Christmas time

Once upon a time a newborn was raised by his Jewish parents, Joseph and Mary, who gave birth of their son in the small town Bethlehem. They named their son Joshua, which means Savior. Some hundred years later the name was translated into the more common English name: Jesus. Christ was at the beginning a title, stemming from the Hebrew Messiah, the anointed one.
Even though the Gospels are quite silent about Jesus as a young child there are some reasons to believe that he was trained to act as a carpenter, supervised by his father. He spoke Aramaic, a language related to Hebrew, but learned probably also some Greek during his later travels around in the region.
The Jewish boy grew up and at around the age of 30 he was attracted by the preachings of John the Baptist and let him baptize him. After that some of John’s followers started to follow Joshua (Jesus) because he repeatedly told the public the he was sent by his Father in heaven, and that this father was God. After a while Jesus established his group of twelve disciples who obeyed him and preached together with him and they did not only spread his words, but told people stories about the miracles: turning water into wine, walking on water, healing the sick, casting out deamons and raising a man from the dead.
Jesus took a big risk when he opposed the Jewish men in power, claiming his own authority. Also the Roman rulers were uncomfortable with the tales of the Messiah who said that he would liberate the Jews from the Roman rules.
The rest is history.
And the history is very interesting indeed, and I am not now primarily thinking about the torture and the crucifixion, but how he came to be a legend for thousands and thousands and later on millions of people and how we, especially in the Western world, still tend to believe that he was born on December 25 more than 2000 years ago (which is probably not correct) and how people have raised churches everywhere (almost), establishing roads for bishops and priests to lead people in this belief of him as God’s son.
It is really interesting.
It is Christmas time. And today we have Santa Claus instead of Jesus and we have all become happy-go-lucky victims of this giant commercialism, so very far from the preachings of the baptized Jewish man called Joshua from Nazareth.

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