Even so, most of us still have folk memories of how the infant king cradled in a manger tugs at the heartstrings and this week seems a good time to set aside the cut and thrust of politics and talk about the feasts of Christmas and the Epiphany, which falls tomorrow.
Jewish monotheism was a unique development in the ancient world. The conviction that there was only one God, an all-knowing, all-powerful creator, and that the Jews were his chosen people set the children of Israel at odds with their neighbours, who believed in a variety of common-or-garden-nature religions or the Graeco-Roman abstractions of Mount Olympus.
Because they relied on a religion revealed by the prophets and recorded in the Old Testament, Jews were known as " the people of the book".
In that book there were frequent prophecies that in the fullness of time God would send them a messiah, his son, to lead and save them and extend his reign to encompass the Gentiles, the non-Jewish nations. Many Jewish scholars in the 1st century AD expected the messiah was going to be an earthly king liberating them from the yoke of Roman oppression.
Christians believe instead he was to be a suffering servant, dying in conscious sacrifice on the cross at the hands of Roman soldiers to redeem us. Secularists find it hard to take seriously the idea that we are intrinsically sinful and in need of redemption.
Ogden Nash famously joked : "How odd of God to choose the Jews. But not so odd as those who choose a Jewish God yet spurn the Jews." Pope Benedict put it another way when he said : "We are all spiritually Semites."
From a Jewish perspective, Christianity must even now seem like the immensely ingenious hijacking of their exceptionalist meta-narrative as the Chosen People. To Christians, of course, it was always God's narrative to do with whatever he wanted, in the unfolding of what we call "salvation history".
The God of the Jews of the 1st century was a fierce and jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers on to the sons to the third and fourth generation. They were more preoccupied, perhaps, with divine justice than mercy and understandably feared contamination from the Gentiles. As well, they had an ill-defined sense of what awaited the dead, beyond the promise in the Book of Wisdom: "The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God. To the foolish they did seem to die, but their souls liveth for evermore."
For Christians, the incarnation changes everything. There is an ancient prayer in the mass, when the priest prepares the chalice with water and wine. It tells us that the commingling signifies the mystery of Christ's dual nature as God and perfect man. Because he has taken our nature upon himself, he has enabled us to share in his godhead. Through holy communion, we believe that we can become Christ-like, transformed gradually by his flesh and blood in a metamorphosis called theosis.
It is something never quite dreamed of in Jewish eschatology. Human bodies suddenly come to be seen as uniquely graced. The pre-Christian and Manichean notions of war between the flesh and the spirit are confounded and man is, in a fuller way than the state of nature allows, at home in his own skin.
That is why, along with the angels, the shepherds, Mary, Joseph and the beasts in the stable, so many of us around this time still kneel and worship at the crib. The paradoxes captured in the tableau provide not only comfort but inspiration and food for thought. The unseen deity takes on human form. For the first time men are able to see the face of God.
The eternal Word condescends to become a babe in arms, unable to speak a word. His mother dandles the lord of all creation on her knees. There is no room at the inn, no pomp and circumstance, just bare necessities, which suggests a number of things about mysterious Providence. But the event doesn't go entirely uncelebrated: for the first time, men join in the songs of the angels. "Glory to God in the highest and peace to men of goodwill."
Liturgically speaking, Christmas takes an octave; eight days when time stands still so as to allow the faithful to enter into the fullness of the event. The celebrations actually go on for 12 days, with the 12th night marking the arrival of the feast of the Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. In the early church, Christmas was a much less important festivity than the arrival of the three wise men. To this day some in the Eastern Orthodox churches take that view and wait to exchange gifts until Epiphany. The Magi represent men of goodwill from every religion, come to acknowledge the messiah. They remind us that at last, under the new covenant, salvation is available to all.
Gaspar, Melchior and Balthazar brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. In doing so they recognised Christ's place in the Jewish tradition as a prophet, priest and king. The gold signifies royal rank (since he was of David's line), the incense betokens the priestly role of sacrificial offering and the myrrh, used for anointing corpses, portends the death of a prophet.
St Francis of Assisi came up with the first manger scene, which has ever since crystallised the way we tend to think of Christmas. The symbolism of gold, frankincense and myrrh is a healthy corrective.
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