Born That Men No More May Die

Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus. Mark, the immediate gospel, just starts, with John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus’s public ministry as an adult. Luke opens with the nativity narratives, first of John the Baptist and then of Jesus, containing that famous Christmas passage that Linus reads in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

But John gets philosophical. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”