Could There Have Been Women Shepherds Watching Those Flocks By Night?

A Shepherdess with her flock, Cornelius van Leemputten, 1841-1902

So I've been thinking about whether there were any female shepherds at the nativity.

The thought arose because a female friend recently asked a question I had never considered before: Why are all the shepherds in Christmas creches men?

A quick look at our own creche showed she was right; both shepherds are male.

My friend went on to suggest that, back in Jesus’ day, women also watched the flocks; it wasn't just men. So why don't women appear in our holiday creches or Christmas pageants?

After all, Luke doesn't say whether the shepherds were men or women; he ascribes no gender to them.

Faced with the question, I did what everyone does in a situation like this: I Googled it.

The first website that came up was Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), an organization that believes the Bible, properly interpreted, teaches the equality of women and men.

In an article titled The Way of a Shepherd, author Beulah Wood—who grew up on a sheep farm and looked after them herself—says that “possibly half the shepherds in Jesus’ day were women, and probably half the shepherds of the world today.”

She goes on to note that we first meet Rachel as a shepherd in Genesis 29:6-9. (“Rachel came with her father’s sheep for she was their shepherd.”)

We are also introduced to Zipporah as a shepherd in Exodus 2:16: “Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father’s flock.” 

Says Wood: “These matriarchs of Israel both met their husbands at wells where they led their flocks to drink. During the course of their daily work, the contact occurred that led to their marriages and many more years of caring for flocks.”

Next up was Women From the Book blog, by Karen Meeker. He goal is to bring to life the “scores of women who appear within the pages of the Bible.”

In a post titled Life as a Shepherdess, Meeker says “in ancient Israel it was not unusual for women to work outside the home, young women at least. When a girl was eight to ten years old, she began leading the family herd out to nearby pasture.”

At the end of the day, she says, “the shepherdess brought her sheep back home. At night the animals were housed in stone-walled pens attached to buildings or compounds, or on the ground floor of houses in the cities, or corralled in thorny, fence-like enclosures typical of nomadic enclosures.”

Tending the family herd “was reserved primarily for girls, and they continued this work until married at age fifteen or sixteen,” she adds.

When local grass was insufficient, she says that “men took the herds further afield . . . women worked close to home.”

In another blog post titled Could the Shepherds Who Visited Jesus Been Women?, Tracy J. Robbins poses an interesting question: 

Considering Jesus’s revolutionary way (for his time) of including women, why not have women be the first to see the arrival of God on earth, just as they were the first to see the resurrected Jesus?

Admittedly, there isn’t a lot of evidence to say women were present at the birth of Jesus. But there also isn’t any way to say conclusively they weren’t. 

The Bible doesn't say anything about it, one way or the other.

But what we can say for sure is that, over the centuries, women have been marginalized women in the Christian religion—their roles in the Gospels and the New Testament downplayed, prevented from being leaders, and forced into stereotypical gender roles.

So even if it can’t be proved women were there, maybe it’s time to promote a little gender balance in the Christmas story.

Perhaps at future Christmas pageants we will see some female shepherds. 

And in the spirit of goodwill, some female magi wouldn’t hurt, either.

Christmas, or What Was God Saying to Indigenous People 2,000 Years Ago?

So I've been thinking about what God was saying 2,000 years ago to people living in North America, or what Indigenous people call Turtle Island.

At Christmas, Christians celebrate how they believe God came into the world through Jesus.

But when God came into the world 2,000 years ago in Palestine, what was he saying to Indigenous people in North America at the same time?

That’s the question that was posed to me recently.

I have to admit: I had never thought about that before. I went looking for more information.

The person who asked the question said he was quoting my friend Terry LeBlanc, an Indigenous Christian leader and director of NAIITS, an Indigenous Christian learning community.

I sent Terry an e-mail. Did he really say that?

Terry said yes, the gist of it was correct. Then he amplified what he meant.

First off, Terry said, he wanted to affirm “if there is a singular Creator of all things, something about which I am in agreement, then unless he is the deist’s god (who created the world and then left), God has been and is omnipresent by default.”

What this means, he said, is that while the history we read about in the Bible was unfolding for the Jews, “there was an historical timeline of equal length unfolding here and in other places of the globe.”

Terry was quick to add he’s wasn’t saying “God as Jesus, specifically, was here [in North America], though there are prophecies of the arrival of the message of Jesus.”

Instead, he said, what he meant was “God as Creator and God as the Spirit were here.”

If that’s the case, I asked him, what was God saying to the Indigenous people of North America?

God was speaking about things like the seven teachings, Terry said: Love, respect, courage, honesty, wisdom, humility and truth.

As we know, when Europeans arrived they assumed North America’s Indigenous people were heathens—that they had no knowledge of God. (At least, not God as they understood him.)

But they did, Terry said. They just used different language and stories to express it.

But Christian missionaries assumed those stories “were irrelevant and/or replaceable by the biblical narrative, instead of recognizing the universal applicability of those [Indigenous] narratives.”

When I read Terry’s comments, I was reminded of what Richard Twiss, a noted American Indigenous Christian leader, said in his book Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys.

In it, he noted that “the Creator’s presence” was active among native people before Europeans arrived.

Unfortunately, he added, they were blinded “to the already existing work of Creator among Native nations of the land.”

Instead of coming alongside Indigenous ways of understanding God, they sought to convert them to “white man’s religion.”

The result was a disaster for Indigenous people as Europeans suppressed their spirituality, culture, languages and ways of life.

But back to the original question: When God came into the world as a baby in Palestine over 2,000 years ago, how was he communicating with the inhabitants of North America—or people in other countries around the world? And what was he saying?

Those are questions I will be pondering this Christmas. What do you think?

Photo at top: Norval Morrisseau, Indian Jesus Christ, 1974.

John Chau: Martyr or Misguided Zealot?

I’ve been thinking about John Chau, the young missionary who was killed trying to bring the Gospel to the people who live on North Sentinel Island.

Was he a martyr, or a misguided zealot? Opinion is divided.

First, a bit of background.

Chau, 26, was killed trying to evangelize the Sentinelese, a remote and isolated group of a few hundred people who live on an Island in the Bay of Bengal.

The Sentinelese have resisted interaction with the outside world for centuries, ever since a terrible encounter with the British in the late 19^th century.

To protect them, and keep them safe from diseases against which they have no immunity, the country of India has made it illegal for outsiders to go to the island. 

As for Chau, he had been gripped by a desire to go to the island since he was 18, according to Mary Ho of All Nations, a mission agency based in Kansas City, Mo. that partly supported him.

“It was his life's mission to go to the island and share the goodness of Jesus Christ," she is quoted as saying.

The first time Chau tried to get to the island, he hired local fishermen to take him as close as possible before he went closer in a kayak.

"My name is John!" he yelled when he spotted some Sentinelese men onshore. "I love you, and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you."

He went back a second time, retreating when an islander shot an arrow at him.

"Lord," he wrote in his diary after that encounter, "is this island Satan's last stronghold, where none have heard or even had a chance to hear your name?"

In his final journal entry, on Nov. 16, Chau left instructions with the fishermen for contacting friends, family and colleagues if his third visit went wrong.

"You guys might think I'm crazy in all this," he said, "but I think it's worth it to declare Jesus to these people. Please do not be angry at them or at God if I get killed."

The next day the fishermen saw the islanders dragging Chau's body along the beach and then burying it.

As of this writing, Indian police have decided it’s impossible to retrieve his body, given the risk of a confrontation with the Sentinelese people.

So: Was Chau right to do what he did, or not?

Non-religious commentators are pretty unanimous in their condemnation.

This included Steven Corry of Survival International, a group that champions the rights of indigenous people.

“The Sentinelese have shown again and again that they want to be left alone, and their wishes should be respected,” he said in a statement on the group’s website.

“The British colonial occupation of the Andaman Islands decimated the tribes living there, wiping out thousands of tribespeople, and only a fraction of the original population now survive. So the Sentinelese fear of outsiders is very understandable.”

Remote tribes like the Sentinelese “must have their lands properly protected,” he wrote.

For British journalist Janet Street-Porter, Chau’s adventure “was an act of cultural imperialism and insane arrogance.”

Writing in the Independent, she called it “another example of two of the worse kinds of environmental pollution: aggressive pushing of faith to another culture and the introduction of ‘gifts’ which undermine their way of life.

But John Stackhouse, an evangelical who teaches religious studies at Crandall University in Moncton, sees it differently.  

In a blog post on Context, he acknowledges what Chau did was illegal, and could have exposed the islanders to disease against which they have no resistance—although he raises doubts about whether that might have happened.

He also questions whether it would be so bad if they were able to enjoy the benefits of modernity.

But beyond the disease question, “there seems little to argue against Chau’s initiative—at least from the point of view of anyone not already hostile to Christianity.”

Christians, he went on to say “believe—perhaps wrongly, but sincerely—that our message of salvation through Jesus Christ is the best news in the world, the solution to every culture’s fundamental problem, the hope of flourishing in this life and in the next.

“Nothing therefore can be seen as more important than hearing this good news, and John Allen Chau risked his life accordingly.”

For Stackhouse, Chau was a “brave young man doing what brave young Christians should.”

But other Christians disagree.

Writing on the website of The American Conservative, Rod Dreher, who is Eastern Orthodox, said "even though I share his faith, Chau had no business going to those people."

If Chau had been a missionary trying to sneak into North Korea, “I would have thought him insanely brave,” he said.

“But the law against visiting that island was there for a very good reason: this tribe has had no exposure to outsiders, and is enormously vulnerable to communicable diseases.”

He went on to note that Chau could not have preached to these people, anyway—he doesn’t’ speak their language.

In fact, said Dreher, “nobody speaks their language. How on earth could he have witnessed to them?”

Unless he planned to spend many years living with the Sentinelese, “trying to preach to them was a pointless endeavor,” he stated.

“He might easily have been an angel of death for this tribe!” he went on to say. “The vanity and hubris of that man is really something.”

Worse, he adds, Chau’s adventure has angered Hindus in India, where Christians can be viewed with suspicion.

“So Chau’s act is now bringing pain and misery onto innocent Christians living in India under difficult conditions of bigotry and persecution. Great.”

For Dreher, the conclusion is simple.

“Chau ought to have left those vulnerable tribespeople alone. He had no chance of converting them to faith in Christ, but a good chance of giving them a disease that could have wiped them off the face of the earth. How could any Christian justify this?”

                                             *                 *                *

For Christians, Chau’s misadventure raises interesting questions.

They are, after all, commanded to preach the Gospel to the whole world.

But what is the best way to do that?

Throughout much of history, missionary and imperial impulses were often mixed. Christians missionaries didn’t just bring their faith, but also colonialism—and a sense of western superiority—to other countries and races.

True, those missionaries also brought health care and education. But death and destruction came, too—both overseas and among Indigenous people in North America.

Today, thoughtful Christians are wrestling with the question of how to be a witness for their faith abroad, and in their own countries.

There isn’t agreement on what that should look like. But, at a minimum, I think it should similar to the oath doctors take: Do no harm.

Using that minimum standard, Chau was wrong to undertake his mission (apart from the fact that culturally and linguistically it made no sense, not to mention his lone-ranger style.)

Anyway: That's what I'm thinking. What are your thoughts?