What would it take to create a Christmas Pageant Play that was true to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s birth, but would also accurately describe the people, places and events of the time? What would it take to make this story scripturally and historically accurate, but also highly entertaining?

My last post showed how I tried 40 years ago to make the Christmas Story scripturally accurate, and it turned out to be a snooze-fest. Let’s move on to how to make a Bible story entertaining. The traditional Christmas Story and Nativity Scene neatly combine all the elements of the Matthew and Luke Gospels into a short narrative with simplistic and easy to understand imagery. Angels appear in the night sky and send shepherds from the fields tending their flocks to a stable to find a newborn baby in an animal feed trough, surrounded by His parents and the stable animals. Three wise men are coincidentally there to visit the child with perfect timing, bearing expensive gifts. Everyone and everything is picture perfect, with accessories and decorations to augment the themes of prophecy fulfillment and the humble beginnings of a Saviour born to all people, Jews and Gentiles alike.

What is the Hollywood treatment of the Gospels? The Passion Story is very entertainingly portrayed in “Jesus Christ Superstar”, with high energy singing and choreographed dancing to keep the audience’s attention. More slower-paced movies with attractive actors and melodramatic scripts with tight direction are “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and “The Last Temptation of Christ”. A brilliantly subversive movie is “The Life of Brian”, which hilariously is more historically accurate than the other movies mentioned already. The lessons here are to make the characters identifiable and approachable with a modern audience, and to make the story arc clear. Every scene has to segue to the next with no extra information or side stories that don’t contribute to the main story. Forget that real life is chaotic, messy, complicated and repetitive; history is so dull! Don’t bother with trivia, irrelevance, absurdity and meaninglessness: that’s boring!

Drama arises from the interactions between triangle of a hero, a victim and a villain. Here’s the drama triangle on the Christmas Story: the victims are Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the villains are the Roman Emperor and King Herod, and the heroes are the innkeeper, the angels and the Wise Men. There are two dramas at play here… the forced relocation of Mary, Joseph and the unborn Jesus, and the jealousy aroused by King Herod of a possible usurper of the throne. The first drama is that of the Emperor requiring everyone to return to their home towns, which brings hardship to Joseph and a pregnant Mary to travel to Bethlehem. The heroes are the innkeeper who finds them a place to stay when no one else would, and the angels who welcomed their arrival. The second drama is that of King Herod hearing from the Wise Men that a new King is to be born and orders the murder of all children under two, putting the child Jesus’s life at risk. The heros are the Wise Men who brought valuable gifts to the Holy Family and who later mislead King Herod about Jesus’s whereabouts, along with the angels who warn Joseph to flee from Bethlehem. I find it interesting that God relies on angelic messengers and dreams to guide the main characters and the Saviour to safety. His Son seems to be very much on his own and subject to the whims of humankind, which when you think about it, plays into the final scenes of the Passion Story. More on that in later posts about who Jesus actually was and what his message truly was (Hint: It wasn’t what is spelled out in the Gospel of John.)

I’m not sure where the drama triangle is in the prophecy fulfillment for the birth of John the Baptist and Jesus fits into the Christmas Story; that drama comes later when John baptizes Jesus, thus starting the identification of Jesus as the Messiah. I guess you could add in some foreshadowing of the death of Jesus, with the villains in the form of the Roman Empire oppressing the people of Judea and the hero is John launching Jesus’s Ministry, which ultimately threatens Pontius Pilate and the Pharisees enough to seek his capture, torture and death of the victim, Jesus. Let’s make it clear, the Jewish people are not the villains in the story, they are the bystanders, the stage and the background to this drama. Indeed, God Himself could be described as a bit character.

So with our drama triangles defined, we now need a clear story arc. the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. For modern audiences, we need a twist at the end as well.

Exposition – Judea is occupied by the Romans and governed in cooperation with regional kings. It’s all the nastiness of a foreign (pagan) occupation, and the people are harshly oppressed and praying for a Messiah to lead them. Elizabeth and Mary are visited by angels, along with Joseph and Zechariah, foretelling the births of John and Jesus. Mary and Joseph must leave on a long, uncomfortable journey to Bethlehem on the orders of the Emperor. All of this fulfills prophecy of the arrival of the Messiah, who will bring salvation to everyone and pay for it with his life.

Rising Action – On arrival to Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph don’t have a place to stay and the innkeeper finds them a room normally meant to house animals. Jesus is born in the stable, leading to angels appearing to shepherds tending their flocks at night, directing them to the stable to witness the arrival of the Messiah. You would think the birth of Jesus would be the climax, but really what can a newborn child do to explain Heaven and salvation or lead his people out of oppression? Jesus is named and presented in the temple in Jerusalem where Simeon and Anna foreshadow the Passion Story. In the meantime, a star has appeared in the sky, which is observed by the Wise Men of the East. They make the long journey to Judea and meet with King Herod, asking about the new King. Herod makes a deal with them to find the child and report back to him, so that he can deal with this threat. The Wise Men travel in a caravan with treasures to find Jesus in a house with this family, offering him a trove of expensive gifts (gold, incense and perfume.) They do not return to Herod to give the exact location of the child Jesus, as warned in a dream to return home a different way.

Climax – King Herod realizes he has been tricked by the Wise Men, but from the information they gave him he can guess that the newborn King had been born several months ago, so he orders his soldiers to kill all male children under the age of two in Bethlehem and surrounding area. Joseph is warned by an angel to take Mary and Jesus and flee to Egypt. The soldiers arrive in Bethlehem and slaughter all the baby boys, fulfilling another prophecy about Rachel grieving for her children. I’m not sure where the Romans are in all this, other than they were possibly complicit in the violence in their alliance with Herod. Anyway, Jesus escaped this traumatic violence.

Falling Action – The Holy Family are safe in Egypt and later return to Isreal, but they go on to Nazareth instead of Bethlehem, where Jesus is raised and educated. The Happy Ending!

The Twist – The Wise Men were well aware that in advising King Herod they were looking for a new King of the Jews, that would arouse his jealousy, resulting in his rampage that would force Jesus into exile for a number of years. The young Jesus would eventually go to Nazareth to avoid Herod’s successor, where he would meet up with John at the Jordan River and be baptized by John and begin his ministry. The young Jesus would have been exposed to many different cultures and peoples in Egypt, giving him a broader world-view than if he had stayed in Bethlehem. The Wise Men have a very active role in bringing about the rise of the Messiah.

So now that we have the scriptural accuracy and the dramatic (ie. entertaining) elements worked out, the next step is to determine the historical details. Who was the Emperor of Rome at the time? Who were the regional Roman and Jewish leaders? What was the power structures like at the time? Who were the Wise Men of the East? What were politics and society like at the time? What would Mary and Joseph have looked and sounded like? What would Bethlehem have looked like (ie. the typical dwellings and living conditions.) What would it have been like to be a refugee in Egypt? The historical accuracy will require the most work in the form of research into what historians have published. It will be interesting to see how empirical information based on historical evidence matches up with the scriptural assertions.