Nothing is more orthodox, one might think, than the traditional Christmas-card Nativity scene of the ox and ass looking adoringly at Jesus in the stable.
Few realise that this much-loved scene has no obvious canonical authority. The canonical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, do not depict the animals in the stable, indeed there are no references at all to the animals attending Christ’s birth. The source appears to be the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, a compilation in Latin from the 8th or 9th centuries which draws on an older oral tradition. The ox and the ass, for example, appear on sarcophagi of the 4th and 5th centuries, and on ivory carvings of the fifth and sixth centuries.
What we appear to have, then, is a non-canonical elaboration of the line found in Isaiah i, 3 (echoed in Habakkuk iii, 2) that “the ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s crib”. Interesting, one might think, but hardly significant.
In fact Pseudo-Matthew is part of a voluminous amount of apocryphal literature that offers strikingly different perspectives on Jesus and animals. In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (5th century), Jesus creates sparrows from clay and breathes on a dead fish to bring it back to life. In the Protoevangelium of James (2nd century), the entire creation, including the animals, is caught up in a catalepsy at the birth of Jesus. In a Coptic fragment, of unknown date, Jesus heals a mule and remonstrates with its owner: “Now carry on and from now on do not beat it any more, so that you too may find mercy.”
And in Pseudo-Matthew lions and panthers accompany the Holy Family into the desert, worshipping the Christ child as they go “with great reverence”. On the bank of the Jordan the lions and their whelps run to greet the young Jesus, and the whelps run around his feet, fawning and playing with him. To his worried parents and onlookers, Jesus retorts: “How much better are the beasts than you, seeing that they recognise their Lord and glorify him; while you men, who have been made in the image and likeness of God, do not recognise him!”
These stories pick up on hints found, for example, in Mark i, 13 that Jesus began His ministry “with the wild beasts”, his triumphal entry to Jerusalem on a “humble ass” (Matthew xxi, 1-9), and the designation of Jesus as the “Lamb of God” (John i, 36). Jesus’ saying about the sparrows “not forgotten by God” (Luke xii, 6) is remarkable when it is appreciated that the sparrows (strouthia, little birds, in Greek) were probably little bits of meat sold in 1st-century Palestinian markets. Thus, in context, Jesus is affirming even the value of animals commonly treated as economic commodities.
The significance of these gospel hints and apocryphal stories is that they testify to an animal-friendly tradition within Christianity. Christ’s birth and ministry are understood as a harbinger of peaceful creaturely relations in fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy that the “wolf shall live with the sheep . . . and a little child shall lead them” (xi, 6).
God’s kingdom, then, consists in peaceful, filial, co-operative relations between species.
This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the instrumentalist views of animals found in classical exponents, such as Augustine, Aquinas and Luther. Animals, they believed, were put here for our use. “Hence,” wrote St Thomas, “it is not wrong for man to make use of them, either by killing or in any other way whatever.”
But the animal-friendly tradition was kept alive — indeed it flourished — in the lives of many saints of East and West. St Basil the Great, St John Chrysostom, St Isaac the Syrian, and St Cuthbert all commended kindness to animals as a mark of holiness. St Bonaventure, the biographer of St Francis of Assisi, wrote of how he was filled with overwhelming piety when he contemplated God’s other creatures, calling them “brothers” and “sisters” because they had the same origin as himself.
Many commentators have dismissed these stories of saints and animals as hagiographical gloss. But, in fact, they carry a strong theological punch: union with God (if it is to be real) must involve communion with all God’s creatures. Attitudes of wonder and celebration cannot easily co-exist with wholly instrumentalist perspectives on animals.
Neither did that animal-friendly tradition die out with the great saints. It culminated in the humanitarian movement in the 19th century that saw the first organised campaigns against cruelty to animals and children.
The Anglican divine Humphry Primatt famously described cruelty as “atheism” in his landmark book The Duty of Mercy in 1776, and subsequent luminaries, such as William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury, maintained that cruelty was incompatible with Christian discipleship. The Anglican priest Arthur Broom founded the SPCA (as it then was) as a Christian society in 1824. The contemporary animal rights movement would have been inconceivable without these Christian pioneers.
In fact the “Christian” view of animals is altogether more ambiguous than many suppose. Despite the almost universal view that Christianity teaches that animals are here for our use, the Bible never explicitly endorses that idea — its originator was (most probably) Aristotle.
Many think that the “dominion” over animals granted in Genesis i, 26 means despotism, but since human beings are subsequently prescribed a vegetarian diet (v29-30), it is difficult to see how herb-eating dominion can be a licence for tyranny.
Although most think that human salvation alone is Christian doctrine, many Bible verses make clear that the scope of salvation is cosmic. Untrammelled human supremacy, it is supposed, is part of the core message, whereas the Bible indicates how humans are uniquely wicked, capable of making themselves lower than the beasts — the Book of Job compares us unfavourably with the Leviathan and Behemoth (chaps 40-41).
Last month more than 100 academics (including 40 theologians) helped to launch the new Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, an international academy dedicated to rethinking the ethics of our treatment of animals. Christianity — once judged to be the cornerstone of “speciesist” and “supremacist” attitudes — in fact comprises resources to help us discover more convivial and respectful relations with animals.
Next time we peer into a Christmas crib, with Jesus surrounded by the adoring animals, we should remind ourselves of the survival of an alternative, animal-inclusive tradition at the heart of Christianity.
The Rev Professor Andrew Linzey is director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics; www.oxfordanimalethics.com
