[Previous: lines 541-594]
Joseph narrates. Jesus has been born in a hut in Bethlehem. Now read on!
“Necdum clara dies merso diluxerat orbi; [595]------------
iam conferto aderant pastores agmine, et antri
floribus ac variis auxerunt limina sertis,
rustica multifori fundentes sibila canna.
Ut stabula ingressi, ad prœsepia lumina vertunt
summissi, terramque petunt, et numen adorant. [600]
Mirabar mecum tacitus, fama unde per agros
hœc subito exisset, deque ipsis quœrere cœpi.
Unus quœrentem sic est affarier orsus:
‘Pastores sumus: in vicinis saltibus omnes
pascimus: insomnem ut nobis mos ducere noctis [605]
haud partem exiguam, atque gregem servare coactum;
nocte fere media vigilantibus astitit ingens
lux cunctis supra caput, attonitisque pavore
ingenti talis vox est audita per auras:
ne trepidate, viri, vobis nova gaudia porto. [610]
Ille, piis toties promissus vatibus olim,
finibus his hodie natus Deus: eximet ille
e tenebris hominum genus, atque in pristina reddet.
Illum vicina fas vobis cernere in urbe
effultum stipula, atque humile ad praesepe iacentem.’ [615]
His moniti vicinam oculos torquemus ad urbem.
Ecce autem volucer pictis exercitus alis,
cœlestes suprà pueri toto œthere visi
nubibus impositi liquidas equitare per oras,
et mirum in morem celeri proludere cœtu. [620]
Atque ubi ter cœlum ternis toto agmine versi
lustravere choris, ter lustravere choreis,
concentu petiere polum: longé ardua Olympi
responsant: laetis dissultat plausibus aether.
Talia narrabant; nec sese explere corusci [625]
infantis facie poterant, fixique manebant
haerentes oculis, haerentes pectore toto.
Fulgebat puer ore, oculis, ac corpore ab omni
divino longe circum loca lumine complens:
qualis puniceo se pandens ore, rosarum [630]
cùm primùm dias flos visit luminis oras;
aut ubi sole novo roseis orientis in oris
enituit verni species patefacta diei.
Nos verô interea, quanquam indubitabile numen
novimus, atque Deum nec opis, nec lactis egentem, [635]
parvum alimus tamen, ut mortali semine cretum,
ubera siccantem matris; tenerumque fovemus,
invalidumque artus: mortalem quippe creatus
mortali matris traxit de corpore partem.
Atque ideo, ut veterum mos est antiquus avorum, [640]
imprimimus generis signum, Samiaque putamus
exiguam testa pellem genitalia circum;
addimus et nomen, memoresque vocamus IESVM,
ut quondam admonuit puer actus ab aethere praepes.
Idem etiam quôd sit regum de stirpe sacerdos, [645]
gentibus est Graio dictus de nomine Christis.”
“Clear daylight had not yet brightened the earth [595]------------
when a band of shepherds arrived, and placed
many-coloured flowers by the doorway, and
played a rustic tune upon their reed-pipe.
Coming into the stable they lowered their eyes
knelt by the manger and adored the child. [600]
I wondered silently to myself how
our news has gone so quickly through the fields.
I asked one of them, and he answered thus:
‘We are shepherds, grazing our flocks in the
neighbouring fields, unsleeping much of the night [605]
to keep our flocks together. Sometime around
midnight, as we shared the watch, we saw
a vast light overhead, and were struck with fear:
a mighty voice could be heard in the sky:
“Don’t be afraid, men, I bring you good news. [610]
Here, as promised by the prophets of old,
a god had been born today, and he will
lead you from darkness, make you pristine again.
You may visit him in this nearby town
where he lies on straw inside a humble hut.” [615]
Thus admonished we turned our eyes to the town.
We saw a host of youths with many-hued wings,
filling the sky above us, through the clean air
riding the clouds and with amazing swiftness,
and singing marvellous songs of rejoicing. [620]
Three times they wheeled through the skies, three times
sang their chorus, three times danced aerial dances,
then flew off to the pole star. High Olympus
echoed their song, the air filled with their music.’
This was his tale. They couldn’t get enough [625]
with gazing on the radiant child, fixing
their eyes and their souls as well fully on him.
The infant’s face glowed, his eyes and his whole body
and his divine light filled all the surroundings:
as when dawn reddens the sky, like a rose [630]
opening its shining petals for the day;
when the chambers of the east grow pink
and the beauty of a vernal day beams out.
We, in the meantime, knew him to be divine
and, as a god, he needed neither milk nor help, [635]
but still, as though he were a little mortal creature,
his mother fed him; and I kept his tiny
delicate limbs warm. Made in mortal form
he took on mortal life through his mother’s womb.
And so, according to our ancient customs, [640]
we marked him with our race’s sign: a shard
of Samian pottery circumcised him;
and we did not forget to name him JESUS,
as the angelic boy had instructed us.
And since he is a priest of royal blood, [645]
his name among the gentiles is Greek: Christ.”
At the head of this post: ‘The Adoration of the Shepherds’ by Giorgione (1510); sometimes called the ‘Allendale Nativity’ after one of its former owners. It's now in the National Gallery of Art.
The odd little detail that Joseph (though he was not a mohel) performed the circumcision of Jesus with, specifically, a shard of Samian pottery derives from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History [35:46]: ‘the priests of the Mother of the gods, known as the Galli, deprive themselves of their virility with a piece of Samian pottery, the only means, if we believe M. Caelius, of avoiding dangerous results.’ It’s an elliptical little reference this, that comes in the middle of a discussion not of bodily mutilation but, banally enough, of different kinds of pottery. Nobody knows who Marcus Caelius was. There's another reference to this business in Martial [Epigrams 3:81]: namely that the cult of Cybele uses ‘Samian pottery’ to excise both the testicles and the penis of its adherents (not that this prevents them from being sexual; that epigram also says that Cybele’s eunuchs are famously good at providing oral sex to both men and women).
This might, I suppose, look like a strangely destabilising intertext for Vida’s purposes, although it may only be that Vida means nothing more than that Samian pottery was famously hard and fine, and so would make a workable cutting edge. But perhaps that’s right. Circumcision is not only not required for Christians, it has come to figure as a mark of otherness, and not in a positive way. This abjection of the practice goes back to Rome.
Circumcision was regarded by the Greeks and Romans as a physical deformity and hence, like others who had various deformities, circumcised men were not permitted to participate in the Olympic Games. Moreover the practice of circumcision was the butt of many jokes by the pagans. This Philo (De Specialibus Legibus 1.1.1-2) begins his descriptions of the special laws of the Jews with the one termed “ridiculous by the great majority, the law concerning circumcision.” The very fact that Paul decided not to require circumcision of Christian proselytes and to interpret circumcision allegorically may well have been influenced by the general hostility of the Graeco-Roman world to this practice … That circumcision was indeed the most characteristic sign of the Jews may be deduced from the title Appella (or Apella) of one of the comedies of the third-century BCE [by the] Roman Naevius, because the word apella would be the Graeco-Latin equivalent of the Latin sine pelle “without a foreskin”. [Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton Univ. Press 1993), 155]That Vida doesn’t use the word ‘circumcise’, but instead methodically spells out what is going on (putamus/exiguam testa pellem genitalia circum 641-42) suggests perhaps a 16th-century desire to make it clear that, contra Pliny and Martial, Jesus was not here being fully emasculated.
What else? Well, line 646 specifies that ‘Christ’ is a Greek term: Χριστός (Khristós, “the anointed one”), a calque of Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ (māšīaḥ, “anointed”; whence our English word ‘messiah’).
And talking of Hellenisms: Vida here introduces a strange, and I'd say at root Greek, wobble into his account at this point. Jesus is a god, he says. Greek gods don't eat and drink human food (they live on nectar and ambrosia, which is some magical and immaterial sustenance). Yet Christ lived as a man, broke bread, ate fish and drank wine. So, after stressing that Jesus, as a god, didn't need milk, he goes right ahead and describes Mary breast-feeding him. Passing through Mary's ‘matrix’ [line 639] altered his divine form in some unspecified manner, leaving him liable to hunger, thirst and eventually death. That last is fine, of course; it's manifestly the story of Jesus as the gospels give it. It's the first bit that seems to me odd. Although perhaps that's just me.
But then perhaps I’m being too simple-minded, here. The status of Jesus’s body, and more specifically its wholeness, was energetically debated throughout medieval and Renaissance. As Irven M. Resnick notes, ‘Jesus’s foreskin became a venerated relic in European Christian communities, even into the modern era’. Several churches claimed to possess it. At the same time Renaissance artists often depicted the infant Jesus as uncircumcised, ‘despite the historical inaccuracy but anticipating his Resurrection, since medieval theologians assumed that at that time his foreskin was restored to him to render his body whole and perfect once again.’
Jacobus de Voragine reports that “it is said” an angel had carried Jesus’ foreskin to Charlemagne, who enshrined it in a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary in Aix-la-Chapelle, although Jacobus expresses as his own opinion, however, that the foreskin must be in heaven with the resurrected body of Jesus … Just as some argued that the foreskin had to be restored to the resurrected body, so too Thomas Aquinas asserts that at the Resurrection the blood Jesus’ body had lost during the Passion would be fully restored to it, leaving church relics said to contain Jesus’ blood to have blood only from abused images of Jesus (Summa Theologica 3:54.3.3). [Resnick, Marks of Distinctions: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Catholic University of America Press 2012), 66-67]This is fascinating, and we’ll come back to it, I think. Quite apart from anything it provides a really interesting context for Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
[Next: lines 647-683]
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