Blog Post #9: The Nativity: A Christmas Image with Sabrina C. Higgins

As we draw nearer to Christmas, we might look around and note that homes in cities around the globe are suddenly alight with lights of every imaginable colour and decked with festive decorations in shades of red, green and gold. Amidst the familiar Santas, reindeers, and garlands that appear with frequency amongst our holiday decor, and which reflect the secular aspects that have come to be associated with Christmas, there are other displays which are more closely associated with the Christian roots of this holiday, notably the inclusion of angels, doves, and the accustomed star atop the Christmas tree. There is one scene, however, that is so central to the Christian roots of this holiday that the replication of its central event has become a fixture of Christmas décor in many Christians homes – that is, the Nativity (or the birth of Christ). In contemporary Christianity, this scene is typically expressed through the visual recreation of the moments after Jesus’ birth in which his mother (the Virgin Mary) and Joseph stand on either side of a manger that bears the infant Jesus. The Holy Family is often flanked by the Three Wise Men, a shepherd, sheep (or lambs), and an angel, while the star of Bethlehem shines brightly overhead, announcing His birth (Figure 1).

Artistic renditions of the Nativity are not limited, however, to contemporary Christianity; in fact, we can trace this iconography back to the late third or early fourth century CE. The relatively late appearance of such a central Christian scene within the visual repertoire of early Christianity might seem odd initially, but we must remember that Christianity was not an officially sanctioned religion within the Roman Empire until the reign of Constantine in the fourth century. Many of its earliest adherents were forced to worship in secret and faced sporadic persecution from Rome’s various emperors. As such, there is no extant evidence for any Christian images before 200 CE. When Christians do begin to create a distinct iconography in the third century, it is perhaps unsurprising, then, that these images appear in relatively inconspicuous contexts, such as the Roman catacombs, and on sarcophagi and personal items. We must highlight, however, that the earliest Christian images largely relied on stories from the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament), such as Jonah and the Whale (Figure 2) and Daniel and the lion’s den. At this time the New Testament – at least as a defined collection of texts – did not yet exist.

That is not to say that third- and fourth-century Christians were unaware of the gospels – these texts would have circulated amongst early Christian communities in one fashion or another. And scenes from the New Testament certainly find their way into the visual repertoire of the faithful in the third and fourth centuries, especially in the catacombs. The Good Shepherd – that is, Jesus carrying a lamb around his neck to represent his flock – is perhaps the most popular among them, but scenes of the Nativity also figure into the early Christian artistic tradition. In its earliest iterations, the Nativity differs substantially from the modern renditions of the scene, favouring the account of Matthew and omitting any reference to the manger. Instead, the first visual accounts of this scene highlight the interaction between a seated Mary, who holds the infant Jesus in her lap, and the three Magi, one of whom often points towards a star; no other characters take part in the scene (Figure 3).

The Protoevangelium of James, on the other hand, introduces a far more interesting variation of the Nativity account, in which Salome, an associate of an unnamed midwife (sometimes referred to as a midwife herself), rejects her midwife companion’s claims that a virgin has given birth to a son. As a result, she is resolved to conduct a “trial” to reveal Mary’s deceit, notably to test whether Mary’s hymen is still intact. After conducting her test, her hand begins to fall off, as if burned by fire. An angel then appears to her and tells her to touch the infant Jesus, and she is miraculously healed – this is Jesus’ first miracle. It should be noted that while Salome appears in Christian art from the sixth century onwards, the more gruesome elements of her story are always omitted. Instead, she typically appears next to Mary and the Child, bearing witness to his miraculous birth (Figure 6). Salome appears much more frequently in Coptic and Eastern Orthodox iconography, but she is not excluded from the imagery stemming from the Latin West (ex. sixth-century cathedra of Ravenna’s Bishop Maximian).

So, this Christmas, when you put up your Nativity scenes in your home or drive past an installation of it on the lawn of your neighbourhood church, take note of the changes this scene has undergone since its first appearance in Rome. Perhaps you’ll spy an ox and an ass in the midst, like this Nativity display in Montreal (Figure 7), or perhaps you’ll notice Salome’s enduring presence on Medieval Orthodox icons of the Nativity. Nevertheless, we can see the lasting legacy of the varying gospel and apocryphal accounts of Jesus’ birth and the evolving nature of our collective visual understanding of this biblical event.

Dr. Higgins is the Assistant Professor of Aegean and Mediterranean Societies and Cultures at Simon Fraser University, where she is cross-appointed between the departments of Humanities and Archaeology. Her research stands at the intersection of Art History, Archaeology, Religious Studies, Papyrology and Gender Studies, with a primary focus on the material culture of early Christian cults in late antique Egypt, especially the cults of the Virgin Mary and St. Thecla. She was recently awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant for her project, “The Early Cult of the Virgin and the Hegemony of the Text”. In addition to this research, Dr. Higgins is an active field archaeologist. She is currently the Assistant Director of the excavations at Golemo Gradište, a late antique basilica in the Republic of North Macedonia, and a co-investigator on the Temple of Isis Graffiti Project, Philae, Egypt.