The Incarnation in History

The Birth of Christ in Luke 2 and the Question of Historicity

Well, this is December 23rd. I have on a green shirt with a red tie. So why don't you turn with me to Luke chapter 2 for a moment. And for a few moments, we don't have a lot of time, but for a few moments, give consideration to some interesting issues relating to the birth of Christ.

I remember once Pastor Fry handed out a myth about Christmas thing that we all took. We haven't done that one in a while. But I want to talk about something I've actually not spoken of before. Looking at Luke chapter 2, now in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth.

This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone was on his way to register the census, each to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee from the city of Nazareth to Judea to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem because he was of the house and family of David, in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him and was with child.

While they were there, the days were completed for her to give birth, and she gave birth to her firstborn son, and she wrapped him in cloths and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.

Ancient Chronology, Herod, and the Date of Jesus’ Birth

Now, we all know the story. We probably could have quoted that. Of course, we couldn't do it in a public school anymore. Even if you're Linus, you can't get away with that anymore, as some of you may know.

But my concern this evening is the historicity of what we just read. When we speak today, when people think about the birth of Christ, for many people, it's just simply an old story. They're not really even sure if Jesus ever existed.

It's just a fairy tale. It's a story to make kids feel better. And of course, I'm very concerned that many of us have accepted what we've been told by people about the issue of the birth of Christ that, in essence, decreases its historicity.

Now, as you may know, the study of ancient chronology is a challenging thing, and it's really grown more in the modern period once we have obtained the ability to use astronomical charts to be able to date things exactly.

We can go through ancient records. We can go through histories. And, for example, when someone will say, there was an eclipse on this particular night during this particular king's reign in the seventh year.

Well, we can use the knowledge we have today, and of course, ancient man actually figured a lot of this stuff out too, but we can do it maybe a little bit easier now with our computers. We can start putting together that data and figuring out when things are.

For example, when did Herod die? Well, for a long time, we were told it was 4 BC. And remember, there is no year zero, and you're probably aware of the fact that there was a Gregorian calendar and a Julian calendar, and there had to be adjustments down through the years as to calendars to try to keep things right as we learn more about astronomy and how time is kept and things like that.

You know that some people in the ancient world used a lunar calendar, and the Muslims still do, and other people used a solar calendar, and there's differences between the two. And, oh, I'll tell you, you read some of these books about how to figure out how long a certain king in Israel reigned and when he became king and everything else, and it is complicated.

We don't have all the knowledge, and there are people who disagree on this side or the other thing, but we're getting more and more knowledge of these things, and as a result, for example, all I was ever told when I was younger was that Herod died in 4 BC.

Well, there's a lot of people now that say he died in 1 BC, and there wasn't any year zero. And that changes everything in regards to how everything relates to one another, and it's fascinating. Well, years ago, you know, I was taught as a kid, well, we don't know when Jesus died.

Well, okay, yeah, I can't say I have absolutely certain knowledge. But what we were told was, and the one thing we know for certain, it was not December 25th. We know that. Because the early church, the pagans had a holiday called Sol Invictus, the unconquerable sun.

And the church just grabbed that from the pagans, and that's where it came from. That's what I was told, and I wasn't told there was any other viewpoint than that, basically. Well, a lot of people have heard that, and that comes from what's called the historical religion school, where basically there isn't really anything new.

All the religions just sort of borrow from one another and cobble things together. You know, when I started studying to debate atheists who say that Jesus was a myth, and Dionysus, or the various Egyptian gods, Osiris and Horus, and all the rest of this kind of stuff, I started realizing, you know, this whole school of thinking is bankrupt.

I mean, the idea that, for example, Paul would make up a religion about a crucified messiah borrowing from pagan religions to convince Jews, I mean, it's just ridiculous. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and it's contradicted by so much history, but that's not what you get from CNN and all the mainstream media and stuff like that.

And so, I started realizing, you know, in reality, all that stuff about borrowing from pagan religions and stuff like that, for example, there's one document that mentions Sol Invictus. It's far more likely, far more likely, that the Romans were borrowing from the Christians as to a date the Christians were already celebrating than it was the other way around.

Christianity was on the rise. The Roman Empire was not really on the rise anymore, and so it's far more likely that it went the other direction. And then I started finding out that we can go all the way back to the second century and find the first references to a celebration of the birth of Christ that is sometime in the winter around the solstice.

And there are two different dates. As you may know, the Eastern Church celebrates January 6th. The Western Church, December 25th. If you ever count the days in between, there are 12 days. That's where the 12 days of Christmas came from.

The Courses of the Priests and the Timing of Zechariah’s Service

And one day I ran across this book. It's by Roger Beckwith. It's called Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian. Now, if you struggle with sleep at night, this is awesome. I'm going to tell you something.

Wow. I mean, two pages, anybody will be gone. It is just, wow. It is just that thick. It is that... But it's the kind of thing that sometimes I look at. And I ran across this section. And it's chapter four.

It's called The Date of Christmas and the Courses of the Priests. I started reading this thing. And it ain't easy. But basically... And there's... I mean, look. Charts, charts, charts, charts everywhere.

In fact, here is a version. There was an article published in the journal The Evangelical Theological Society this year. This year. 2015. I ran three copies. That's all I could really come up with. It's not as bad as this.

You can actually read five or six pages before you're out like a light. But if you're really interested in this kind of thing, there's the Jets article. I'll leave it up there for folks. He's doing some of the same thing.

And he provides color charts, which are better than... This is the same chart. This is all one chart. And these are the courses of the priests. What in the world is the courses of the priests? And what does it have to do with what I'm babbling about this evening?

Think about it. We can talk about Herod. We can talk about stuff like that. But there's one fascinating little piece of history that most of us would never think about that actually gives us a really good idea of what time in the year Jesus was born.

What might it be? Well, I'm sorry, I've already told you. The courses of the priests. What does that have to do with anything? Zechariah. Remember Zechariah? What was Zechariah doing when the angel appeared to him?

He was burning incense in the temple. And we know the approximate relationship in age between John the Baptist and Jesus. We know how far along Mary is when she visits. Remember? And when she comes in, the babe leaps in, not her room, John does.

And so we've got that information. Well, guess what? It's not like we just have one scroll that tells us all this stuff, but we have something recorded here, something recorded here, something recorded here, something recorded here.

And by putting that together, in fact, for example, at the end of in 87, when the Romans burst into Jerusalem, we have one historical source that tells us what the priests were chanting when the Romans came in and killed them in the temple, and which group of priests it was.

So we've got a little thing here, a little thing here, a little thing there. We've been able to put together the courses of the priests as to which families would be ministering at what point in time.

And guess what the Bible tells us? It tells us which one of those groups Zechariah was in. And so, by putting together a lot of the secular history to know when Herod's doing what Herod's doing and so on and so forth, and then put this together with the courses of the priests, what's fascinating is that the most consistent way to read all this data together and to put it together gives us a time for the birth of John the Baptist that then when you figure out how far ahead he was of Jesus, lo and behold, the birth of Jesus falls at the end of December or the beginning of January.

So you start wondering, wow, we go back to the second century and we can find references to the December 25th date, and then there's all this weird stuff. And I'm not saying that this necessarily helps the case any, but there were a bunch of people who in the early church tried to figure out, do you know what one of the beliefs of the ancient world was?

That great men always die on the anniversary of their conception. Do you know that? Now you and I go, really? But that was a very, very common theme. And so guess what you find amongst some of the early church harlots.

They try to figure out the date of the crucifixion so that it fits with a December 25th birth. Why would they be doing that? Especially if they just borrowed this hundreds of years later from the pagans, which is what we were all told all along anyways.

And so I started looking at all of this information and you put it together with some of the references you can pull out of the early church fathers and lo and behold, I'm not saying this absolutely proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt because I just don't know given how far away we are that you can prove something beyond a shadow of a doubt.

But one thing I can tell you for certain, anybody that looks at me and says, well, the one thing we know is it couldn't have been December 25th. No, that's not true. That is not true. Well, that they wouldn't be out in December 25th keeping their flocks by night.

You been to Israel in December? You been to New York in December right now? Anybody notice that? It's warmer back east than it is out here right now, which I think is extremely wrong. But the reality is that the temple worship continued during the winter.

There were still sacrifices going on even during the winter. Where did the flocks come from? They had to be someplace. They couldn't be kept inside. Wouldn't it be very interesting if those shepherds were keeping the flocks of sheep that were used for sacrifice?

Hmm. That would be an and maybe the people in Jerusalem would have known that and would have made the connection. I don't know. All I know is when people say, well, it couldn't have been that time. No.

That's not a valid objection either. So, what am I saying? What I'm saying is when you read Luke, Luke does not write as a person who is saying, I have a nice story I'd like to tell you. Once upon a time in a land far away there was a little baby boy born.

That's a grim fairy tale. What did Luke do? He connected it with something that's extremely controversial today. Mainly because of Josephus. If you accept Josephus as being absolutely infallible without everything it throws a kink in the chronology as to when this census was in regards to when Quirinius was governor and stuff like that.

But you know what the fascinating thing is? We know Quirinius was governor. We know there was a census. We know there was a Roman Empire. And we know how it acted. And we know how it operated. And the point is the biblical writers you know, we might look at John 1 .1 and oh, it's back in eternity.

Yeah, but Jesus came to identifiable places at identifiable times. In history God acted at a particular time in a particular place. Now, maybe for preceding generations that was a little more relevant than the current generation.

Which does not seem to have a whole lot of interest in history. You know, if it didn't happen and couldn't be recorded by MP3 or MP4 it didn't really happen. That's how many people think today. But the point of the narrative is we're not talking about a fable here.

We're not talking about just a nice feel-good message. God acted in history. It actually happened. If we had had a phone to record guess what? We would have seen shepherds. And we would have seen an Israelite woman and her husband.

Not in the nicest of places. And we would have heard the sounds of childbirth. And unlike these silly songs crying, Jesus did make. That's how babies live. That's what they're supposed to do. And there would have been a birth.

And there would have been all the accompanying things that the New Testament tells us took place in regards to the shepherds and eventually the wise men and all the rest of that stuff. It happened. In fact, in the article, there's a fascinating discussion of what we know about the end of Herod's life and when most likely the Magi would have come and given him news.

And how we know from secular sources how many days it would have taken him to travel from one place to another and the things he did extra-biblically at that time. It's fascinating how it all comes together.

The Incarnation, Christmas Traditions, and the Resurrection as Historical Events

But the point is it happened in history. And yeah, we may have all these little manger scenes around and yeah, the wise men weren't there that night. And none of them glowed. And Jesus looked like a Jewish baby, not like a baby who's never seen the sun and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

I realize all of the strange things that have happened. And there was the guy there in a red suit. And at least I can appreciate that recently, there has been a slight attempt to... How would you say to make Orthodox as a verb?

To orthodoxize? Saint Nicholas, I don't know if you've all heard of it, but allegedly, the original Nicholas was a bishop at the Council of Nicaea. And the tradition is, the story is, that what made him famous was not giving gifts.

I mean, I guess he was a giving person to his parishioners and things like that. But the orthodoxizing story, and it's true, historically anyway, as far as tradition goes, is that he was so angered at Arius' denial of the deity of Christ.

And I think, Pastor Frye, I could appreciate this. You know this story, don't you? That he punched Arius in the nose. He took a swing at him. Popped him one for denying the deity of Christ. Didn't you say that's what you do with Jehovah's Witnesses?

I'm not really sure. And you've got the beard and everything else going on here. So I'm just sort of wondering, you know, there might be, I don't know. But all of that stuff aside, my point is this. At this time of year, the world may sort of tip its hat or chuckle.

Things like that. But for us, if we even take the time to consider these things, always keep in mind what we're talking about is not a childhood story. Some of us may have known it from childhood. It may be very special to us because of that.

But the reality is it happened in history. It happened in history. Every writer in the New Testament wants us to know this took place. We are witnesses. Because if the birth of Christ didn't take place in history, then the cross of Christ didn't take place in history.

And the resurrection didn't take place in history. And yet it is absolutely definitional of our faith that these things, they happened and they continue to resonate through the corridors of time to this very room.

Two thousand some odd years later, a group of people from various backgrounds, and yet we are gathered together and we remember what actually took place in history. Jesus was truly born. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Thank you.