Christmas for Skeptics

In today’s world, just about any person can track down proof that they were in fact, born. For centuries, births and deaths were documented in church records, not government ones. Of course, in the early years, it was far from an accurate documentation process; if a child did not live to be baptized, was enslaved or a transient, its birth may have eluded record keeping, and the infant’s existence was relegated to the memory of its surviving mother. And then there’s genealogy databases for ancestry sleuths who can trace their family tree lineage way, way back, all from the comfort of their living rooms. The consensus among genealogists is that you can reliably and accurately trace a family tree back to the 1600s, depending on the specifics of your family. I have heard that some people have been able to go back 2,500 plus years! This is hardly the norm, but fascinating, nevertheless. The wealth of online resources and DNA kits available to modern detectives (who must have little else to do with their time,) is truly remarkable.

However, none of these types of tools existed in the first century when the New Testament was written. People didn’t even celebrate their birthdays until the late 19th century, let alone know the exact date of their own or their family and friends’ births. And yet, the Christian tradition teaches that not only was it known when Jesus was born, but how and when he was even conceived! (This isn’t an entirely too difficult as subtracting nine months from one’s delivery day can get most people in the vicinity of mom and dad’s big night.) But for Christians, that simple deduction gets much trickier given Jesus was conceived in a most unusual way: “by the power of the Holy Spirit,” to be exact.

Was Jesus historically conceived within a virgin or was his origin story in Matthew merely written that way? Was Mary truly a virgin, or was this too a word choice—a byproduct—born from the early Church’s discomfort with sex and sexuality? Furthermore, what “evidence” do scholars have about Jesus’s father or the existence of Jesus siblings or the very real possibility that Jesus was born illegitimately?

One doesn’t have to dig very deep to discover many reputable Biblical scholars having concluded that the author of Matthew relied on a Greek translation of Isaiah 7:14 (which was originally written in Hebrew) to “predict” Jesus’s arrival. The Hebrew text stated that a “young woman” will give birth to a son and will name him “Immanuel” which in Hebrew means “God is with us.” Historians are also in near consensus that Matthew’s Gospel was likely written near the end of the first century and therefore his insinuation that Jesus came to the earth in such a miraculous manner was the first of its kind to suggest such a thing. No other document retained before Matthew’s Gospel can back up his claims, especially not the Apostle Paul’s letters which far precede any of the Gospel writers’ accounts. This is the same Paul who had an answer and response for everything and whose words formed the backbone for much of Christianity’s theology and liturgy. Here was that same know-it-all Paul never so much as mentioning Jesus’s birth story.

I’m not entirely sure what we are supposed to make of Paul’s silence about Jesus’s origins. Frankly, I wonder less about how Jesus was conceived and more about why the scriptures cared to chime in anything about his origins at all. The first we hear about Jesus in Gospel of Mark, which most believe was the first Gospel published, was Jesus as a grown man meeting John the Baptizer by the Jordan River. John’s Gospel, which most believe was the last Gospel published, described Jesus in a much more abstract and mystical way, indicating he as the divine logos existed at the very beginning of time. So when Matthew and Luke, which many believe were writing around the same time, provided a tale about Jesus’s conception and birthday, my interest was piqued. Was Luke aware of Matthew and Matthew of Luke? Were they trying to supersede or to complement one another? Why weave such a tall tale about Jesus’s origins in the first place? Was Mary being impregnated because of her self-actualized “gaze of grace” upon Angel Gabriel’s visitation intended to be a plausible explanation or as a divinely inspired myth? Were these stories of Jesus’s beginnings intended to set the story straight, once and for all-time? Perhaps. Or maybe these authors felt pressure to convey something else about Jesus—something that supported the sentiment of the time they were writing about him. Did you know that the early church was severely anti-family and anti-marriage back in the day? Is it possible that portraying Jesus’s mother as a virgin or Jesus as unmarried had anything to do with this?

It must be at the very least considered that by the time Matthew and Luke were writing, Christianity was very much in full swing, and motivation was high to protect the emerging tradition about who the early Church believed Jesus was. Written with the end of the story in mind—from the tomb to the womb—it seems to me that the early Church impressed upon these writers to make it abundantly clear Jesus was to be worshipped as “God in the flesh.” This, to me, is the only explanation that makes reasonably good sense as to why neither the Apostle Paul nor the Gospel of Mark, who were writing only a handful of decades post-crucifixion, make zero mention of Jesus’s miraculous origins. Jesus’s birth tradition had not developed to that extent yet—followers of “the way” were still trying to understand Jesus’s overall importance in the earlier years of Christianity. Then, as time went on, Christians’ beliefs about Jesus transformed into the greatest story ever told—and as every decent writer knows, great stories require great beginnings.

The truth is that I don’t think about Mary’s alleged virginity all that much anymore, and frankly, I am tired of Christians who continue to stress something along the lines of: all of these things literally happened as written. In fact, I doubt that any of the Gospels are historically accurate about Jesus. It’s not that I don’t think Jesus was legitimately awesome, but I doubt Jesus would want to be remembered for the manner in which he was born or how he spent his last moments on earth (just as I prefer to think of my deceased loved ones by the way they lived rather than the way they died.) I’ve spent my livelihood amplifying what Jesus accomplished in his thirty-some years. But I have gotten to a point where I am skeptical about those accomplishments—doubtful of what the Bible said he said, wary of the way he is often depicted, and deeply curious of the historical context behind these ancient publications.