That's Showbiz?

NBC vs. the Nativity

In some ways it might better have been called All in the Holy Family. Mary and Joseph look like a couple of '60s flower children, he curly-haired and callow, she snub-nosed, discreetly nubile, with a hint of freckles. Much of what happens to them is intended as dramatic improvement on the work of the original scriptwriters, Matthew and Luke. Mary's father, for instance, is crucified for criticizing the government. Joseph's family has come down in the world, its ancestral wealth having been snatched from it by greedy King Herod. Joseph has been an anti-Roman terrorist. When Mary claims to be pregnant with the Messiah, a Jewish court sentences her to death by stoning. In the nick of time, Joseph intervenes to save her, accepting the paternity of the child and a flogging in her stead.

These were only a few of the non-scriptural episodes in an otherwise reverential three-hour NBC-TV movie called Mary and Joseph: A Story of Faith that stirred religious controversy long before it was aired this week. Defending the show, the Rev. Richard Gilbert of Princeton Theological Seminary, one of several religious consultants called in by the network, says, "There is much in Mary and Joseph that is invented. There is nothing that could not have happened."

In any case, storytellers have been embroidering on the Nativity texts for nearly 20 centuries. Sometimes it is to make the Holy Family more believable, often it is to make events even more miraculous. Many of the inventions of art and literature are so ingrained that people regard them as part of Holy Writ. The beasts that appear at the manger, for instance, are not mentioned in the Bible. Neither is the number of the Magi. The names Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar and the legend that Balthasar was black were popularized in the 8th century. Partly to make it easier for Catholics to believe in Mary's lifelong virginity, early church authors developed the notion that Joseph was an older man, presumably a widower, when he married her.

The earliest embroidered versions of the Nativity are the apocryphal "infancy gospels" dating from the first centuries A.D., which, for good reason, the church never included in the New Testament. The Gospel makes the flight into Egypt a series of miracles. A mule turns into a boy; idols selfdestruct. Another apocryphal story illustrated Jesus' childhood power by noting that he struck dead a boy who had run into him and knocked him down. Joseph, in despair, expresses his fears to Mary and wonders whether Jesus should go out at all.

The most famous Nativity anecdotes were gathered together in the 13th century by Jacobus de Voragine in The Golden Legend, a compilation of saint stories that became a medieval bestseller. Among other things, Father Jacobus reports that the water of a Roman spring turned to oil on the day Christ was born. But the most touching Nativity tales turned up in 14th century English mystery plays. In the York Cycle, a medieval playwright gives Mary rhymed lines that brilliantly extend the spirit and simplicity of Matthew and Luke: Now in my soul great joy have I am all clad in comfort clear; Now will be born of my body Both God and man together here.

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