The Twenty-First Century

If everything I wrote until now was irrelevant to any miracles, now, there comes the time to talk about them. Although – what can be more mysterious and enigmatic than inner world of a person and the real world we all live in?

Anyway, let us return to Jesus. As we agreed, He was born and grew up exactly as all the other children around Him; otherwise we would hear about it.

Nevertheless, I would never believe that the boy, who meant so much to His people, would be left to grow up “as it goes,” and there would be no observers to check what was happening to Him. Being anointed as a king in His very cradle, this child was obviously much too important to be left and forgotten like that.

Now – pay attention! Reading gospels, we all the time run across some strange characters, who typically carried out the most important missions; I mean Angels. There are quite a lot of places in gospels mentioning them. The really interesting thing, though, is that their tasks were of most earthly origin and importance. They, for example, comforted pregnant Mary and arrange the marriage between her and Joseph – and Joseph obeyed them (Luke 1:26-38; 2:5). They informed Joseph about the necessity to leave the country and to move to Egypt – and did it in time. Talking to Joseph, they, at the same time, mentioned that when the dangerous time would pass and it would be safe to return back to the country, they would give him a message about it as well – and they really did it when King Herod died.

The next thing, I want you to pay attention to, is the strange history we have already mentioned, a strange tale about an overcrowded inn where there was no place for the family with a woman going to give birth to her child (Luke 2:7). Was the inn really overcrowded so badly that there was not possible to find a place – any place to the poor woman? Isn’t it more likely that the family was placed in the stables on purpose? Was it done to prevent her and the coming baby from being noticed by extraneous spectators, which we talked about in the previous chapters? And the legend was invented later to explain the presence of the woman and her newly born child in such an inappropriate place, which contradicted all the norms and traditions. As for the owner of the inn – maybe, he was paid to do it? Or, maybe, he had to obey the orders?

When giving birth women used to get help – and in the most cases there are women to help each other; but there was not a single woman to help Mary when she was giving birth to her first child.

I consider as an impossible situation that there were no women in the inn, especially taking into consideration that, according to the gospels, the inn was overcrowded – and not only by men, I suppose. There had to be women among visitors, as well as among those working at the inn. Women should have been among the members of the family of the owner of the inn, at least one woman, his wife.

I have already mentioned that in Jewish culture and those similar to it, there was a tradition, which still exists some places: women in certain state, i.e., after giving birth to a child, are considered to be “unclean” and no men were allowed to see them. Besides, in case of necessity – especially in connection with the “girls” problems – every woman searches help from a woman, not from a man, and every woman helps her sister.

Still, there in the gospels we read about the opposite situation: not a single woman existed in Mary’s surrounding when she was giving birth to her first baby, just men. Only men. They were Joseph, the Wise Men, and later shepherds. That is something that would enormously contradict all the existing traditions.

Why it was like that? – The answer is obvious: to keep the secret – at least to the moment when everything important was over and those-who-make-the-decisions had made them.

Here again, Angels are mentioned. It was an Angel, who informed the shepherds about the newly born child and ordered them to come to see the baby (Luke 2:9-20). Now, there comes another question: why he, I mean, the Angel, did it? Wasn’t it because there had to be some outside witnesses whose task was to spread the message and to inform Jewish people about the newly born King? Or was it done in order to prevent unwanted rumours as shepherds anyway would learn about the mother and the baby in the stables? It is well-known nowadays: if people are given explanations in advance, i.e., before questions arise in their minds, first, it is not sure the questions arise in general, and second, the explanations provoke much less discussions about the item than the perplexity resulting in questions and rumours.

Anyway, no matter which explanation we choose, all the activities of Angels look like deliberate actions of the people, who perfectly well understood both: the political situation in the country and psychology of people. This means, that we again came to the possibility of existence of an organization or a group of people, most likely, not numerous and kept under deep secret, which members could easily communicate all the strata of society from a palace of a king to the camp-fire of shepherds – actually, we read about it in gospels. We see the organisation that had possibility and resources to obtain the reliable information and to use it properly as, e.g., sending it to the place where it was needed – and did it fast! We see the organisation, members of which were able to make the decisions considering lives and activities of other people, who obeyed them.

The conclusion is astonishing and yet… Let us try to check it once again; but this time we’ll go another way round.