Here now is the twelfth (and final!) of my twelve favorite Christmas posts of years gone by, in our celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

******************************

Yesterday I gave Part 1 of my Newsweek article on Christmas, published in 2012.  Here is Part 2!

Most modern readers who are not already familiar with these stories [in the apocryphal Gospels such as the Proto-Gospel of James] tend to find them far-fetched.   That’s almost always the case with miraculous accounts that we have never heard before – they sound implausible and “obviously” made up, as legends and fabrications.   Rarely do we have the same reaction to familiar stories known from childhood that are also spectacularly miraculous, and that probably sound just as bizarre to outsiders who hear them for the first time.  Are the stories about Jesus’ birth that are in the New Testament any less far-fetched?

It depends whom you ask.   This past November, Pope Benedict XVI published his third book on the life of Jesus, this one focusing on the New Testament accounts of his birth, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives.  Before his ascent to the head of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger was best known as a leading German theologian, and he does bring his training to bear on the narratives of Jesus’ birth.  But this is not a scholarly book written by a scholar to advance the purposes of scholarship.  Instead, as one would expect, it is chiefly a pious reflection highly suitable to the faithful members of the Pope’s very large flock.  As such it will be widely welcomed – not only among Catholics but also, one might suspect, among conservative Christians of whatever stripe, for its affirmation of the Gospel accounts not only as theologically valuable but also as historically accurate.

 

The book will not be as well cherished, however, among those who are less interested in affirming the narratives of Scripture than in knowing what actually happened in the past.  And there is indeed a very wide swath of historical scholars – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, agnostic, and other – who have a very different view of the accounts of Jesus’ birth in the New Testament, who realize that there are problems with the traditional stories as they are recounted for us in Matthew and Luke, the only two Gospels that contain infancy narratives.   However valuable these writings may be for theological reflection on the meaning and importance of Jesus – and why should anyone deny that they are tremendously valuable for that? – they are not the sorts of historical sources that we might hope for if we are seriously engaged in trying to reconstruct the events of history.   For some Christian believers that is a problem; for others, it is a liberation, as it frees the believer from having to base faith on the uncertainties provided by the imperfect historical record and the fallible historians who study it.

For centuries scholars have recognized that the birth narratives of the New Testament are historically problematic.  For one thing, the two accounts – the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two chapters of Luke – are strikingly different from one another, in ways that appear irreconcilable.   To start with, they both give genealogies of Jesus’ father, Joseph (it’s an interesting question why they do so, since in neither account is Jesus a blood relative of Joseph), but they are different genealogies:  he is said to have a different father, and grandfather, and great grandfather, and so on.  It is not that one is a genealogy of Mary and the other of Joseph.  Both Gospel authors are crystal clear:  they are giving Joseph’s genealogy.  And they are doing so because they both want to relate Jesus to the ancestral line of the Jewish patriarchs, but neither of them has access to the kind of reliable data they need for the task.  So they have provided genealogies that have been invented for the purpose and that, as a result, are necessarily at odds with each other.  And that is just the opening gambit.  The discrepancies occur repeatedly throughout the chapters.

Moreover, both accounts contain contradictions with the known facts of history.  Just take Luke as an example.  Only in this Gospel do Joseph and Mary make a trip from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem in order to register for a census when “the whole world” had to be enrolled under Caesar Augustus.  The whole world?  Luke must mean “the whole Roman empire.”  But even that cannot be right, historically.  We have good documentation about the reign of Caesar Augustus, and there never was a census of his entire empire.  Let alone one in which people had to register in their ancestral home.  In this account Joseph and Mary need to register in Bethlehem (which is why Jesus is born there) because Joseph is descended from King David who came from Bethlehem.  But David lived a thousand years earlier.  Is everyone in the entire Roman Empire returning to their ancestral home from a thousand years earlier?  Imagine the massive migrations for this census.  And no historian from the time thought it was worth mentioning?   This is not a story based on historical fact.  It is a narrative designed to show how Jesus could have been born in Bethlehem – whence the messiah was to come – when everyone knew in fact that he came from Nazareth.

There are other kinds of implausibility in the accounts – leaving aside the much-debated question of the virgin birth itself.  In Matthew, for example, the wise men follow the star to Bethlehem, where it stops over the house where Jesus is (why, by the way, is Jesus’ family living in a house, if they just came to register for a census?).   How is it that a star – or any celestial body – can lead anyone to a particular town?  And how can it then stop over a particular house?

Conundrums such as these have been debated for many years, of course, with some Christian scholars and their lay followers finding ingenious solutions to them and more critical historians insisting that in fact they are bona fide problems that show that these Gospel sources, whatever else they are, are not historically reliable descriptions of what really happened when Jesus was born.

Many Christians take offense at that claim, but in fact, it need not be that way, as many less literally-minded believers have long known and said.   The accounts of Jesus’ life in the New Testament have never been called “histories”; instead, they have always been known as “gospels” – that is “proclamations of the good news.”  These are books that meant to declare religious truths, not historical facts.  For believers who think that truth must, necessarily, be based on history, that probably will not be good news at all.  But for those with a broader vision, a more generous appreciation of literature, and a fuller sense of theological meaning, the story of the Christ-child and his appearance in the world can be founded not on what really did happen, but on what really does happen, in the lives of those who believe that stories such as these can convey a greater truth.