Tim Haydon

21

Dec

2011

Is Christmas a Fairy Story or is it True?

Written by Tim Heydon

Is Christmas just a lovely story, a colourful myth or fairy tale to keep naïve, unsophisticated adults and innocent children amused at a dreary and uncomfortable time of year?  Or is it something more?  How much of the Christmas story can we believe to be true?

The Beginning is in the End

In order to find out we should first go, not to the beginning of the story of Jesus but to the end.  That’s because the accounts of the birth (and life) of Jesus were written in the light of the events surrounding his death.  So then, is what we are told in the Bible about his last days, his execution and resurrection – is that true?

One cannot be absolutely certain of anything in history and Jesus’ life, treated as history, is no exception.  But what we can say for sure is that the events surrounding the ministry of Jesus and his ‘Passion’ are better attested than almost anything else in ancient times.  If you believe that Julius Caesar invaded England and that he was assassinated on the Ides of March, then you must also believe that Jesus was executed by the authorities in Jerusalem and that he was subsequently seen alive.

Reasons for believing in the Truth of the Stories of the Resurrection of Jesus

So what are these attestations?  This is a subject about which whole libraries have been written.  But there are two main reasons for believing in the essential truth of the Gospel stories.  They are:

1. According to the Gospels, the first witnesses at the empty tomb were women.  Mary Magdalen saw Jesus, but his resurrected form was so changed that she did not recognise him, mistaking him for the gardener.  This mistake has the ring of truth about it.  But what is truly convincing is that the reports of women are related at all.  Why?  Because, as in Islam today, in ancient times the testimony of women was not thought to be worth much.  The Oxbridge theoretical physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorn tells us (‘Testing Scripture’, Brazos Press 2010 p77 ):

‘In the ancient world, women were not regarded as being reliable witnesses in a court of law and anyone simply making up a tale would make sure that it was men who played a key role in it.  The women are there, I believe, because they were indeed the ones who made this startling discovery’.

2. The Disciples fled from Jerusalem when Jesus  was arrested and executed, some as far as Gallilee in the far north of Palestine, but returned to spread his message, notwithstanding that they then put themselves in the greatest danger as supporters of an executed subversive.  As Geoffrey Sampson, Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, puts it in his excellent short memorandum, ‘Why I am a Christian’.

‘In his Evidences of Christianity (1794) William Paley argues, at length and persuasively, that the behaviour of members of the early church would be incomprehensible, if the disciples had not actually had the experience of meeting and speaking to the resurrected Christ.  The writer A.N. Wilson (who abandoned Christianity in the 1980s, but returned to it twenty years later) made the same point in 2010:

‘Who appeared (in the testimony of Paul written only 20 years after the event) to over 500 people in Jerusalem after the Crucifixion?  Was it a phantom?  Was it a fake?  Were they lying?  Quite possibly, of course.  But then you have to wonder why those who concocted the fake were prepared to spend uncomfortable lives as missionaries, undergoing shipwrecks, persecutions and stoning, preaching this illusion so ardently; and why or how they found the courage to die heroic martyrs’ deaths defending this “lie”? (The Spectator, 3 Apr 2010). ‘

How do we evaluate the Evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus?

So we are faced with good reasons for believing that Jesus rose from the dead.  How we evaluate these depends on our view of nature: is it always and everywhere absolutely uniform?  If we believe in the inviolable uniformity of nature, we would be likely to dismiss the evidence as a legend and the Christmas story as pure myth, dreamt up to fit Old Testament prophesy.

Disbelievers tend to be ignorant of the Science they rely on

But people who believe this tend actually to be rather ignorant of the science on which they pin so much.  The universe is not as readily comprehensible as most people think.  Here is the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees;

‘There could be a three-dimensional universe just a millimetre away from us, but if that universe were measured in a fourth spatial dimension, we would be completely unaware of it… We should be amazed that our brains, which evolved to cope with the life of our remote ancestors living on the African Savannah have been able to get us so far as to understanding the counter-intuitive world of the quantum and things in the universe.  But just as the chimpanzee is unaware of the problems of the quantum theory, it seems to me that there are aspects of reality of which we are unaware.’  (As told to Luke Coppen, Spectator Magazine, 17 /24 th December 2011) .

And here is Geoffrey Sampson again:

‘ I .. do not see much sense in the attitude that it’s all obviously just fairy stories, because people don’t rise from the dead, change water into wine, or what not.  That reaction to my mind bespeaks a naive failure to grasp how extraordinary the everyday world is, as described by sober natural scientists many of whom have no religious belief.  We all know that a thing cannot be in two different places at once, yet the physicist Richard Feynman explains to us in his 1985 book QED that fundamental particles routinely travel not along one of the various paths available to them but along all of them simultaneously, and if they did not then some quite ordinary features of the world would look different from the way they do.  If the world revealed by science can be as utterly counter-intuitive as it is, I see no grounds to dismiss out of hand the strange stories in the New Testament.’

So those who would dismiss the Resurrection and the other miracles of the New Testament such as the Virgin Birth as contrary to the laws of nature are building their house of unbelief on sand.  All of these events could be perfectly possible even if we think that a divinity would work solely within the laws of nature and never override them.

If Jesus was resurrected, who was he?

Which brings us back to Jesus.  If he was resurrected, what then?  What are we to make of him?  Who was he?  This was the very question faced by the earliest Christians and the authors of the Gospels such as St John, who was an eyewitness to his crucifixion and almost certainly to his resurrected appearance.  The best person to answer this question though is Jesus himself.  While he made no express claims about himself, he did make claims in what he said and did.

Who Jesus thought he was

Ben F Meyer, author of the most outstanding book on Jesus of the later 20th Century (‘The Aims of Jesus’ SCM Press 1979) treats Jesus like any other historical figure and applies a rigorous historical method which views the dismissal of miracles and so forth before anything else (or ‘a priori’) as culturally determined.  Such dismissal fails to take into account the advances of modern science already mentioned.  The philosopher Bernard Lonergan, on whom Meyer relies, builds this insight into his cognition theory which presents the world process in contemporary science as consisting of emerging probability rather than deterministic necessity.

Jesus saw himself in the light of Nathan’s Prophesy to David

Meyer argues that Jesus saw himself in the light of Nathan’s prophesy to David about his offspring who will build God’s Temple:

‘When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise your offspring after who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom.  He shall build a home for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever.  I will be his father and he shall be my son.’ (2 Sam 7.12-14)

Jesus the Master – Builder of the Temple

In Meyer’s understanding, Jesus saw himself as the unique revealer of the full and final measure of God’s will. ( Aims p151)  He thought of himself as the Son of God who is the Master Builder of God’s Temple, the community of the faithful, restored Israel, as a definite dwelling-place of God among men, and that he did as one who knows that he will share the divine throne because he is acting with nothing less than the authority of God.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

Meyer presents Jesus’ destiny in the form of thesis : Jesus’ presentation of himself as the Master Builder of the House of God; antithesis: his death would precipitate an ordeal in which his mission would appear to be frustrated and which would involve trial for the remnant; synthesis: inaugurated by the eschatological (ie at the last) resurrection, including his own, the reign of God would be consummated, the day of the Son of Man would dawn and then a new Temple would be built in the form of Israel restored in the remnant.  (Aims p221)

Jesus the Messiah and the Son of the Divine

Because in a unique way he felt the presence of the Divine within himself, Jesus knew that he was in some sense the Son of God. He was the long – awaited, divinely appointed Messiah.  As such, he could with the authority of the Divine teach an utterly transforming ethic which ultimately has brought the Christian West, and through it the World, to modernity. (For a good book on this see David Bentley Hart’s ‘Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies’ [Paperback] Yale University Press). 

He could heal the sick, could perform other ‘mighty works’ (as even his enemies acknowledged) and had an uncanny ability to read minds. (For more on this, good books are ‘The Miracles of Jesus’ a paperback by Hugh Montefiore, SPCK [especially good  on the reading of minds] and the CS Lewis classic, ‘Miracles’, Harper Collins. 'Science and the Paranormal,' by Arthur J Ellison, the Emeritus Professor of Engineering at  City University London who was President of the Society for Psychical Research is also a very interesting and illuminating read. Floris Books).

What we can celebrate at Christmas: The Triple Vindication

For those who accept its historicity, either intellectually and forensically or simply because the gospel story of Jesus speaks to the heart as true, Polkinghorn states, (p78) that Christ’s resurrection ‘represents a triple vindication.

‘It is the vindication of Jesus, for his life had a character that meant it should not have ended in rejection and failure.

‘It is a vindication of God, who was not found after all to have abandoned the one who had wholly committed himself to doing his Father’s will.

‘It is the vindication of a deep–seated human intuition that in the end the last word does not lie with death and futility, but we live in a world that is a meaningful cosmos and not ultimately a meaningless chaos.’

The Truth of Christmas

And so, however many accretions the tales of the birth of Jesus may have acquired in the telling at the hands of those who knew he had risen from the dead and saw his origins through the spectacles of this knowledge and its implications, we may believe that the Christmas story is true in all essentials; that Christ was the bearer of divinity and that his birth was the Good News that Christians have always believed it to be.

And that really is something to celebrate.

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