The Birth of Jesus

Like the Victorians, we live in an age of great belief and great doubt, and sometimes it seems as though we must choose between two extremes, the evangelical and the secular. "I don't want to be too simplistic, but our faith is somewhat childlike," says the Rev. H. B. London, a vice president of James Dobson's conservative Focus on the Family organization in Colorado Springs. "Though other people may question the historical validity of the virgin birth, and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we don't." London's view has vast public support. A NEWSWEEK Poll found that 84 percent of American adults consider themselves Christians, and 82 percent see Jesus as God or the son of God. Seventy-nine percent say they believe in the virgin birth, and 67 percent think the Christmas story--from the angels' appearance to the Star of Bethlehem--is historically accurate.

Others, though perhaps fewer in number, are equally passionate about their critical understanding of the faith. The Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars devoted to recovering the Jesus of history, is a battalion in this long-running culture war. One of its members, Robert J. Miller, a professor of religion at Juniata College, wrote "Born Divine: Jesus and Other Sons of God," a 2003 book which argues that the Nativity narratives can be seen as Christian responses to the birth stories of pagan heroes like Alexander the Great and Caesar Augustus--literary efforts depicting Jesus as a divine figure in a way Greco-Roman listeners and readers would understand and appreciate.

To many minds conditioned by the Enlightenment, shaped by science and all too aware of the Crusades and corruptions of the church, Christmas is a fairy tale. But faith and reason need not be constantly at war; they are, John Paul II once wrote, "like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth"--and the spirit cannot take flight without both. This is why modern, grounded, discerning people do make leaps of faith, accepting that, as the Gospel of John put it, "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."

Just how he became flesh is the business of Christmas. If we dissect the stories with care, we can see that the Nativity saga is neither fully fanciful nor fully factual but a layered narrative of early tradition and enduring theology, one whose meaning was captured in the words of the fourth-century Nicene Creed: that "for us men and for our salvation," Jesus "came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary and was made man."

For Jesus' contemporaries, the explosive story of his life and its cosmic significance did not begin with his birth but with his Passion and resurrection. Jesus of Nazareth was executed by Pontius Pilate at Passover in about A.D. 30 for the crime of sedition. After dying a terrible, humiliating death on Golgotha, Jesus, his followers believed, had risen from the dead, turning the world upside down. Working backward from the Easter miracle, the early Christians--almost all of whom were Jews and thought of themselves as such--told stories of their Lord's last days, of his ministry and, eventually, it seems, of his birth.

The first followers, we should always remember, believed that the Risen Lord was going to return and usher in a new apocalyptic age at any moment. "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who shall not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power," Jesus tells his disciples in Mark, and in the Epistle to the Romans--a very early writing--Paul says: "The night is far spent, the day is at hand."