Behind | Workbook: The Nativity in Context

Grab your Workbook Journal!

[Record your answers in the workbook provided at the beginning of this course.]

The thought of God being born in a manger as a human infant may seem like an obvious biblical idea to those of us familiar with the nativity story. But for Jewish thinkers who lived during or after the time of Jesus this idea of God having a body or being human was in contradiction to monotheism.

Recall the presence of God in the Old Testament Tabernacle where God’s presence was so different that humans were not allowed to approach him directly in his dwelling place. Philo of Alexandria, an important Jewish philosopher from the time of Jesus, appeared to explain this dynamic when he insisted, “… it is contrary to holy law for what is mortal to dwell with what is immortal.”

In another place, Philo ruled out any idea of God being fully human, “… for neither is God in human form, nor is the human body God-like.” 

Similarly, Flavius Josephus, a leading Jewish scholar and historian, attributed a similar comment, in his history The Wars of the Jews, to the High Priest Eleazar as he encouraged a brave death to the Jews who were surrounded by the Romans in the mountain fortress of Masada. In the following selection from this speech note carefully the relationship he envisions between divine things and humanity. 

It is life that is a calamity to men, and not death; for this last affords our souls their liberty, and sends them by a removal into their own place of purity, where they are to be insensible of all sorts of misery; “for while souls are tied down to a mortal body, they are partakers of its miseries; and really, to speak the truth, they are themselves dead; for the union of what is divine to what is mortal is disagreeable.” It is true, the power of the soul is great, even when it is imprisoned in a mortal body; for by moving it after a way that is invisible, it makes the body a sensible instrument, and causes it to advance further in its actions than mortal nature could otherwise do. However, when it is freed from that weight which draws it down to the earth and is connected with it, it obtains its own proper place, and does then become a partaker of that blessed power, and those abilities, which are then every way incapable of being hindered in their operations. Sources: Josephus, The Works of Flavius Josephus, vol. 2, 1825, p. 509; Walter J. Burghardt, The Image of God in Man According to Cyril of Alexandra, 2009, p. 12; Philo, The Works of Philo Judaeus, vol. 2, 1854, p. 147.

3. How does Josephus frame the relationship between the human and divine?

4. What does he think of the human body and its effect on human spirituality?