as a Research Fellow with black offenders at Birmingham Prison and then moving to the faculty as the first Lecturer in Black Theology in 2001. He spent two years as the Reader in Black Theology and Popular Culture at Oxford Brookes University, and is currently teaching as an associate lecturer at Cambridge University.
Robert is the author of five academic texts in the field of religion, culture and politics, including a study of Rastafari and Pentecostalism (Dread and Pentecostal 2002), Gang Culture in Birmingham (God and the Gangs 2004) and a Theology of Reggae-Dub (Jesus Dub 2006). His current research explores the role of documentary film as resistance to the bewitchment of black British Christianity by a-politicism and anti intellectualism (Documentary as Exorcism, Continuum 2010).
A firm believer in teaching for social change, Robert has retained a commitment to teaching outside of traditional contexts, including community groups, care homes and male prisons. An extension of his organic approach to intellectual matters led him into broadcasting in 1999.
Robert has presented a plethora of documentaries on radio and television and made his debut in the Trevor Phillip’s series, Britain’s Slave Past. He quickly moved on to work on number of programmes with BBC 4 including Ebony Towers (2001). Robert presented his first mainstream feature length documentary in 2002 for BBC 2 on the story of Jamaican Independence (Blood and Fire) and earned a BAFTA for diversity in educational broadcasting for a six part series for BBC Religion (Test of Time 2002). He began working with Channel 4 in 2003 and struck up a dynamic partnership with the commissioning editor, Aaqil Ahmed.
To date Robert has averaged an impressive two films per year with Channel 4, becoming a regular fixture on the prime time television slots of Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. He even found time to present a weekly BBC West Midlands Radio Show in Birmingham 2006/7. As one of the most prolific black documentary presenters in Britain, his credits include God is Black (2004), Empire Pays Back (2005), The Secret Family of Jesus (2006), The Great Africa Scandal (2007), The Secrets of the 12 Disciples (2008) Decoding the Nativity (2008)and The Dark Ages and the emergence of an English inclusivity(2009).
His films for channel 4 have earned him a ‘controversial’ label which he interprets as, ‘a cultural field that can only locate black men as athletes, entertainers or problematic.’
Secure with his modest success, Robert has worked to develop talent within the African and African Caribbean community, including Andy Akinwolere (Blue Peter)and Jazz artist Soweto Kinch. Robert is currently turning his hand to TV drama and is currently collaborating with playwright and actor, Kwame Kwe-Armah on a gritty but redemptive urban series.”
The Wikipedia article give the impression that he is still the Reader In Black Theology and popular culture at the Oxford Brookes University, based on the former City Technology college and which became the alternative University in the City and for the County, on Headington Hill having taken over the estate of Robert Maxwell at Headington Hall which was opposite the former technical College during my first year at Ruskin and then when I lived for just over a year at Headington.
In the present programme there is not much of the present Christmas Nativity story which remains unchallenged. I spent the greater part of Saturday morning two days later trying to view the programme again using the Channel Four player in order to ensure that I was able to follow up the programme with other research
Who was Mary and where did she live is the first question behind this programme? The first problem is that Nazareth does not appear to have existed as place until several hundred years after her death but there is the remains of what would have been the largest urban area in Galilee at that time and which was the scene of much trouble between the local inhabitants of the Roman occupiers which much rape of young women and boys.
This brings to one of the central beliefs of Catholicism but a lesser extent of other Christian faith except the Evangelical: The virgin Birth. The programme presents the issue that as an orthodox Jew given that the New Testament indicates Mary, Joseph and Jesus were, had Mary become pregnant outside of marriage because of a loving relationship she and her lover would have been stoned to death. The programme argues that the more likely option was the she along with others was the subject of rape by Roman soldiers and there is recorded references to Jesus being the son of particular Roman soldier and that the child was accepted by Joseph as his own.
There is also the matter that one of the writers of the New Testament scriptures which were accepted into the Catholic and subsequent Christian Bibles goes to great length to demonstrate the Joseph was 27th generation descendent of King David of Bethlehem, and important thing to do because of the Old testament prophecy that the Messiah be a descendent of Davis and would be born in Bethlehem. Given the evidence which Beckford collated for his earlier programme that Jesus had brothers and sisters, the argument that Joseph was in fact the normal father must also be considered a strong possibility.
Just as December 25th is the day of a pagan festival, the year of broth remains debatable for reasons related to the reign of King Herod and the reference to the reason for the trip to Bethlehem was the census. The census took place when Jesus was about ten years of age and there is no evidence that Jews would have been required to move to their ancestral home places assuming that they knew there these were. The whole Bethlehem nativity is a theological creation to show that the prophecy had been fulfilled.
Moreover of the two scriptural reference one refers to Jesus born in a house/home and the other, presuming the tie in with Bethlehem that there was no room in the Inn. The reference to Stable and feeding troth (manger) are only in one scripture and can be argued as part of fitting the birth into the Messiah prophecy. If one examines the houses used by Jewish citizens at that time then the birth warmest have taken place in the best and warmest room within the property and which would have shared animals.
The Nativity as performed by children in schools throughout Christian based countries provides a picture of a birth with Joseph, Shepherds and visiting kings. However the reality that for a birth at time the men would have played no part until the cleansing ritual would have been completed. The Shepherds represent the the ordinary Jewish people at that time who in fact only grazed their sheep between March and November. There is also only reference to wise men from the East who later became kings and one black. This was a later addition to reflect the development of Ethiopia which a Christian country several centuries later and the largest and second most powerful country at the time. Most Catholic and Christian theologians regard this part of the nativity as a development, flowering one put it, which became a picture with the Renaissance.
Robert then produces the conclusion from with which eh started. The story of the Nativity as it has come to be handed down through the Christian church is a theological creation to help the development on what became a new religion in the centuries following the death of Jesus. The writers of the New Testament scriptures about the birth were not historians or contemporary witnesses but they were writers recording their beliefs and their faiths to be passed on to others. For Catholics and Christians there is the divinity of Jesus through his birth and his resurrection after human death offering eternal salvation.
To understand the power of this concept listen to the Handel’s Messiah as I did on Christmas Day evening with Sir Colin Davis conducting the London Symphony Orchestra for the last time before becoming its president, a position which has not been filled for close on two decades. But if one really wants to understand the nature and power of faith then I reflect on the years, the months, the weeks and the days and then final moments of the death of my mother
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