BHA: Bearded men

[MSPRINKER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            12-Jun-1998 05:32am EDT
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx )

Subject: Bearded men

Colin,

Let's take a harder case:  Jesus of Nazareth.

Now there seems to be not a little evidence that someone of
the sort actually lived and walked around historical Palestine
in the first century.  Not so long after, and to this day,
he became the locus for a complex, widespread, and very powerful
set of social practices which we can lump together under the
heading "Christianity."

But there's a problem:  lots of the stuff written about him,
both around the time of his life and after, seems about as
plausible as that there is this white-bearded old man who
delivers gifts to children at Christmas.  Just to give a
for instance, here's Buck Mulligan's "Ballad of Joking Jesus"
from Joyce's ULYSSES:

I'll sing you a story like you've never heard.
Me mother's a virgin, me father's a bird.
With Joseph the Joiner, I'm sure you'll agree,
Me story's the strangest in all Galilee.

And if you be thinkin' that I'm not divine,
There'll be no free drinks when I'm makin' the wine.
But sippin' on water and wishin' for gin,
When it's wine that I'm makin' to water again.

(It goes on).

The origins of Santa (or Saint Nicholas, Kris Kringel, Father
Christmas--not always white-bearded and benevolent, as Hans
reminded us) are lost in the mists of time, so far as I
know.  But isn't possible that he once walked the earth
just as it's generally believed Jesus of Nazareth did, and
that a complex set of rituals now associated with this figure
originated with this guy who did some of this strange stuff
around Christmas?  Are Christ's reported miracles all that
different in kind, and by extension, is the figure Christ
so much more "real" than Santa?

I don't want to push this very far, but try it out as a
thought experiment.

Cheers,

Michael


     --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---