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Both Newsweek and Time have Jesus on their covers, and neither article quotes an evangelical scholar in its attempt to narrate how Christians concocted the story of the birth of Jesus.

Newsweek's piece says, "We live in an age of great belief and great doubt, and sometimes it seems as though we must choose between two extremes, the evangelical and the secular. 'I don't want to be too simplistic, but our faith is somewhat childlike,' says the Rev. H. B. London, a vice president of James Dobson's conservative Focus on the Family organization in Colorado Springs. 'Though other people may question the historical validity of the virgin birth, and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we don't.'

A Newsweek poll found that most Americans side with London. It "found that 84 percent of American adults consider themselves Christians, and 82 percent see Jesus as God or the son of God. Seventy-nine percent say they believe in the Virgin Birth, and 67 percent think the Christmas story—from the angels' appearance to the star of Bethlehem—is historically accurate." As Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times, likes to point out, more people believe that stuff than evolution.

Newsweek says they want to find the middle, somewhere between London's childlike faith and severe skepticism. Then, author Jon Meacham goes on to report only what those scholars say who do not believe what the Gospels report about Jesus' birth. "The first followers, we should always remember, believed that the Risen Lord was going to return and usher in a new apocalyptic age at any moment."

But when Jesus didn't return, these followers decided they'd better write down the story of Jesus' life, says Meacham. This Gospel story, Newsweek says, cannot be trusted historically because early Christians were by then far removed from the actual events, and, besides, they were only using the story as a means to gain believers.

"If we dissect the stories with care, we can see that the Nativity saga is neither fully fanciful nor fully factual but a layered narrative of early tradition and enduring theology," Newsweek writes. While explaining away the virgin birth (a belief caused by a mistranslation into the Greek of Isaiah 7:14), the star over Bethlehem, Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, and the trip to Egypt, Meacham goes on to say, "almost nothing in Luke's story stands up to close historical scrutiny." In addition:

• "The Gospel writers collected traditions in circulation and told Jesus' story—not in a clinical way but, as John put it, so 'that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.'"
• "The accounts of Jesus in the Canon are not history or biography in the way we use the terms."
• "If we examine the Nativity narratives as classical biography, then the evangelists' means and mission—to convey theological truths about salvation, not to record just-the-facts history—become much clearer."
• "If the virginal conception were a historical fact, however, it is somewhat odd that there is no memory of it recorded in the Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry or in the Acts of the Apostles or in the rest of the New Testament."

Maybe there isn't that much to report if the story of Christmas is simply that most Americans believe it, as is. But because the article begins by seeking a middle ground between skepticism and belief, it would have been helpful to include scholars who find historical, reasonable explanations for what gives these modern scholars so much trouble.

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December (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48