Did the baby Jesus burp, cry, or get sick?

A few thoughts prompted by The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

Imogene Herdman (Beatrice Schneider) cradles the baby-doll Jesus in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

I had a fun chat with Kathryn Post from the Religion News Service last week, talking about The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and the state of faith-based films in general.

Her article went up last Friday, and it quotes me twice—once with regard to how faith-based films have been struggling post-Covid (a topic I wrote about here), and once with regard to how Dallas Jenkins, the director of The Chosen and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, has made a point of humanizing the characters in the Bible.

Along the way, she quotes something I said about The Chosen’s recurring focus on excrement (Matthew steps in it, Joseph shovels it, Jesus meets his first disciple while building a latrine, Mary reminds Jesus that she used to change his “soiled” swaddling clothes, etc., etc.):

“In one of the Christmas episodes (of “The Chosen”) is a close up of Joseph shoveling crap in the stable. And there are lines of dialogue about people relieving themselves, too,” he said. “It’s a recurring thing in ‘The Chosen,’ and part of the point is that it is to make everything seem more quote, unquote, relatable.”  

I want to briefly expand on this point here.

I made the quoted comment in connection with a scene in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever in which Imogene, the wild child who plays Mary in the pageant, starts burping the baby-Jesus doll, which prompts this exchange between two people in the congregation:

Woman: I never! Burping the baby Jesus as if he had colic. That certainly wasn’t in the program.

Man: Well I like it. You think the baby Jesus didn’t need to burp?

The first time I saw the film, I assumed Jenkins had written that exchange; it seemed very on-brand for him. But then I read the book (for the first time in decades) and discovered that there is a somewhat similar exchange in there:

Imogene had the baby doll but she wasn’t carrying it the way she was supposed to, cradled in her arms. She had it slung up over her shoulder, and before she put it in the manger she thumped it twice on the back.

I heard Alice gasp and she poked me. “I don’t think it’s very nice to burp the baby Jesus,” she whispered, “as if he had colic.” Then she poked me again. “Do you suppose he could have had colic?”

I said, “I don’t know why not,” and I didn’t. He could have had colic, or been fussy, or hungry like any other baby. After all, that was the whole point of Jesus—that he didn’t come down on a cloud like something out of “Amazing Comics,” but that he was born and lived … a real person.

So, the film got the basic exchange from the book. But it also tweaks the exchange in two ways that seem noteworthy to me.

First, it’s an exchange between children in the book, and between adults in the film—and the girl who objects to the burping in the book seems to question her own assumptions just a few seconds later, without any external prompting. She is capable of self-reflection. The woman who objects to the burping in the film, on the other hand, doesn’t question her own assumptions until she is contradicted by a man.

And second, while the film emphasizes the burping, the book emphasizes the colic. The film, like Jenkins’ other projects, is very comfortable with the idea that Jesus had the same body functions as the rest of us, but it is less enthusiastic about the idea that Jesus—the great healer, at least when he was an adult—might have cried excessively as a baby or had any physical ailments that prompted said crying.

This raises an interesting question: Did the baby Jesus cry at all? Did he ever wake his parents in the middle of the night when he needed to be fed or changed, etc.?

You certainly don’t get that sense from, say, traditional Christmas carols:

• ‘Silent Night’ assures us that “all is calm” as it celebrates the “holy infant so tender and mild” who “sleep[s] in heavenly peace”.

• ‘What Child Is This?’ ponders the child who “on Mary’s lap is sleeping”.

• ‘Away in a Manger’ goes so far as to say that baby Jesus doesn’t even react when the animals in the stable wake him up with their noise: “The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.”

The image presented in almost every Christmas carol, crèche, or film is a remarkably peaceful one. Jesus is holy, and silence is holy, therefore Jesus was silent, etc.

But some people take issue with that image, arguing that the baby’s lack of crying doesn’t make him more divine, it just makes him less human.

For example, when I interviewed Scottish minister and hymn-writer John Bell in 1999, he called ‘Away in a Manger’ a “sub-Christian text” because its lyrics give us “a depiction of a child who is not the incarnate Son of God; he’s a rather sickly, wee boy who needs to seek help.”

I suspect the makers of Pageant would agree that crying was part of the baby Jesus’ human nature—after all, just look at how emotional the adult Jesus gets in The Chosen—but I also wonder if they think there’s a limit to the amount of crying he would have done. Maybe they think their audience thinks there’s a limit.

There’s a lot more that could be said about this topic, but I haven’t got time to get into it all here, plus I don’t want to stray too far from the film itself.

I do want to toss two other thoughts out there, though:

First, I recently caught up with the Paramount+ series Evil, and one of the major storylines in the final season involves the birth of the Antichrist. When Kristin, one of the show’s main characters, learns that the Satanists have gotten a surrogate to carry this child, she bursts out laughing and tells the biological father:

I can’t think of any greater torture I could devise for you than to give you a baby. A crying, s—ing baby. I giggle at the thought of you waking up at 3am because the Antichrist needs changing. Or dealing with diaper genies and bottles at 4am. And that’s just the beginning. I mean, have you thought about the terrible twos? In your apartment? Did you ever wonder why The Omen skipped the infancy? Because that’s the real horror.

So it’s not just the infancy of good babies that films tend to skip over.¹

And second, it seems to me that the line in Pageant about Jesus burping and/or having colic plays very differently now than it would have when the book came out 52 years ago, to the point where I almost wonder who even “needs” to hear it now.

In the 1970s—when films like Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar were just beginning to treat Jesus like a human being that people could relate to—this line about burping might have prompted the reader to think, “Oh, I never thought of that.”

But now, after decades of films in which Jesus laughs, dances, plays sports, and splashes his followers with water,² I suspect the average viewer is likely to respond, “Well, duh.” Which means we’re no longer in the position of the girl who rethinks her assumptions, but the man who scoffs at the indignant woman.

And… that’s about all I have to say about that, for now. More later, maybe.

1. Evil plays with this idea even more just a few episodes later, when the father in question has to deal with the baby Antichrist’s projectile vomit during Zoom calls and the like.

2. Laughs: see Matt Page’s post on Jesus’ humour in film.

Dances: Jesus dances at the wedding in Cana in 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, 1995’s The Revolutionary, 1999’s The Bible Collection: Jesus, and a 2019 episode of The Chosen.

Sports: he plays a ball game with his disciples in 1980’s The Day Christ Died, and he plays another with his fellow Nazarenes in a 2022 episode of The Chosen.

Splashes people with water: he does this to his disciples in the aforementioned The Bible Collection: Jesus, and to his mother in 2004’s The Passion of the Christ.

Just to cite the first examples that come to mind.