There are no accounts of
Jesus Christ’s birth beyond Luke and Matthew’s Gospels. So, how can we trust
that the Christmas story happened the way they describe? English New Testament
scholar NT Wright shares his thoughts. You can hear more on the Ask NT Wright Anything podcast.
Christmas broadcast
About 20 years ago I was
phoned up shortly before Christmas by a television station saying they were
putting together a program that was going to talk about the birth narratives.
They wanted a New Testament specialist to come on and say: “Actually, that
stuff probably never happened.”
I said to the researcher
on the phone: “Supposing I was to come on and say, ‘actually, there’s quite a
reasonable chance that it all might have happened’?” There was a pause, and
then she said: “I don’t think that’s what my producer was looking for.”
So, I said: “Thank you,
goodbye.”
Cultural Skeptics
That’s how our culture
is slanted right now. Our cultural gatekeepers don’t want to hear an ancient
historian telling them that, in most of the texts we have from the ancient
world, most of the incidents that we know about are described once and once
only, whether it be Tacitus or Suetonius or Josephus – or Matthew or Luke.
That doesn’t mean the
events didn’t happen. All historians have to say: “Well, there’s a bit of
evidence; how do we weigh it, what’s the probability, what’s the likelihood?”
When it comes to claims about historical accuracy, I have often read scholars
who think that the New Testament writers got certain things wrong and say
“maybe Luke was having an off day”.
But time again, later
research often shows that we had missed something.
Dodgy chronology?
For instance, there’s the
census in Luke 2.2, which is often translated to say:
“This was the first census, at the time when
Quirinius was Governor of Syria.”
The problem here is that
Josephus, the Jewish historian, tells us the dates that Quirinius was Governor
of Syria, and it doesn’t seem to square with Luke’s chronology of Jesus being
born in the reign of Herod the Great. Many people have fastened on that as part
of their case that the birth stories were made up later. (Of course, it’s
possible that Josephus got his dates wrong, but that’s another question.)
In my own New Testament
translation, Luke 2 verse 2 says:
“This was the first census before the one when
Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
Several scholars have
made this point but it often gets overlooked. The Greek word, ‘protos’, with a
genitive, as in this case, can mean ‘before’ rather than ‘the first’. In other
words, there may have been a census before the ‘Quirinius’ one – which would
then fit comfortably with Jesus being born in the reign of Herod the Great.
A very different Christmas broadcast
In contrast to my
experience with the television producer who phoned me, some years ago the BBC
broadcast a four-part series called The Nativity. They commissioned
Tony Jordan, the scriptwriter for a popular British soap called EastEnders,
gave him the Christmas stories and said: “Do it.”
It was spectacular. And
it was thoroughly believable. All the elements were there. It made sense as a
narrative. And I thought “people need to see that”. Making sense, after all, is
what history is supposed to do.
Hear more from professor
NT Wright on the Ask NT Wright Anything podcast.
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