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    The First Christmas: A Story of New Beginnings
    The First Christmas: A Story of New Beginnings
    The First Christmas: A Story of New Beginnings
    Ebook173 pages3 hours

    The First Christmas: A Story of New Beginnings

    By Stephen Mitchell

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    About this ebook

    “I love The First Christmas. What a charming way Stephen Mitchell has found to tell my favorite story of all, the Nativity, character by character (I love the donkey and the ox), with wise and thrilling interludes about God, reality, truth.” –Anne Lamott


    In The First Christmas, Stephen Mitchell brings the Nativity story to vivid life as never before. A narrative that is only sketched out in two Gospels becomes fully realized here with nuanced characters and a setting that reflects the culture of the time. Mitchell has suffused the birth of Jesus with a sense of beauty that will delight and astonish readers.

    In this version, we see the world through the eyes of a Whitmanesque ox and a visionary donkey, starry-eyed shepherds and Zen-like wise men, each of them providing a unique perspective on a scene that is, in Western culture, the central symbol for good tidings of great joy. Rather than superimposing later Christian concepts onto the Annunciation and Nativity scenes, he imagines Mary and Joseph experiencing the angelic message as a young Jewish woman and man living in the year 4 bce might have experienced it, with terror, dismay, and ultimate acceptance. In this context, their yes becomes an act of great moral courage.

    Readers of every background will be enchanted by this startlingly beautiful reimagining of the Christmas tale.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 9, 2021
    ISBN9781250790705
    Author

    Stephen Mitchell

    Stephen Mitchell's many books include the bestselling Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, and The Second Book of the Tao, as well as The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, The Gospel According to Jesus, Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Meetings with the Archangel.

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      Book preview

      The First Christmas - Stephen Mitchell

      1

      The Innkeeper

      Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.

      —EMERSON

      IT WAS SNOWING AGAIN as they arrived, the man and the girl. They had been on the road for six days, traveling fifteen miles a day except when she felt too unwell to continue. The man went on foot, leading the donkey. The girl on the donkey was wrapped in an extra cloak that covered her head, her back, and her swollen belly. Much of the time she barely noticed the road they were traveling on. Her attention was focused on the child inside her, and she would track its movements with a fascinated delight. Sometimes she would talk to it or sing it a lullaby.

      They had tried to find lodging at four inns already, but Bethlehem was swarming with pilgrims who had gathered there for the census. Half the population of the country, it seemed, were scions of the house of David; since the official genealogies had been destroyed six hundred years before, during the conquest of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity, anyone could assert that he was of royal blood, however down-at-heel he might look. The inns were full. Again and again the man had been turned away, each time with a brusque no. Now night was falling.

      The innkeeper—a burly man in his forties with a tangled brown beard and a diagonal scar over his left eyebrow—told them they would have to wait, he would get to them as soon as he could; he was very busy, with a dozen requests to attend to. All the rooms were occupied, some of them with double or triple the usual number of guests, and the broad covered courtyard was so packed with bodies that he had to thread his way among them in order to bring someone wine or food. It took all his expertise to make his guests comfortable, or not overly uncomfortable. His wife and their two sons and three daughters were just as busy. It had been this way for weeks.

      An hour later, when he returned to them, he paused to take a better look. The girl seemed to be fourteen or fifteen years old, and she was very pregnant. She stood with modestly downcast eyes, but beneath the shawl, enough of her face was visible that he could see how pretty she was: fine features, the nose delicately arched, the lips full and shapely, though chapped by the bitter cold. She was wearing a roughly woven light-brown woolen tunic that fell to her ankles and over it a cloak dyed a slightly darker brown. The man was in his twenties, of average height, about five feet four, heavy boned, with large hands and a full, reddish-brown beard. He was dressed in the same kind of tunic, which came to his knees and was fastened at the waist by a thick leather belt. His cloak reached midcalf and had the prescribed tassels at its four corners.

      It turned out to be one more hard-luck story, as the innkeeper had suspected. He had heard many during the previous weeks. Royal descendants had asked him for a deduction in the price or suggested that he waive the price entirely, given the honor they were bestowing on him by their mere presence. Some of them, with tears in their eyes, had traced the downward descent of their family over the past six centuries. Some had paraded their grimy children before him and begged for his indulgence.

      Given all his pressing obligations, he felt tempted to shoo the young couple away. He could do only so much, and in good conscience he wouldn’t squeeze one more person into the already dangerously overcrowded courtyard. He wasn’t God, after all, who could create something out of nothing. He was only a decent man trying to do his best in a situation that would have tested the patience of Job. No, they would have to be on their way. He was about to say this when something stopped him.

      What was it? The young man looked composed, but it was obvious how weary he and the girl were and how close she was to giving birth. That wasn’t his problem, of course, and he brushed away the brief thought of responsibility. But there was something in the young man’s demeanor—a forthrightness, a sincerity—that touched his heart. Is there no place at all for us? The voice was calm and manly. There was no pleading in the tone, no attempt to persuade him or appeal to his sense of pity. As he looked into the young man’s eyes, he felt as though a current of sympathy had somehow established itself between them. He was embarrassed by this; it was bad business practice. But he had to acknowledge it. A decision had been made somewhere inside him—in spite of him or without his conscious assent. They could stay.

      But how? There was certainly no room for them, and he couldn’t ask any of his guests to leave. Suddenly an image arose in his mind, of the small, dilapidated stable in back of the inn, with its four narrow stalls and its single inhabitant, an ox that he rented to farmers during the season of plowing. The stable’s roof was damaged, and there were loose stones on two of its sides, but it would provide shelter for the young couple. No time for thanks; they must follow him, quickly.

      He threw a second cloak over his shoulders, lit a torch, and walked outside with them. Their small gray donkey was tethered to one of the posts in front of the inn. Snow covered her back and neck. When she saw them, she uttered a bray that was like a pump gone dry. The girl undid the rope and walked behind the two men with quick steps, hurrying to stay inside the circle of torchlight.

      The stable smelled of straw and manure. Flies congregated in the ox’s stall, crawled over the piles of dung, and reconnoitered on the walls. There were shallow stone troughs in each of the four stalls and enough clean straw to make beds for two people. The innkeeper placed the torch in the rusted iron holder on the wall, said good night, and was out the door, not even stopping long enough to listen to their

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