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Like many American boys, I learned about Jesus' birth while wearing a bathrobe. Each Advent season I got a part in the Christmas pageant, generally as either a shepherd or a wise man. At the appropriate moment, I shuffled into place and said my line—usually only one, occasionally two.

We worked from original scripts, the accounts in Luke and Matthew, portraying the Incarnation as a real event involving real people. The idea was to show Jesus' birth as history, just as Scripture does. The effort at historical authenticity never went too far. An unusually faithful reproduction would include live sheep.

To the best of my memory, Herod's Slaughter of the Innocents was never included. But among the cuddly images of Christmas come these barbed historical details. For many adults, it is hard to understand the violence at the beginning and the end of Jesus' earthly story. Why did Herod murder all the boy-children? For that matter, why did Pilate have Jesus executed, and in such grisly fashion?

A recent writing assignment for the Catholic edition of The Student Bible required my studying books of the pre-Christian Apocrypha (from the Greek for "hidden" or "obscure"), which Catholics include in their Bible. As a Protestant I grew up only marginally aware of these books. They made me a little nervous, to tell the truth. Somewhat to my surprise, I found they helped me understand the kind of world Jesus was born into.

I happily affirm the Reformers' decision to leave these books of the Apocrypha out of the canon of the Holy Scripture. These writings don't rise to the level of divine inspiration.

Nevertheless, as popular Jewish literature of the two centuries before Christ's birth, they are the closest thing we have to a rack of paperback books preserved from the streets of Jerusalem. They remind me of those calcified mummies from Pompeii, which seem to capture the expressions on people's faces the moment Mount Vesuvius erupted. From these books, we learn a lot about Jewish minds in Jesus' day.

Historians and biblical scholars estimate these books were written 160 to 220 years before the birth of Jesus. Undoubtedly, much changed in the intervening period. Still, a lot stayed the same, especially Israel's political and religious environment.

It was a world suffering from great political and religious stress, a world more like modern Afghanistan or Iraq—or Israel—than anything I picked up in my Sunday school lessons. For nearly six centuries, ever since the Babylonian exile, the Jews had been a scattered people, and a series of powerful foreign empires ruled Israel. The godless were no longer somewhere over the border. They lived inside the Holy Land, and cheek-by-jowl with Jews throughout the Diaspora. God's people had to cope with the world's might and mindset every day, without refuge.

The threat to Israel's faith can be read all through these writings. It came as a two-headed dragon. One head was personal and individual: the seductive, numbing force of a polytheistic culture. Greek (Seleucid) masters—and later Roman masters—assumed intellectual and cultural superiority. And with some reason: Greek art, philosophy and literature stand out as marvels even today. How could Jews believe themselves to be God's chosen when other people had more knowledge, wealth, and power? Why should Jews maintain their separation from a culture that offered so much? Jews were clearly tempted to assimilate, to fit in to the Empire.

The dragon's second head was more violent, coercive rather than seductive. Emperor Antiochus Epiphanes determined to unite his vast realm religiously and culturally. He acted in much the way that religious regimes sometimes do in the East today (and did once in Europe, as well). Believing that political unity required religious uniformity, he offered Israel the choice of assimilation or death.

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December 9 2002, Vol. 46, No. 13