Christmas — The Rest of the Story

[David777]

Yesterday 12/25/2023, Christmas evening, as I was enduring an unpleasant decades long health issue I won't explain herein, upon browsing through OTA channels on my TV, came upon local CTS channel 42.1, I infrequently ever watch, that had the following presentation by Rick Renner that is now also on the below Youtube link about 50 minutes long, that describes the Christmas story with added scholarly information beyond what is in New Testament scripture.

For any Christian Senior Forums members, I'll highly recommend watching the below presentation that goes well beyond anything I'd ever discerned from scripture that tends to be scattered about in various Bible books. Note these are not facts, nor is scripture but is well reasoned putting the traditional story in believable light.

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Christmas — The Rest of the Story, Youtube video including images, 58:20

Webpage with map of that era:

Map and History of Israel at the time of Jesus Christ

2:40 Mary and Joseph were both descendants of King David within a clan located in Nazareth. Mary's well to do parents possibly involved with sacred scrolls, were in Jerusalem and she was placed in a special religious girl's school. Later her parents moved to Sepphoris near Nazareth in the territory of Galilee a distance of about 60 miles.

Over millennia many have argued about how the notion of a virgin birth with Mary is nonsense. However in this modern science era it is one of the easiest to explain away in believable terms.

At 11:20 Renner relates Mary conceived in a moment. However that supernatural like description is where I suggest instead Mary if so was impregnated by a physical process of an advanced race of Ultimate Intelligent Entities I hypothesize angels and possible God actually were. To do so given our current level of biological and genetic science would be quite believably possible by first anesthetizing her say as she was already sleeping, then implanting into her uterus and an egg, DNA that may have been derived over millennia from what had been that of Adam's, and then specially enhanced. She would then have been taken out of anesthesia, and allowed to awake without even knowing what had occurred.

17:30 Jesus was probably not born in a manger in a barn as is often described but rather in one of several rock caves used by special rabbinacal shepherds that provided lambs for Passover sacrificial purposes. Such lambs were wrapped in swaddling cloth in order to be presented to inspecting sacrificial priests. Thus another connection of Jesus as the "Lamb of God".

That cave site is where in AD 326, Helena, the mother of converted Roman Constantinople Emperor Constantine, traveled to interview descendants in order to record information about holy sites. At the cave Bethlehem location in 339 AD, they built a church that was later rebuilt a second time in 520 AD by the Emperor Justinian as elaborate cathedral the current Church of the Nativity.

At 24:30 relates a spectacle with angels shown to visiting shepherds. At 30:50 Mary likely related those events to those that wrote the Gospels including Luke. At 31:10 Renner begins discussing how the appearance of the Maji have heretofore been misinterpreted. That they likely arrived 2 years later. At 35:00 Renner discusses the star in the sky that led the Maji. I'll speculate that such was not a star but rather a UIE spacecraft up above the Earth since it could be positioned to lead them on their journey. But the star did not point to Bethlehem where Jesus was born, a tiny village at that time but rather to where Mary and Joseph with Jesus had moved to the nearby larger city of Nazareth.

At 43:10 once the caravan of Maji appeared at Mary and Joseph's house they delivered their gifts that then became what they lived off of in Egypt where they escaped from murderous Herod. At 46:00 Renner relates how excess funds from Maji may have been stored in Sepphoris a banking center that after the family returned 3 years later could be used during following mystery years before Jesus began his ministry at about age 30.

 

[David777]

The below site is a paid website that after a few seconds becomes blocked. I'll demonstrate how one can still read content on such blocked pages that very few tend to bother opening accounts with. As a Windows computer user from earliest versions, I always keep a Notepad open on my desktop that has many purposes, especially removing any non-text formatting characters.

Upon opening such sites, immediately be prepared with mouse located on such pages to on their keyboard enter:

<CTRL>a <CTRL>c

<CTRL> being depressing of the Ctrl key simultaneously with say the "a" key. That selects everything in a browser window. Thus Select All Copy. Then enter <CTRL>v to Paste it into a Notepad window. Ignore all the browser page characters except the core informational text.

Christ's Birthplace Bethlehem Has Surprising History
snippets:

...St. Helena was the Emperor Constantine’s mother. In her late teens, she was a barmaid somewhere near Isthmia or Smyrna. She married a very ambitious Roman general, who had divorced his first wife, and they had a son, who became the emperor Constantine. At a great age, his mother became the most powerful woman in the empire and a very influential Christian.

Christianity seemed to appeal to wealthy Roman women because many of them had built up large inherited fortunes, either through divorce or death. But there wasn’t any way to use that power in Roman political society. Christianity became a roundabout way in which they could have influence.

St. Helena was one of these women, and the most powerful of them. She made a huge pilgrimage, building churches as she traveled through Europe, what’s now Turkey and the Middle East, until she arrives in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

The church she built in Bethlehem is unlike any other. She picked the spot because the Roman bishop of Caesarea took her there, and the locals pointed out the spot that had, for the previous 200 years, been where pilgrims had celebrated. She saw this little cave and this ceramic manger or trough where people worshiped Christ. She wasn’t inventing the mythology. She was celebrating a site that already existed.

The church she built is unlike any other. She basically burrowed into the cave, opened up the top of it, put a roof on and built a rotunda with a balcony, so you could look down into the cave. It was St. Helena who created the famous little town of Bethlehem. She put the place on the map as the center of pilgrimage. She was followed by other very wealthy Roman women, the most prominent among them being St. Paula.

Sadly, the church she built doesn’t exist anymore. The Samaritans burnt it down in a revolt. Two churches following the same design also no longer exist. But the cave does, though it’s changed...