Check out the new Convergence Church Network! 

Visit www.convergencechurchnetwork.com and join the mailing list.

Enjoying God Blog

Andreas Kostenberger and Alexander Stewart, co-authors of The First Days of Jesus, recently published an article in Christianity Today titled, “5 Errors to Drop from Your Christmas Sermon.” Continue reading . . .

Andreas Kostenberger and Alexander Stewart, co-authors of The First Days of Jesus, recently published an article in Christianity Today titled, “5 Errors to Drop from Your Christmas Sermon.” The five errors are:

Don’t add details that aren’t in the text.
Don’t supply spiritual explanations for cultural practices to make them sound biblical.
Don’t be embarrassed by the Jewishness of passages related to Jesus’ coming.
Don’t be swayed by dubious challenges to the biblical witness to Jesus’ birth.
Don’t get bogged down in trivia and miss the true significance of Jesus’ birth.

Justin Taylor recently reprinted their explanation of #1. Here it is.

This might seem obvious but bears repeating because it happens so often. The massive annual proliferation of Christmas cards, nativity scenes, and TV specials perpetuates these added details and gives the impression that they are facts.

The infancy narratives in the Gospels lack many of the details that have been fabricated in subsequent centuries. For example, they don’t tell us about the nature of the stable (cave, open-air, wood, etc.); whether there even was a stable; whether or not there were animals nearby; or the number of wise men. These magoi (not kings and not necessarily three in number) almost certainly didn’t arrive on the night of the birth as most manger scenes depict. And a star wouldn’t have been suspended right above the roofline. With no mention of a stable, the manger could have been in the open air, in an animal pen near the house, in a small cave, or in the area of a house used for animals.

The texts don’t mention Mary and/or Joseph riding on a donkey. It is equally plausible—if not more so—that they walked the entire way from Nazareth to Bethlehem (70-80 miles; at least 3 days of steady walking). The idea of Mary riding a donkey stems from a second-century apocryphal work (Protoevangelium of James, chap. 17). Actually, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for a pregnant teenager in antiquity with an active lifestyle to walk such a journey.

Despite what we see in some Christmas pageants, there is no mention of an innkeeper (whether mean and coldhearted or regretful for the lack of space available); Luke simply mentions that there was no room in the kataluma (Luke 2:7). The kataluma was not a formal professional inn with an innkeeper but could point to either a public covered shelter (as in the Greek translation of Ex. 4:24) or to the guest room in a personal home (as in Luke 22:11).

It is important for us to stick with established facts when preaching and teaching. There is, of course, nothing wrong with the use of historical imagination. But it is important to maintain a clear distinction between what we actually know happened and imaginative reconstructions of how events might have taken place. Christianity is rooted in historical fact. This is as true for Jesus’ birth as it is true for the crucifixion and resurrection.

 

Write a Comment

Comments for this post have been disabled.