THE BIBLICAL WITNESS TO THE BIRTH OF JESUS

THE BIBLICAL WITNESS TO THE BIRTH OF JESUS

By Paul Merkley.

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When I was twelve years old ( I think ), our Pastor, Caleb Harris, called on me to read the lesson for the Sunday Service during the week of Christmas  (1945, I believe.) My Mother smiled up at me from the front row. My Father smiled from the choir – not  the heavenly choir ( not for a few decades more), but the Indian Road Baptist Church of Toronto Choir.

The text that I was given begins:

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.).And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.  And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David… to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. Luke 2:1-6.

If I have the chronology correct, my mother was likewise great with child – which turned out to be my younger brother, David.

As I had rehearsed my part in the service, alone before Pastor Caleb Harris a few days earlier, I formed one of the great intellectual commitments of my life: that the Bible, which I already understood was meant to be the source of the faith that would see me through to my end, was also a book of History – made of the same materials as the History lessons that we had at school.

I wanted to know: “Who was Caesar Augustus? Who Was Cyrenius?

I have read enough of the academic and semi-academic and pseudo-academic literature on the matter of the “historicity” of the Gospel accounts to have no concern whatever that anything is due to appear anywhere in time and space that will have the power of contradicting the historical truth of the Gospel account – the most developed account anywhere of the circumstances of the birth of Jesus Christ.

In his next Chapter, Luke spews out boldly names of the famous people of his time, who would be recalled clearly – if not in their persons, in terms of their current fame –by his first readers:

Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene,  Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.

Luke’s intention is clear—and it is bold, even brazen. He is challenging  people contemporary to events of his Gospel to draw back their minds to those days, only a few decades back in time, and try to remember where they were when these famous characters strode the earth. It is all meant as a challenge, thrown down to contemporaries, to check Luke’s story against their own  recollections or those of their parents and friends. The challenge was to any and all who doubted the events  of the Christian story — everything that His disciples were now saying about His life and his message, as they set out after His resurrection to walk to the ends of the earth.  There is no escaping the spirit of Luke’s challenge to his contemporary audience: If I have got any of the details of this story wrong step up and challenge me.

I have never believed that these lines from Luke’s gospel compel belief in the meaning that Christians attach to the life of Jesus of Nazareth , but I can say that that Sunday morning over seventy years ago I believed that I was proclaiming historical fact and that the congregation, in responding, was confirming confidence in historical fact.

It is not at all an ambiguous matter: Christian faith is based upon proclamation about the meaning of events that are among the most thoroughly-documented of their time. Along life’s way I have met lots of partially-educated souls, many of them clergymen, who pretend to believe that historical validity is somehow extrinsic or even irrelevant to the Gospel story. “What matters,” they say, “is that Jesus is in your heart.”  But this remains a precious fraud: if Jesus did not walk and talk and speak as the Gospels what is in my heart remains something without objective reference –an exercise in solipsism: Are you really sure that what lives in your heart really does derive from the life and the testimony of the Man, Jesus of Nazareth?

This contempt of certain pious souls for two thousand years of continuous witness takes solid flesh at the so-called Garden Tomb, or Gordon’s Tomb outside the northern wall of the Old City of Jerusalem. Here a continuous caravan of America tourist buses pulls up before a cluster of three tombs, in a familiar First-Century style. These caught the attention of the famous General Gordon as he reclined in comfort, across the street, in the home of an America family, the Spauldings, who ran the so-called American Colony of Jerusalem. “Gosh,” said the General ( or something similar) “Are those not long-abandoned tombs that I see over there?”  Indeed they were – abandoned some time early in the Second Century. You will see many others of the same kind and of the same provenance elsewhere in the Holy Land. “And don’t’ those little mounds behind them look like great Skulls? By Jehovah, that must be the Place of the Skull (Matthew 27) and these must be … yes, yes, yes, the remains of the tomb of Jesus! This means that that Church of the Holy Sepulchre cannot be what has been claimed for it! Protestants could now take custody of the real Calvary, conveniently located far away from the dark and spooky site secured about for about 1800 years already, by archeology and by faith. Most providentially of all: there is no parking problem here!

Only a Nineteenth Century Model of a Model Major-General would ever have imagined that the world would sit to hear such arrogance and such ignorance of history played out. But it has worked. Sadly, most of the grown men and women who sign on for tours of the Holy Land under auspices of the major “Evangelical” and “Pentecostal” denominations will never get within several city blocks of the site where, as History and Archeology thoroughly validated over nineteen centuries ago, took place the execution and the Resurrection of Jesus.

Does it matter ? Of course it matters! These things cannot have happened both  there and here!.

The Gospel make claims about the largest matters that are and they claim that these matters follow from specific claims, built upon specific events in specific time and specific place. The contemporaries of the Apostle Paul fully understood this. They were not interested in hearing yet another fantasy about things that go on in otherworldly realms above or below us. The woods were full of such fantasies in those day.

But now today, such is s the contempt for History  among our publically-educated masses today, that leaders of our churches are  sedulously instating fantasies, made of the same stuff, back into the empty spaces where most people put the details of such history as they will ever hear in their lifetimes.

There are some small difficulties of reconciliation apparent in the Gospel’s historical narrative. For example: so far as the secular historical record shows, this gent Publius Sulpicius Quirinius was not the Governor of Syria at the time of the Gospel story, although he does seem to have been in that office a little later. If this is a discrepancy, it is the only one of note and seems to be pretty small change. (In my view, the most reliable source for these matters is a book now considered antique by today’s Bible scholars, but which is so well-fortified with scholarly reference that it is without rival among the literature of today. I have in mind Alfred Edersheim, The Life and times of Jesus the Messiah ,1883.)

As for the awkward anomaly that Jesus’s date of birth seems to have been around 6B.C., the fault here is with the shaky official Roman records and not with the Gospel record. [See Paul L. Maier, In the Fullness of Time, Kregel Publications, 1991, pp.24-28.]

To my knowledge, neither any archeological discovery nor any literary discovery has managed to discredit any statement of fact to be found in the Gospels. The fact that secular commentators manage to keep alive rumours along these lines is entirely owing to the low level of preparation for discussion of theology and history that obtains in nominally learned circles today.

 

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