The Wonder of Christmas: Myth or History? NT Wright explores

It may be a cliché, but it remains the case that the wonder of Christmas on the faces of little children is absolutely amazing, and now that I have grandchildren, the wonder of the season comes alive for me in an even more profound way. One of the nice things about getting older is that I have layer upon layer of memory that are easily evoked by just one line of a Christmas hymn or story. I love all kinds of music, but one of my all-time favourite pieces is Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. To me, the opening is perhaps the best in all classical music. It ascends with the most amazing explosion of sound, announcing a historic moment, in which everything is now different. You can feel it in the music, and you can sense Bach’s almost contagious excitement.

But I often get asked whether this wonder, this awe we feel at Christmas time, is nothing more than just a feeling. Are the Christian birth narratives mere myth, or are they history?

Can we trust the historical veracity of the Gospels?

Let me tell you a little story to illustrate where our culture is sitting right now on this question of biblical historical veracity. About fifteen to twenty years ago, I was phoned by a television station that was putting together a programme on the Christmas birth narratives. They wanted a New Testament specialist to come on the show to confirm that, actually, the birth narrative accounts never in fact happened. I thought for a moment and replied to the researcher on the line, “Supposing I was to come on the show and say, well, actually there’s quite a reasonable chance that these accounts might have taken place?” There was a pause before she replied, “I don’t think that’s what my producer was looking for,” so I said, “Thank you, goodbye,” and ended the call.

But, you know, it’s often the case today that our culture is slanted in this way. Many people don’t want to hear that, actually, there is good historical evidence to support the idea that the events recorded in the Gospels did in fact happen as they are written.

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The faith of the shepherds: A Christmas reflection

As an ancient historian, I study texts in which most of the incidents that we know about from the ancient world are described and recorded once and once only, which is the case in the works of Tacitus or Suetonius, or any of the other great ancient writers. Almost all of the texts from the ancient world, we know only through one or two mediaeval manuscripts. The work of Lucretius, the great Epicurean poet from the first century BC, was lost completely until a singular manuscript was discovered in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini. That means that Epicurean studies were revived with one manuscript! Even Josephus, the great Jewish historian, often records historic events only once – that doesn’t mean those events didn’t happen. Amazingly, when it comes to the New Testament, we have copies of copies of copies – hundreds and thousands of manuscripts, all converging on this explosive event of the birth of Jesus, and we have to recognise that this doesn’t happen by accident. We have a much more solid basis for the history recorded in the New Testament, much more so than other ancient texts, whether it’s Homer and Virgil, Caesar and Cicero, or Seneca and Suetonius.

Were the birth accounts of Jesus written years after the events took place?

Another criticism posed to the Gospel accounts is that the events recorded were written years after they took place, and that they are therefore subject to inaccuracy. Again, looking at this as a classical scholar, this kind of historical recording is very common. If we look at Josephus’ writings, some of these were written twenty to thirty years after the events, in some cases even more than that, and yet historians communally recognise these as evidence and weigh them up together to test their probability, likelihood, and accuracy.

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Is the Christmas story less trustworthy because the Gospel writers were invested in it?

All of history is written by people who have agendas. I tell my students there is no such thing as an epistemological Switzerland – a neutral ground from which you declare that you’re seeing everything clearly. David Hume, the great sceptic in the middle of the eighteenth century, had massive agendas, as did Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Do we assume such historians – including ancient ones like Josephus – are objective? No, we can’t assume that at all. That doesn’t mean the events did not take place. This is what I call critical realism, and the way I define it is this: yes, fake news exists, but that doesn’t mean nothing happened. The same applies when we read the Gospel writers’ accounts of the Christmas story and the life of Christ, which are corroborated by other historians of the era, for example Josephus, who were not invested in the same way as the disciples were.

So, is the wonder of Christmas myth or history? I believe we have enough archaeological, historical, and textual manuscript evidence to claim the latter. In our modern world, many of the most celebrated aspects of Christmas culture are not historically verifiable – for example, magical sub-narratives of Santa Claus, elves, and his flying reindeer – as delightful as they may be. But what if the most wondrous story – that the Word became flesh and stepped into the world He made, in order that it may be remade – is not only history, but the most historical moment of all time?

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