| Feature Article – December 2005 |
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I want to talk this month about the contentions arising when certain discoveries made by modern scholars bring into question some of our most deeply-held beliefs about the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.
What lies at the heart of this issue is an important question: is our faith formed by the word of God, or do we allow our experiences in life, and our perceptions and beliefs that arise from those experiences, to shape our understanding of God’s word? It ultimately comes down to the issue of interpretation and authority. As a help in approaching this question from a biblical perspective, I would keep before us as a guide Christ’s own words when he was asked a most important question concerning the life of faith: “What is the first and greatest commandment?” Jesus’ response was: “Love the LORD with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength!”
Sadly, it seems that when some people become Christians they feel that it is appropriate to love God with your heart and soul and might, but they act as if in the rite of Baptism the Holy Spirit somehow performs a partial, if not full, lobotomy on the newest member of the body of Christ. We speak of being endowed by our Creator with the gifts of memory, reason, and skill, but because of the influence of the Fundamentalist movement arising out of post-World War I American Protestantism, all too often people in the church fail to use the gift of their minds to engage both the world and God’s word. But we are not called by Christ to not think, we are called to use our minds to their fullest capacity to honour God, which might very well mean letting go of some of our deeply-held, but possibly misguided, beliefs, not because God has made a mistake, but because we fallible mortals might just have made a mistake in understanding God’s word.
We encounter just such a situation when it comes to the dating of the Nativity narratives found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. If a non-Christian were to ask you the question, “When was Jesus born?”, I would venture to say that most people would answer either “Year 0” – which actually never existed – or possibly 1 AD. But there immediately arises the problem that Matthew’s gospel states that King Herod the Great was living at the time of the birth of Jesus: for it is Herod himself who inquired of the Magi where the Messiah was to be born. We know from other ancient sources outside of the Bible that Herod died in 4 BC (that is, Before Christ). We are also told that when Herod learned that he had been tricked by the Magi he had his soldiers kill all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years of age or younger. Consequently Jesus, by this accounting, was born at the latest in 6 BC, but possibly even earlier – a far cry from the assumed date of birth, 1 AD. The reason for this misunderstanding is not that Matthew’s version of events is incorrect, and consequently that God’s word could somehow be wrong, but that our understanding of the event and consequently our faith position is incorrect because it has been formed by something other than God’s word, something more human and consequently liable to mistakenness and fallibility.
The reason for this mix-up can be traced back to the Scythian Monk Dionysius Exiguus who calculated this date for the Incarnation in the 6th century. It is a miscalculation of the calendar, based upon human error which is the cause of contention here, not the veracity of God’s word. It is also not a help to us in our faith that we also see at this time of year Nativity scenes marketed by various retail stores which have the wise men worshipping a newborn Christ wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger as if they somehow had appeared miraculously at the stable just hours after the birth of the Lord.
A somewhat similar situation also arises when we begin to talk about the date upon which we celebrate Christmas, December 25th. There is no indication in God’s word that this was the actual historical day upon which Christ was born. It appears that December 25th was settled upon as the date for the feast of the Nativity in the 4th century AD to oppose the then popular Roman festival of Saturnalia which occurred at this time of the year. The date upon which we celebrate Christ’s birth appears to have been settled upon due more to human necessity, than divine directive.
But as followers of Jesus Christ, such things as the historicity of day and date ultimately are not the things upon which our faith rests, and to concede that Christ may have been born on some other day than December 25th, in some year preceding 1 AD. in no way diminishes the power or truth of God’s word. For ultimately the Gospels seek to tell us, not so much the when, where and even how of God in our world, but the why and what of God’s actions in creation. The true message of Christmas, therefore, is to be found in the fact that God has acted in time and history for our salvation and well-being through the Incarnation of the babe born in Bethlehem. So in this knowledge we, too, can raise our voices in adoration and join with that multitude of heavenly hosts, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours”.