Chapter 3: Birth

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book I: Early Years
Part One–Child
                                      

My beloved David, these matters aren’t always easy to speak of. On some days I am bowed down by the pain. My age weighs on me greatly. I feel lost in a younger world that Christ and all of my old friends have left.

I have not been honest with you completely regarding how I feel. On many days I am fine, if weaker than I used to be. But on a few days, like today, I truly suffer. It is difficult to go on, on such days as this, for even to dictate out loud to my scribe hurts me.

Now you know the truth. But it would hardly be fair to write you such lengthy answers to your questions, and not let you know the occasional state of pain I am in. After all, it may influence how I answer you. If anything, I hope it will make me too meticulous rather than too general. I wish certain details of Jesus’ life and death to be written down for all time, and thus understood until the day he returns to this world to claim it as his own.

When I am in pain such as I am today, I continue my normal activities anyway. After all, my pain is as nothing compared to the agony suffered by Jesus as he slowly suffocated on the cross, nor the swift pain my older brother James, also one of the twelve, suffered when Herod had him killed by the sword. My pain is nothing more than a gnat in God’s eye compared to the stoning to death that our first martyr, Stephen, suffered, or the terrifying death from attaching lions so many of the friends have felt, naked in the arenas.

For that matter, my pain is small compared to the agony of childbirth that Mary experienced giving birth to Jesus.

She had been well prepared. She had done exercises and learned how to relax herself. But riding five days on a donkey over rocky and hilly trails from Nazareth to Bethlehem–this would make any pregnancy unusually hard. If she had not done nine months of exercises, it is very possible she would have died giving birth to Jesus.

Let me continue her story, and that of the friends with her. When you get to the part about the actual birth itself–Mary’s feelings and thoughts when Jesus was first entering the world–you should know that these are Mary’s own description of it as she dictated it to me one dark night almost forty years afterward. She was sick for a week after having dictated this by going back in memory to this painful and beautiful hour of Christ’s birth.

I hope, therefore, you will take her own words about it, as they are written here, seriously.

As Mary smiled weakly at the Essene innkeeper in the courtyard, waiting for him to tell them where they could stay, he bent over and peered at her.

“You’re pale!” he exclaimed. He was still out of breath. “You’re not, you haven’t, he’s not coming yet is he?”

Mary nodded.

“Oh no!” he exclaimed. “For give me! Where–” his body twisted around, “–we must find you a room immediately!”

“It could be any time,” Joseph agreed. “She has at least one more hour. We need to prepare her.”

The innkeeper slapped his wide forehead.

“I was going to give you my own apartment,” he said. “But that little runt of a Roman official, curse his scented feet, has commandeered it for himself!”

He twisted around again.

“Sarah! Daughter! Where are you?” he called. “I need you right now!”

A quiet, pretty girl came trotting around the far corner of the inn, wearing a coarse linen apron and holding a large inlaid-silver tray.

“Sarah!” her father commanded. “The far stable! Quick! We will have to use it!”

Sarah stopped. The silver tray banged against her knee. She ran up to Mary and kneeled in front of her, taking her hand to kiss it.

“Greet her later!” the innkeeper yelled. “The baby is due any minute!”

Sarah smiled at Mary shyly. She had been one of Mary’s playmates and, like both Mary and Josi, one of the girl children chosen as a possible mother of the Christ. Unlike some of the other girls, she had lived at home off and on during the years of her training. She quickly rose and ran back around the inn to get servants to help them.

Soon all the servants and the innkeeper’s family, except for a cook and ne servant girl for the diners, were scurrying back and forth between the inn and the stables, and from stable to stable.

Most of the stables were full. They stretched out in a single line, one after the other, behind the inn. Though many of the stables were wooden, some were also caves. They were hollowed out of the cliff and the steep hill behind part of the inn.

The servants hastily carried several earthenware oil lamps to the farthest stable, a wide grotto the front of which was extended and roofed over by planks. The servants laid fresh straw down on the floor and flattened the straw by walking back and forth on it.

Sarah returned to the group of travelers in front of the inn and shyly took Mary’s arm. Josi lightly held Mary’s other arm, and the two girls escorted their pregnant friend across the dirt yard to the stable. As they walked, two servants threw straw down before them just as someday the crowds in front of Jerusalem would throw palm fronds in front of Jesus as he entered the city.

“It is better that you are as far away from the inn as possible,” the innkeeper told Joseph. The two men were walking behind the women. “Tonight the fools in there,” he jerked his big thumb back at the inn, “are celebrating Midwinter’s Eve. Those who aren’t drunk are looking for trouble. Why, if they knew there was going to be a birth, they would want to witness it!”

His voice dropped to a whisper.

“And some of those soldiers would be glad,” he said, “to run a sword through everyone here if they knew what we’re trying to do.”

Joseph nodded.

“Keep us well protected,” he said. “Keep everyone who isn’t one of us away from the stable.”

As they entered the stable, Mary’s nose twitched. Though the stable was clean and neat, the sharp odor of old goat dung and the rich, earthy smell of the damp cave walls intermingled. A worn old grain trough stood to one side, and behind it her donkey was already happily munching fodder from a second wooden trough on the floor. A sheep and her small lamb, which was too young to be moved outside, calmly stared at them from the rear.

“Where can I lie down?” she asked Josi.

Sarah pointed. The servants had prepared a comfortable sleeping mat with a pile of clean straw underneath and several wool blankets and fine linen sheets on top.

Josi led Mary to it.

Mary heaved a sigh and sank down. Another contraction started, but she hardly noticed it in spite of the pain. The sight of the bed had made her dizzy with sleepiness. As soon as the contraction was over, she quickly slipped into a dreamy sleep.

While Sarah went to get her mother, who was going to be the head midwife for the delivery, Josi sat cross-legged beside Mary and watched over her. Josi was tired, too. But the excitement and her concern for Mary made her stay alert. She had her own job to do, and it was just beginning. She had to help Mary get through the worst of the labor contractions by encouraging her to breathe in a controlled manner, and to relax as totally as possible between contractions. This was standard Essene training for childbirth.

Mary’s contractions became fewer and further between, now that she was lying down. Every ten or fifteen minutes, another would grab her belly and make her tiredly come half out of her deep sleep.

This was the time that the rigorous Essene training, forced on both her and Josi by the Essene leader Judy, began to pay off. Both of the girls were so well trained that they could do it in their sleep, which was what Mary did. She woke, during each contraction, just long enough to follow Josi’s commands. Then she would fall back asleep. Soon, though, Mary fell too deeply asleep to respond quickly enough to Josi. Josi grabbed her hand and squeezed it rhythmically in time with the spoken commands.

“In, in, in, in. Out, out, out, out,” came Josi’s steady voice. “Breathe deeply and hold it. Now let it out.”

The quiet spoken rhythm during each contraction made everyone else in the cave feel both peaceful and alert.

The other women were preparing the cave as Joseph and the innkeeper talked. Sarah was scrubbing out the grain trough. It would soon be in use as the crib. She scrubbed it several times, rinsed it thoroughly, and stuffed it with well-cleaned straw, woolen blankets, and linen sheets.

A servant brought in the birth stool. It was a strange and sturdy contraption of divided and polished wood on which Mary would sit as Jesus descended and came out. The women attacked it, too, with hot water and soap, though it had already been washed earlier in the day.

Sarah’s mother ordered the preparations of Mary’s body.

First she directed several of the other midwives to carefully wash Mary’s legs and lower trunk with tepid water and rose-scented soap, even as Mary still slept. Then she spread the oils on Mary. She laid Balm of Gilead, a healing lotion, on the young girl’s body. She followed this with an ointment compounded of the purest olive oil mixed with the essence of Egyptian garlic–an ancient formula known to help cleanse and sterilize against many sicknesses.

As Sara’s mother worked, her old eyes looked down on the sleeping girl, and she smiled. She was seeing yet another sign of the future birth in the young girl’s face. Mary’s face looked beautifully feminine, a recognized sign among midwives that the child in the womb had drawn away all of the masculine power from the pregnant mother’s body, and into its own. This meant the child would be a male.

Some of the Essene lodgers at the inn came out to the stable after Mary was prepared. Their quiet conversations with joseph and the innkeeper wove in and out of the peaceful silence of the night filled by starts. Many of them were skilled laborers like Joseph. The rough stone walls of the cave scratched their calloused hands as they leaned in to see the sleeping woman who would soon be giving birth to their hope.

After several hours, Mary gradually awoke. It was close to midnight. Her contractions were getting closer together.

Mary was a brave woman, and a skilled one carefully prepared for this event. But she was younger even than many of the poorest girls when they married. And because of her years with the Essenes, she had never really seen a birth. She had been told about the process. But it had all been abstract knowledge until now.

This is why the pain took her by such surprise. Also the pain probably was even worse because she had slept through much of the middle stage. She came out of the sleep with discomforting dreams, and a body which was complaining and groaning with pains it had never felt before.

It was frightening. Josi was beside her. But for one moment, as Mary surfaced into complete wakefulness and a frightening terror, she simply couldn’t believe a child could be born in such crude and chilly surroundings. She wondered what it would be like to die.

That was when the pain really took over, for it was fueled by despair and deep worry. The contractions wouldn’t stop. They just kept flowing over her, one after another, with barely a minute’s rest between.

Sometimes she grabbed Josi’s hands, pulling and tugging at them, clenching her own teeth and wishing she were not too proud to scream. She wanted to let go and scream at the top of her voice, and to hit and kick and smash Josi’s patient face as Josi patiently called out the breathing rhythm. Many women go through this.

Mary later described this painful time in the following words.

I wanted to scream and claw my stomach to get that nine-month torture out of me! But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t dare hurt my child. Don’t you see, I knew I had to make sure, I had to see, that the child would come out right. He was Jesus, but he was also a part of me, and either way I didn’t want him damaged. But how could I know he was a savior? What good are a million people and angels telling you who he will be when you’re right on the edge of screaming because a part of your body is tearing itself loose from your inner self? Who cares? I was just a ragged mind aware of nothing more than wave after wave of pain, of fear and Josi’s idiotic breathing commands.

I tried arching my back and biting down again and again until I bit the tip of my tongue. They saw what had happened and put a roll of cloth between my teeth. I bit on that and started clamping my hands hard on Josi’s arms.

“On the birth stool, Mary. Come on. It’s time to get on it.”

I remember Josi telling me that. I refused to budge. But then I realized that was the only way I could get it over with quickly. Another contraction suddenly grabbed me, and I did scream. I screamed as loud as I could, but they said later it was just a moan. They acted like I hadn’t even opened my mouth, and they just lifted me off the mat and sat me on the birth stool.

“Come on, Mary. Bend now. Hold our arms.”

Josi kept saying things that made absolutely no sense to me at the time. For one wild instant, I was sure they wanted me to die. That’s when I struggled. They said I tried to stand up and they had to hold me down.

“Think of the baby, child!” That was what one of the old women said.

That quieted me down. But I was still sure I was going to die. I just knew, as the contractions kept hitting me again and again, that this savior in my womb was a huge baby that would split me in two before he got out. It felt like I was already ripping apart down there.

“Mary, Breathe!” Josi told me.

It was funny. Even when I thought they wanted me to die, I never stopped my special breathing. I followed Josi all the way through with that, until the last few minutes. When I realized that, I started laughing. It was really funny to me, that I’d just kept on breathing like that all along. I was getting crazy. I laughed out loud at them, at myself, and everyone there except the baby.

Except the baby. Suddenly I felt it move way down. I had an incontrollable urge to push.

“Push! Push! I’ve got to push!” I yelled at them. I started crying.

“Wait, Mary!” they told me. “Blow air out to stop the baby from coming. We’re not ready, yet!”

Ecstasy was welling up inside me. But I had to push to get it. They wouldn’t let me. I cried and beat my hands against the birth stool and puffed air out as I had been trained.

“Take a deep breath, Mary. Now, push!”

Oh my God, I had never felt such joy and physical pleasure rushing through me as I pushed my baby out! They had told me that some women feel good when this time comes–but nothing like this!

“Wait, Mary! Relax! Take another breath. Hold it in. Now push!”

“Oh, God! the tearing joy as he suddenly rushed out of my body and down between my legs. I was sobbing with uncontrollable tears as they showed him to me and cleaned him. Then they put him against my breast. He hunted for my nipple and fund it. He was so red! They told me that was natural. I fed him until he was satisfied, crying and laughing and showing him to Josi as I kept pushing my nipple back in his mouth when he lost it.

Later they took him away to wrap him in swaddling clothes. Sarah held him a few minutes. Her face lit up and tears streamed down it. I cried with her. Josi held him briefly, then gave him back to me. He drank some more. Still later, we both slept.

That, David, is how Jesus was born.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Aug. 2020.