Christmas Apologetics

Each Christmas season over the past few years, I’ve put up a post linking to Triablogue’s material related to Christmas:

2008
2009
2010
2011

The 2008 post covers the most ground and is foundational to the others. These posts include links to other web sites addressing Christmas issues, book reviews, a scripture index linking to posts related to those Biblical passages, and many other resources. For example, here’s a post about the historicity of the Slaughter of the Innocents. Here’s one on the historicity of the census mentioned by Luke. And this post addresses some common objections to the virgin birth.

We’ve also written a lot since the 2011 post linked above. Here’s a post in which I linked to a collection of Triablogue articles about the relatives of Jesus. An article about the benefits of the Christmas season was linked by Steve Hays. I wrote about how we can make better use of the Christmas season. A lot of issues related to prophecy fulfillment come up at Christmas time. Here’s a post I wrote about why Messianic prophecy isn’t more detailed. I also wrote a response to James McGrath’s liberal view of the infancy narratives. Steve linked some articles on Christmas issues by Craig Keener here and here. And here’s a response to Amy-Jill Levine on the genre of the infancy narratives. Patrick Chan linked to a video about Christmas. Steve linked to an editorial about not holding church services when Christmas falls on a Sunday. I wrote a response to John Loftus’ Christmas material. Patrick linked an article by John Frame on the incarnation. John Bugay wrote about spending Christmas with his family here and
here. Steve wrote about loss and loneliness during the Christmas season. I wrote about Jesus as the Sun of Righteousness. Steve linked to a video of the Apollo 8 Christmas Eve message from 1968. Since issues like the historicity of miracles and whether miracles have occurred in the modern world are often raised during the Christmas season, here’s a series of posts I did earlier this year on those subjects. I wrote about
the death of my father, in part addressing the influence he had on my Christmas apologetic work.

Within the last few months, a book was released that’s highly significant in the dispute over the historicity of the infancy narratives. The first volume of Craig Keener’s commentary on Acts (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2012) has come out, which has implications for Luke’s gospel. The introduction alone is more than 600 pages long. James Dunn calls it "unbeatable in today’s market" on issues of historicity, Richard Bauckham calls it "magisterial" and refers to Keener’s "encyclopedic knowledge of ancient literature", and Daniel Marguerat calls it "the most comprehensive commentary on Acts to date", among other endorsements.