"You don't have to be in the room, but I am reading the nativity to our children."
My wife said this in December. It wasn't a fight. It wasn't an ultimatum. It was a line, drawn gently, in permanent ink.
I do not consider myself religious. Or spiritual. Or even agnostic anymore—I've drifted past that into something that looks like atheism if you squint, even though I find most atheists unbearable. The cultural superiority. The militant behavior that mirrors the very thing they claim to reject. The arrogance dressed up as rationality.
To be honest, I get along better with my religious friends than I do with the agnostics. We disagree on the architecture of the universe, but at least they're building something. At least they're trying to live inside a story that asks something of them.
The literal idea of these stories? Silly. Mormonism specifically? The ramblings of a conman building bigger homes, acquiring younger wives, and shooting anyone who dared print the truth about him. I left that. I left it bloody and I'm not going back.
But.
I appreciate the culture. Christmas is nice. The Hebrew Bible, as translated by Robert Alter, is a masterpiece—four thousand years of story refined into something that earns its survival. Job is the oldest book in the Bible from a purely historical standpoint. A poem about suffering that refuses to answer its own question. That kind of honesty survives.
My wife saw the chink in my armor: the New Testament.
Here's my problem with it.
The earliest Christians didn't have gospels. They had sayings. Short, koan-like fragments passed hand to hand—Blessed are the poor in spirit. Let the dead bury their dead. The kingdom of heaven is within you. Scholars call this the Q source: a hypothetical collection of Christ's words that predates any narrative we have.
The stories came later. Mark wrote first, roughly forty years after the crucifixion, and he wrote like a man in a hurry—short sentences, present tense, no birth narrative at all. Matthew and Luke came after, borrowing from Mark, adding their own material, constructing origin stories that served theological and political purposes the historical Jesus likely never endorsed.
By the time John wrote, decades later still, Christ had become the Logos. The Word made flesh. Philosophy grafted onto a Jewish peasant who probably would have found the whole thing unrecognizable.
By all accounts, Christ was a real man. But the texts wrapped around him were engineering projects. Ways to preserve the sayings while building institutional scaffolding—priesthood lineages, apostolic succession, something Rome could work with.
I find much of it appalling. I also find it fascinating. Both things are true.
So when my wife made her declaration, I understood. If we celebrate Christmas—and we do—she wanted these stories in our children's bones. Not as doctrine. As inheritance.
"You don't have to be in the room."
But of course I had to be in the room.
We negotiated.
Her requirement: tell them it's the story of Christmas. No hedging. No "some people believe." If they ask whether it's true, I could say, It doesn't need to be true for it to be special.
My requirement: I choose the translation. I compile the reading. If I'm putting these words in my mouth, they have to be words I can say without choking.
She agreed.
The New Testament, in its original Greek, is awkward. Unpolished. It doesn't have the literary refinement of the Hebrew Bible—centuries of oral tradition sanding every sentence into shape. Mark's grammar is rough. Paul writes like a lawyer mid-breakdown. Luke is smoother but still: there's a not-quite-finished quality to the thing that most translations sand away in the name of readability.
I didn't want readable. I wanted honest.
David Bentley Hart. Eastern Orthodox theologian. Published a New Testament translation in 2017 that he called "pitilessly literal."
He refused to make the Greek comfortable.
Where other translations say inn, Hart says lodge.
There was no room in the lodge.
The difference is everything. Inn is a Christmas pageant with a kindly innkeeper. Lodge is a door closing on a pregnant teenager in a town that doesn't want her.
Hart doesn't say wise men. He says Magians.
Astrologers. Persians, probably. The wrong religion entirely, following a star, showing up with gifts for a king they had no business seeking. Not the priests. Not the faithful. Outsiders.
Hart doesn't say handmaid. He says slave.
Mary, in the Magnificat, calling herself that. Before the angels finish speaking. Before the shepherds arrive. A teenage girl naming her place in the empire's hierarchy and saying yes anyway.
The Magnificat.
This is what they skip in Christmas pageants.
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has exulted in God my savior, for he has looked upon the lowliness of his slave.
And then:
He has pulled dynasts down from thrones and exalted the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.
That's not a lullaby. That's a revolution. A teenage girl announcing the end of empire before her son is even born.
I built the reading the way you build a film. Cuts. Sequence. Rhythm.
The annunciation: an angel appearing to a girl in Nazareth, and the girl disturbed—not peaceful, not serene, disturbed—by what she's being asked to carry.
The Magnificat: Mary's revolution hymn, the part they don't put on Christmas cards.
Joseph's side: the man who planned to divorce her quietly because he was decent, then didn't because he dreamed something that changed his mind.
The birth: a census, a journey, a town with no room, a child laid in a feedbox because that's what was available.
The shepherds: working-class, ritually unclean, the kind of people who wouldn't be allowed in the temple, and they're the ones who get the announcement first.
The Magians: foreigners following a star, arriving with gold and frankincense and myrrh, asking the wrong king where to find the right one.
Simeon: an old man in the temple, holding the baby, ready to die. Now you are releasing your slave in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation.
We read it to our children on Christmas Eve.
I'm not going to manufacture a moment of transcendence I didn't have. I'm not going to claim the story broke through my defenses and I wept into the firelight.
What I can say is this: the words were in my mouth and they didn't burn.
What I can say is this: my wife was right. These stories belong to our children now—not as chains, not as checklists, but as culture. As inheritance. As something beautiful that doesn't need to be true to be special.
There was no room in the lodge.
There's no room in my theology either. Not for angels. Not for virgin births. Not for God made flesh in a feed-box.
But I made room for this.
For anyone who wants it—religious, agnostic, or otherwise—here's the version I compiled. Hart's translation. The story as I wanted to tell it.
It doesn't need to be true for it to be special.
Merry Christmas.
