Christmas Story Refuted
Only two of the four gospels tell us anything about the infancy of Jesus Christ.
The Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke claim to speak about the birth of
Jesus. They have given rise to the Christmas story.
The idea is that Joseph took his wife Mary to Bethlehem
to register in a census. There was no room for them in the inn and they had to
settle in a stable and there Mary gave birth to her firstborn son and laid him
in a manger while shepherds and angels attended. Kings from the east came with
gold, frankincense and myrrh to honour the Christ child. King Herod in a failed
attempt to kill the baby Jesus had all the male babies in Bethlehem slain.
There are a lot of problems with the tales. Also,
Christianity has manipulatively made people delight in the stories about God
becoming a helpless vulnerable baby all for us. That idea is the spiritual
attraction. And the faith knows fine well that if Jesus is God then he was only
acting helpless and wasn’t really helpless at all! He was running the universe.
What if the story makes blunders and is absurd? It
matters because Christianity claims the Bible was ultimately authored by God. If
there are historical errors in it then that is not true.
Matthew and Luke alone record the birth and childhood of Jesus but Luke who
wrote later knew nothing of Matthew’s version.
The annunciation is the story of an angel announcing the birth of Jesus to his
mother.
Matthew’s silence on the annunciation, a tale that appears only in Luke, proves
that it never happened. Luke chose to say an angel announced the strange
conception to Mary before it happened. Matthew doesn’t mention it and has Joseph
her husband hearing about it in a dream long after he saw his wife to be was
pregnant.
Who says the dream was real? Mary was found pregnant meaning her condition was
showing so it was only then Joseph believed her to be pregnant. She hadn’t told
him before for he had no reason to question her claim to be pregnant even if the
story of how the baby got there was the last thing he expected to hear. There
probably is a contradiction between Luke and Matthew. Christians never worry
about probable contradictions at all. They just arrogantly assume there is no
error in the Bible.
Haley rejected the opinion of Strauss that when Mary was told in Luke just
before the conception of Jesus that she would have Jesus and in Matthew only
Joseph was told about it when Mary began to show there is a contradiction (page
406). If Mary conceived miraculously as Haley believes, she would have told
Joseph even if he would not believe for God would convince him and take care of
the future and because he had a right to know and would know eventually.
Matthew says that the holy family lived in Bethlehem and Luke says they lived in
Nazareth. There need be no contradiction here for they might have gone to
Nazareth some time after they left Bethlehem. Luke says they had no home in
Bethlehem and only visited there making it a wee bit more likely that there is a
contradiction. When Matthew and Luke contradict one another on such a serious
matter as the danger from Herod it is likely that their traditions are not
complementary. The fact that nobody else bothered with trying to satisfy
people’s curiosity about the childhood implies nobody cared about it and that
the traditions were made up. If Mark was derived from Peter’s teaching as
Christianity maintains and John wrote John and both Peter and John were closest
to Jesus we would expect an account of the childhood in them. Even forgers would
know that they could not masquerade as Mark and John unless they created stories
of the childhood.
Was there a Nazareth in the first century? If there was then where did Jesus get
work as a carpenter there? Jesus’ line of work suggests that the town was a big
one when he was alive which we are certain is not true.
Nazareth was never mentioned by Paul or by the Talmud. The Talmud mentioned
about sixty-three towns in the reign of Galilee and it was not one of them. It
treated Nazareth like it never existed. And when the Talmud complains about
Jesus and seeks to run him down at every opportunity this omission of Nazareth
is extraordinary for the Jews had always felt that nothing good could come from
this town according the gospels. Josephus never mentioned Nazareth either. And
he mentioned forty-five villages and cities of Galilee and even mentioned Japha
which was only a short distance from where Nazareth is today. The first time
Nazareth was mentioned was in a poem by the Jews in the 600s AD. The Case For
Christ says all this and then claims that an Aramaic list made after 70 AD shows
that some priest families were sent to Nazareth. Pity it does not ask why first
century tombs were found outside the town which accords with Jewish Law and why
there are no older tombs.
Jesus was called the Nazarene. Nazarene meant one who was consecrated to God in
a special way and could not cut their hair. Nazareth seems to have appeared
after Christ. There was confusion in the Bible between Nazareth and Nazarene.
Both words mean branch. If Nazareth did not exist and the priests were sent to a
branch for people called the Nazarenes then confusion would result. When the
town of Nazareth appeared the gospellers got confused and thought their Jesus
the Nazarene hailed from Nazareth and that was what Nazarene meant.
If the gospellers made the mistake of saying Jesus’s home was a town that never
existed when he was supposedly alive that would mean they were making things up
about him. And they did make that mistake.
Matthew says that a star led the magi or astrologers to the house where the baby
Jesus was in Bethlehem. He says the magi said this. Oddly the star led
them to Jerusalem first - the wrong place! Another oddity is how the magi rely
on it so little that once they get to Jerusalem they investigate to find out
where the Christ child is!
One star.
Now in astrology, it would be the position of the star that counts. But there is
no such thing as a system that can tell people where a person will be born and
who that person is and exactly when he will be born and if that person is the
most important person in the world. So, the law of correspondence, the magical
law that like is connected with like, dictates that a huge star would have to
indicate such a person. A small star would mean an important person is being
born but a huge one would imply that a more important person is being born
because it is bigger.
God condemned astrology and would not make a big star appear in the right place
on the magi’s charts. Matthew would have wanted us to realise that. So what made
them think it was a portent of a unique and divine birth? It had to have been
the sudden appearance and the size.
Though it guided them to Palestine it was so big that they thought it had
indicate that Jesus was born in Jerusalem. If it filled the sky to a large
extent that would have been an easy mistake to make.
Matthew said that the star stopped moving over where Jesus was. A small star
could not have provided such guidance. It must have been very big.
Ignatius of Antioch thought the star was bigger and brighter than the sun and
the stars put together.
It is odd that the magi brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Their
horoscope must have told them that they would find a king.
Kepler found that a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter happened in 7BC. Professor
Konradin Ferrari d’Occhieppo who was once with the Austrian State Observatory
found that Jupiter stood still in the sky in July of 7 BC and the two stars were
in conjunction in November and found that Jupiter the star of Marduk or Kakkabu
was the most sacred star in the Babylonian system of astrology both of which
facts would demonstrate that a saviour was about to be born. A clay tablet found
in 1925 near the Euphrates stated that the two planets would come together in
the winter of 7BC and herald the coming of a new saviour. First of all, it was
pagans who were saying these things and that could have triggered off legends
about a Messiah among the Jews. The Jews were more likely to be impressed by a
low and unusually bright star than by astrological claptrap. The ancient world
was full of such prophecies. None of this explains why the magi spoke in terms
of following a star and it resting over a house. The prediction and the birth of
Jesus are unrelated for two planets connecting would not fit what the Bible
understands by the star which seems to be a huge disk in the sky. Christians
however still used the fact that the pagans were expecting a saviour at that
time and rejected their reason for believing. I mean because the pagans wanted a
saviour then, they said he was born then, but they rejected the pagan’s reason
for saying it was that time.
Science and history bear witness against the star of Bethlehem. It was an early
Christian legend inspired by a stupid interpretation of a verse from the Law.
The gospels give no evidence against the view that the star was not real but
only a vision or a real temporary star that only the Magi could see. Even if
there was a star it wouldn’t prove that Matthew was truthful but that like
others he plotted his god’s birth at the time the star appeared to impress
people.
Luke’s tale of the finding of the child Jesus in the Temple is untrue. It has
Mary and Joseph looking for Jesus among their friends and relatives in their
party after they left Jerusalem. They would have left him in somebody’s charge
and when that person did not have him they would have not spent a day looking
for him. They would have immediately went back to Jerusalem and told somebody
else to do the searching in the party. Caring parents would search the most
dangerous place first and waste no time at it. Mary and Joseph did not
understand when Jesus asked them if they did not know that he had to be in his
Father’s Temple. Just how dumb does Luke think they were?
Then we are told that Jesus obeyed them perfectly after that. That doesn’t seem
likely after what Luke just reported about him.
John says that the Baptist said that one is coming after him who ranks before
him because he existed before he did. This person is Jesus. The words were said
to the Jews. They would have taken John to be saying that Jesus was older than
he was. Therefore that is what he meant. The contrast between coming after and
coming before indicates that John did mean that. Yet the Church says he meant
not that Jesus was older but that Jesus was God and as God was before John and
older in the sense that God is older for God existed always. But the Gospel
never says that Jesus was God. And we know from the first three gospels that
John had serious doubts about Jesus. The plain sense of John’s words is that he
meant that Jesus had greater power and rank than him because he was older and
more experienced and that the two were the holiest men on earth when Jesus could
outdo him just by being older. Suppose the Bible does not give a clue here as to
what it means. The Christians put an interpretation on it that fits their own
presuppositions. But all it can be is an interpretation and there is no evidence
for it and yet this interpretation is the real word of God to them. They make
their fantasies into the word of God. They do this a lot, an awful lot.
The trouble is that Luke contradicts himself by saying Jesus was born after
John!!
Conclusion
The Christmas story is sheer humbug.
BOOKS CONSULTED
ALLEGED DISCREPANCIES OF THE BIBLE, John W Haley, Whitaker House, Pennsylvania,
undated
BIBLICAL EXEGESIS AND CHURCH DOCTRINE, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York,
1985
CHRIST AND PROTEST, Harry Tennant, Christadelphian Publishing Office,
Birmingham, undated
CHRISTIANITY FOR THE TOUGH-MINDED, Editor John Warwick Montgomery, Bethany
Fellowship, Minnesota, 1973
IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1996
JESUS AND THE FOUR GOSPELS, John Drane, Lion Books, Herts, 1984
JESUS HYPOTHESES, V Messori, St Paul Publications, Slough, 1977
NEW AGE BIBLE VERSIONS, GA Riplinger, Bible & Literature Foundation, Tennessee,
1993
THE BIBLE UNEARTHED, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, Touchstone
Books, New York, 2002
THE CASE FOR CHRIST, Lee Strobel, HarperCollins and Zondervan, Michigan, 1998
THE HOLY BIBLE NEW AMERICAN VERSION, Confraternity of Christian Doctrine,
Washington DC, 1970
THE JESUS EVENT, Martin R Tripole SJ, Alba House, New York, 1980
THEOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Kittel Gerhard and Friedrich
Gerhard, Eerdman’s Publishing Co, Grand Rapids, MI, 1976
THE PASSOVER PLOT, Hugh Schonfield, Element Books, Dorset, 1996
THE UNAUTHORISED VERSION. Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992
THE VIRGINAL CONCEPTION AND BODILY RESURRECTION OF JESUS, Raymond E Brown,
Paulist Press, New York, 1973
