Word: romanizing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...stable but to one of a series of basement grottoes where they are informed Christ was born. The Nativity Church may not be the best possible guide, since it was built well after the fact, circa 324, by Helena, mother of Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to become a Christian. Nonetheless, she was heeding strong oral traditions that seem to have prevailed in the region for many years, and the idea of a cave is not so exotic as it might seem. Then, as now, many West Bank houses were built onto natural caverns that function as rooms and basements...
...animals. Luke did not include any. The ox and ass first appeared much later, in artistic renderings like a 4th century Roman sarcophagus that shows them peeking over the side of Jesus' crib. Cute as it was, the image served an interreligious enmity, employing for Christian purposes God's annoyed statement in the Old Testament Book of Isaiah that "the ox knows its owner, and the donkey knows its master's crib, but Israel has not known me." By contrast, the camels that pop up in many Nativities are relatively innocent. A passage from the medieval compendium of saints' lives...
...experts interpret these lines? As you might guess, they wonder where Luke got them. The first angel's language, some note, was less biblical than ... imperial. Brown called it "a christology phrased in a language that echoes Roman imperial propaganda." Recent scholars have said it is a near parody of one of the Emperor's titles at the time: "Son of God, Lord, Savior of the World, and the One Who Has Brought Peace on Earth...
...resemblance accidental? Some of the more left-leaning interpreters doubt it. They claim that as Luke's Nativity went on, it became more openly critical of the Roman system and supportive of the struggles of its poorer Palestinian subjects. Mary's Magnificat, for instance, reprises some of the more radical sentiments of the Hebrew Bible: "[God] hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree/ He hath filled the hungry with good things;/ and the rich he hath sent away empty...
Other scholars think this interpretation is significantly overdrawn, and suggest that the angel's language may be a straightforward homage to the Augustan official style. However anti-Roman the Gospels' undertones, they point out, they were certainly not offensive enough to prevent Constantine from eventually adopting Christianity as an official religion of his empire in A.D. 313 and exporting it around the world...