ABSTRACT
The Christian gospel came first in an age of terror, when multitudes and, particularly, the authorities were vexed to nightmare by the world in which they lived and by a particular rocking cradle. Jesus, according to Luke’s gospel, was born in Bethlehem rather than his home town of Nazareth, because of an autocratic imperial decree from a despotic foreign government. Again according to the tradition, shortly after his birth he was visited and honoured by Magi, or ‘kings’, from the East who recognized on behalf of the Gentile world his cosmic and earthly status as Messiah and Prince of Peace. The enquiries of the Magi in Jerusalem provoked desperate and draconian measures on the part of the Roman stooge, King Herod, who initiated in Bethlehem the ‘massacre of the innocents’, at the time just one of many massacres of innocent people on the part of political and religious authorities. The baby in Bethlehem was seen from the beginning, the tradition suggests, as a threat to established authority and the existing order, political and religious.
