Snow in Bethlehem
Blogged by James Preece on 10th January 2013
Fantastic...
[source:catholicnews.org.uk]
From Chesterton..
This is written amid fields of snow within a few days of Christmas. And when I last saw snow it was within a few miles of Bethlehem.
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Everything I have been taught or told led me to regard snow in Bethlehem as a paradox, like snow in Egypt. Every rumour of realism, every indirect form of rationalism, every scientific opinion taken on authority and at third hand, had let me to regard the country where Christ was born solely as a sort of semi-tropical place with nothing but palm-trees and parasols.
It was only when I actually looked at it that it looked exactly like a Christmas card."
Now can we have some snow in Hull please?
Reader Comments
Patrick Fahey said...
I think you will have your wish this weekend!
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mike cliffson said...
Equally, I have often been irritated by what is supposedly even topnotch and/ or Catholic Biblical Criticism - Our present Peter has written about this sort- wherein the factual nature of any aspect of the gospels is "disprovable" by any authority of any erudite modern, typically a chairborne handsoff academic landsman well-read, but with a 20th century townie, understanding of Agricultural practice, etc.
One of the many pundits' pronouncements I have thought "oh, Yeah?" to has been the idea that shepherds would NOT be out at night, or in winter (because of, eg , the danger of snow, and wild animals )
I have NEVER visited the holy land, I am not a paleoclimatologist, nor can I read Latin, Arameic, Hebrew, or Greek.
But I have lived in the penines and been friends with farming families, and one thing about grazing animals is constant : If you put them inside , you need fodder, which you can run out of over say a winter, say a drought. And you can have bad years for fodder, its storage is a problem too, etc.
Let alone that modern studies, they have been done in the middle east and Uk, for example, indicate better goats milk quality , live weight gains, and general health, including reproductive, , when feeding on fresher vegetation than on most traditional fodders.
Which they MAY have known by experience 2000yrs ago.
(Or they may have been the thick hick grunting cavementypes one hears depicted.Some individual shepherds may not have been the best, one understands) The Judean hills AD0 are not the penines AD2000,and are wolfless and lionless, but I surmise that in common have that ranging far and wide on uncultivated rocky areas can feed flocks.
Which means taking them further than daylight allows return to theirstabling or corraling.And taking advantage of every burst of slightly better weather. Certainly 1950s penine farmers traded off the loss of some sheep when caught by harsh weather, despite looking for them and moving them at night with landrovers etc , (no droughts admittedly usually in the uk),taking advantage of every last patch of edible vegetation and saving their fodder for a rainier day.
I suspect that the risk to livestock - fooddersaving tradeoff is a constant, even if modern betterpaid firstworld shepherds would be disinclined to watch flocks by night without overtime.
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