Pete Buttigieg's Christmas

The Flight into Egypt

Pete Buttigieg has gotten a lot of criticism for his Christmas tweet:

“Today I join millions around the world in celebrating the arrival of divinity on earth, who came into this world not in riches but in poverty, not as a citizen but as a refugee. No matter where or how we celebrate, merry Christmas.”

Others quickly pointed out that there is no indication in the Gospel that Jesus’s birth family was either rich or poor. And Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem not as refugees, but to register for a census.

And why can’t he use the name “Jesus”?

It seemed to me initially obvious that Buttigieg was way off; I am surprised to see that some have also defended his tweet.

Peter Wever at The Week, for example, responds “it's hard to see how a carpenter from an otherwise insignificant village in Galilee would be well-off.”

I suppose that depends on what counts for you as “well-off.” A carpenter from a small town in America today can do well enough. He’s just not going to make the Fortune 500.

But it seems to me the bottom line is that, if it were somehow significant to the narrative that Jesus was either rich or poor, that fact would have been noted in the Gospels.

Jack Jenkins responds that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were indeed refugees at a later point, the flight into Egypt.

JMJ do seem to fit the meaning of “refugee” in informal usage during the flight into Egypt; but not the legal definition. Because they did not leave their home country—Judea, Galilee, and Egypt were all provinces of the Roman Empire. It would be like fleeing from Georgia to Ohio. As many blacks did during “Jim Crow” days.

This does not look to me like a plausible interpretation of what Buttigieg wrote, however. He was speaking of how Jesus came into this world, not of subsequent events.

So it seems to me there are two possibilities here: either Buttigieg does not have a very clear idea of the New Testament; or he is distorting it to suit a political agenda.

Either way, it does not mark him as a serious Christian.

This would not matter, except that he has made his Christianity a central feature of his campaign, arguing that he can win Christian votes away from the right.

A tweet like this seems to make this less likely, by showing how superficial his avowed Christianity actually is.

There may be a constituency, on the other hand, of those who are not themselves serious Christians, but who would still like to be reassured that their political beliefs do not run counter to it. This, after all, is presumably why we hear ahistorical assertions that, say, Jesus was black, or a communist, or a political revolutionary.