Responding to Brett Ehrman

Brett Ehrman, in 2017, wrote a post about the birth of Jesus and why “it didn’t happen that way.” The post is behind a paywall, where all the proceeds go to charity, but I believe it fair enough to Brett to cite briefly from his piece (which we at The Art of Taleh did pay to access), by way of response.

Ehrman levels his criticisms at the narratives of Jesus’ birth in Luke and Matthew, observing that both accounts can only be harmonized by effectively creating an extratextual narrative, and noting that there are historical and logical problems besides.

How Do We View the Past?

Recently, my pastor preached a sermon on how the “innkeeper” in the Christmas story was likely someone with a room to rent out, at best. And more likely, a poorer person who kept animals in his home, and that was the spare room he had to give to Mary and Joseph.

My point in bringing this up, is that reality often pokes holes in our understanding of the Christmas story as we have romanticized it, introducing extra-biblical elements that somehow meld with the scant details we have.

Some depict Mary and Joseph as quite white, while the three (if indeed there were only three) wise men are depicted as three different races, traditionally. There is no historical basis for this.

Yet, what Ehrman is after is something deeper than criticizing extra-biblical baggage that attached itself to the Christmas story. In his words, Ehrman states that this whole exercise is not only about the historical accuracy of the biblical text, or lack thereof. Rather, it is that he now believes differently:  “I am setting up my explanation of what I came to believe when I stopped being a conservative evangelical who thought that every word of the Bible had to be literally true.”

He states in his preamble to this piece that:

“This [historical inaccuracy in the text] is a huge issue mainly for fundamentalist Christians and conservative evangelicals – and those they have managed to persuade that if a story does not describe what actually happened, then it is worthless and should simply be thrown out. For others – whether theologians, pastors, parishioners, or simply lay-folk interested in Christianity – the stories are important for other reasons, for example in the ideas they are trying to convey.”

Reality often pokes holes in our understanding of the Christmas story as we have romanticized it, introducing extra-biblical elements that somehow meld with the scant details we have.

– Dave Chase

Problems in the Texts

Ehrman establishes three major problems: the impracticality of an empire-wide census, the fact that Quirinius was not governor of Syria when Herod was alive (the latter had been dead ten years at that point), and that famous star that just doesn’t seem to behave as stars do.

When I first wrote this piece, I waded into the fray, valiantly explaining that the Greek word “egeneto” rendered “it came to pass” often had a temporal preposition (such as “when”) supplied by a translator. But, perhaps we merely did not supply the right preposition?

Also, we may be missing something about ancient astrology that would allow the elites of the Jewish and Roman cultures to accept the words of the wise men about a star leading to the place a king was born.

Finally, I am sure a census could have been regional, or rolled out in a straddled way so as to not disrupt the operations of a whole empire.

I’m sure it was all very scintillating reading. But, it really doesn’t address what Ehrman is driving at.

What Actually Happened

When I talked to my pastor about Quirinius, he basically shrugged it off that Quirinius hadn’t ruled contemporaneously with Herod.

It just doesn’t seem to be an issue that makes or breaks the rest of the story of Jesus being born in Bethlehem, by one means or another.

When Ehrman attacks the belief that something must be “literally true” in order to have value, this is such a loaded term as to sink under its own weight.

Stories are invariably told by people–even divinely inspired people. And what does this humanness mean? Truth is somehow incarnational, meaning we cannot divorce the telling of truth from the writer or speaker, functioning in a certain time, with a certain level of understanding of historical events and scientific realities.

Simply because we detect incongruities with our modern understanding of history and astrophysics, say, doesn’t make something less inherently true. In a season where we are contemplating the incarnation, the union of God and human, we might stop to ask what truth is being communicated in the biblical story, and to acknowledge the words and the writer as the means through which truth comes to us.

Simply because we detect incongruities in the Christmas story with our modern understanding of history and astrophysics, doesn’t make it less inherently true. Click To Tweet