Life: Faith and Christmas

Have been sick the past few days and have been sleeping a lot.

Well, tonight, was channel surfing and came across CBS's 48 hours Mysteries.

On this Christmas night, they rebroadcast their 1 hour exploration of Christmas.

The program interviewed three scholars who were skeptical of the details of the nativity as recounted in the Gospels.

In the second half of the broadcast, Ben Witherington was interviewed along with on location filming of many Biblical locales. He gave some reasons why the Gospel accounts might be plausible.

Some interesting tidbits were his hypothesis that Luke interviewed Mary for the details of Jesus birth in Jerusalem and that Matthew did the same with other followers in Capernaum.

As for the slaughter of innocents which to our ears sounds so horrible, he explained would have been very consistent with Herod's paranoia. He also pointed out that Bethlehem of that time was only at most a few hundred people and thus the killing of children under two might have entailed the deaths of perhaps 6-10 children which unfortunately would have been a relatively small slaughter in that era and not noteworthy in historical records outside of the Gospels.

Skeptics have suggested that this detail was fabricated by the church to make Jesus into a Moses figure. To further the Moses connection, skeptics say Matthew invented the journey to Egypt.

Witherington's offered an explanation of why Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt: there was a large Jewish community in Egypt at that time in history. Thus, their fleeing there has some rationale as they would in fact be safe there.

All in all an educational hour of television.

Am glad that the CBS presentation gave both sides a chance to make their case.

In the end, are there still elements of faith in the Nativity story?

Absolutely.

But what was fascinating was that if you only had watched the first half of the show, you would think that the Nativity was a total fabrication.

But after watching the second half, one can see that the Gospel accounts as presented have some plausible basis.

At the end of the broadcast, the documentary reporter had to acknowledge, regardless of what one believes about the birth of Jesus, the world has never been the same.

Amen!

UPDATE: Since Witherington is a blogger, I wondered if he had any opinions on how fairly he was treated by the CBS crew. His thoughts on the experience were posted on his blog here. In brief, he enjoyed working with the crew and felt he got a fair shake.