Breastfeeding Jesus: The Missing Christmas Icon

RELIGIONS NEWS SERVICE
By David Gibson

"Nursing Madonna" (1520s) by Bernardino Luini

At its heartwarming core, Christmas is the story of a birth: the tender relationship between a new mother and her newborn child. Yet all the familiar scenes associated with the holy family today – creches and church pageants, postage stamps and holiday cards – are also missing an obvious element of the mother-child connection that modern Christians are apparently happy to do without: a breast-feeding infant. Jesus certainly wasn’t a bottle baby. So what happened to Mary’s breasts? [link]