Is Christmas unbelievable?

Dec 20

Around the end of the year you start to see Nativity scenes everywhere: at the shops, in front yards, and all throughout the house. Carols services across the world trot out all the usual Christmas characters: Joseph and Mary, an innkeeper, the shepherds, the angels, the three wise men, and a small chorus of barnyard animals lowing beneath a brilliant star.

At the same time, historical purists who read the gospels carefully like to stomp all over the inaccuracies of our nativity scenes, pointing out that the inn wasn’t really a hotel but rather the guest room in a house, that the stable wasn’t really like a barn in the hills but rather the dirty ground floor where they sheltered the animals, and that there wasn’t really three wise men, simply three gifts. In fact, historically speaking, the wise men weren’t even there at the first noel … they came to worship Jesus months after he was born. But why should we care about getting the Christmas story straight anyway? For all manner of people are convinced that the nativity scene is more hoax than history; that the gospel stories in Matthew and Luke about Jesus’ birth are just legendary fabrications, so you cannot rationally believe in Christmas.

Now in another article—Can I Trust the Bible?—I laid out a few of the reasons why I think you can take these gospel accounts seriously as credible historical sources. So what I want to tackle in this video are two of the more fantastical elements of the nativity that lead people to dismiss the Christmas story as too unbelievable: the virgin birth and the Bethlehem star. As one of the earliest summaries of mere Christianity, the Apostle’s Creed affirms: I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, and born of the virgin Mary.

Now before you reject the Bible because it is full of ignorant goat herders who blindly believe miracle claims, it seems the people in the Christmas story found the virgin birth just as hard to accept as we do. Matthew’s gospel records that when Joseph, Mary’s betrothed, found out she was pregnant, he didn’t believe her story, and assumed she had been unfaithful. That is, until, Mary’s extraordinary claim was confirmed by extraordinary evidence: an angelic messenger, Gabriel, appears to Joseph to reassure him of the supernatural origins of the child in Mary’s womb. Likewise in Luke’s account of the birth narratives, Mary isn’t ignorant of the birds and the bees. So when Gabriel informs her that she would be the womb through which God would enter the world, she is confused. She has questions.

Now the virgin birth has nothing to do with God disapproving of sex. Sex is God’s idea, designed as a gift within marriage, and the Bible is radically pro-sex. Rather Jesus’ arrival via a virgin birth has more to do with the idea of God launching a new creation project. The point is theological: God is creating a new humanity in Jesus. But can serious people believe in the virgin birth? Well, that depends on two things: (1) Whether God exists beyond nature, able to reach in from the outside to feed in a new creative event, and (2) whether the evidence stacks up for believing the story of Jesus’ virgin birth.

Now I think the case for God is pretty strong, and that the problem of miracles put forth by Hume is itself riddled with problems. But I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to the virgin birth, the historical evidence for this particular miracle is spotty at best. What I think we can say is that while the historical record doesn’t prove a virgin birth, it is consistent with one. Certainly Jesus’ mother, Mary—no doubt from whom we get Luke’s account—she believed it. And even Jesus’ opponents seemed to speak of his origins as unusual or suspicious. But the reason why serious people affirm the virgin birth today rests more on the case for Christ as a whole than the case for this Christmas miracle, ultimately turning on the case for the resurrection of Jesus.

The logic goes that if God exists, having already created everything out of nothing at the inception of our cosmos, then the miraculous conception of Jesus and the virgin birth 9 months later is simply child’s play by comparison. And given we have a strong historical for one miracle at the end of the gospels, the resurrection of Jesus, at least for me, it seems to remove any barriers to affirming what Christians have always believed about another miracle at the start of the gospels, the virgin birth. You might say that in light of the historical case for the resurrection story, the Christmas story becomes more believable. But speaking of light, what about the Bethlehem star? Are we really supposed to believe that the heavens broadcasted Jesus’ birthday?

Now as crazy as that might sound, there are serious secular scholars, conferences, and even publications devoted to entertaining that possibility. Broadly speaking classical historians who study the relevant texts, and astronomers who study the night sky, have put forward three possible explanations for this astronomical anomaly:

First, a nova, or supernova. Either the birth of a new star, or the death throes of an old one, both would produce a new brilliant light in the sky. Though given they would be visible right around the world, and the only known supernova of the time dates back to 12BC, too early for our timeline, it makes this first explanation unlikely.

Second, a comet. Moving through our solar system, a comet could be a good explanation for how the magi felt the star moved East, then West, then South, and with its tail pointing in the right direction it could be said to be “standing over” the place of Jesus’ birth. Certainly the early church father Origen opted for a Christmas comet over a Christmas star, and with a Chinese record of a comet in 5BC fitting the proposed timeline, this is a live option.

The third and final option is a rare conjunction of stars and planets. This explanation perhaps best fits our historical understanding of the magi. Based in the Parthian empire, the magi were an elite class of advisors and kingmakers whose craft was interpreting the stars. As such, the magi would have been well poised to notice what happened in 7BC with the rise of Jupiter, the royal planet, as it interacted with the regular stellar constellations that in ancient thought were assigned to nation states.

It isn’t much of a stretch, then, to think the magi would have interpreted Jupiter’s rare rising amidst the Jewish constellation (Ares), as being a herald of the birth of a divine king in Israel, prompting them to come and worship. The basic summary, though, is that there are serious options for the Bethlehem star, meaning the Christian story is far from unbelievable.

You don’t even need to believe in a miraculous star, just God’s providence over the heavens and history to bring it all together at the right time. Which is the really cool thing about the Christmas story. The way God meticulously coordinates so many signals to announce the arrival of His Son as a newborn baby in Bethlehem:

Special revelation in the biblical prophecies.
Signs in the heavens.
A supernatural miracle in the virgin birth.
Angelic heralds.

For those to whom God first announced Jesus’ birth, the Christmas story was not only believable, it was breathtaking, for the Jews and the foreigners, for the lowly shepherds and the educated elite. At Christmas, no one has to be left out in the dark. God wants everyone, near and far, to come and celebrate Heaven touching Earth.