National Geographic's Reconstruction Of Christmas

National Geographic just published an article by the New Testament scholar Antonio Pinero on the events surrounding Jesus' birth. The article often refers to scholars and scholarship without naming names or citing the percentage of scholarship holding a particular view. The author favors liberal conclusions and sometimes mentions views that are only held by a minority of scholars without indicating how unpopular those views are. People often write without providing the sort of information I just referred to, for the sake of saving space, to make an article more readable, or for whatever other reason, but the information is worth noting when responding to an article like Pinero's. It's common for people to think a source like National Geographic or a scholar like Pinero who's writing in such a context is representing more of scholarship and better scholarship than he actually is.

I've already said, elsewhere, the large majority of what needs to be said in response to something like Pinero's article. Those who are interested can see my collection of Christmas material here. What I want to do in the remainder of this post is provide some examples of how problematic a position like Pinero's is and link some relevant resources.

Something that should stand out to anybody reading Pinero's article is how little support for his conclusions he cites from ancient sources. If traditional Christian views of Jesus' childhood, the dating of the gospels, their authorship, and other relevant issues are wrong and are as wrong as individuals like Pinero suggest, many people in antiquity would have been in a position to know it. And many of those people would have had an interest in preserving that information and would have had an ability to do so. There are many thousands of claims and arguments about Jesus that circulated among the ancient sources. Various Jewish, pagan, and heretical individuals and groups denied the virgin birth, argued against a Christian understanding of Isaiah 7:14, expressed doubts about the traditional authorship attributions of documents like the gospel of John and 2 Peter, and so forth. It's not as though hypotheses like those advocated by Pinero would have been inaccessible to ancient sources or couldn't be reflected in the historical record if people were putting forward such views. And it's not just that beliefs like the ones I just mentioned could appear in the historical record. They frequently appear, often prominently (e.g., interactions with Jewish opponents of Christianity, as reflected in Justin Martyr's Dialogue With Trypho; interactions with pagan critics, like Celsus and Porphyry; heretical documents, some of which we have access to today). So, why don't we see more support from the ancient sources for denying Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, dating the gospels and the infancy narratives in particular as late as the dates referred to in Pinero's article, etc.? The lack of ancient sources holding views like the ones referred to by Pinero is significant. For further discussion of the subject, you can find other relevant posts in our archives, like my article here regarding how problematic it is for critics of the Bethlehem birthplace that there's such a lack of support in the ancient sources for a birthplace other than Bethlehem.

There were written sources on Jesus' childhood before the gospels. I'm not just referring to Paul's comments on Jesus' Davidic ancestry (Romans 1:3), his having a brother named James (Galatians 1:19), and so on, though the Pauline material is enough to make my point. I'm also referring to other evidence for such writings, like the opening of Luke's gospel, which refers to "many" earlier accounts like his (Luke 1:1-4). He then goes on, immediately afterward, to give a written account of Jesus' childhood that takes up more than 130 verses in modern Bibles. It's unlikely that Paul would sometimes refer to facts about Jesus' childhood while writing letters, but that none of the many previous accounts referred to by Luke included such material, even though they were writing in a more relevant genre than Paul's letters and Luke goes on to include so much material on Jesus' childhood just after mentioning those many sources. For more about the pre-gospel written sources on Jesus' childhood, see here.

Pinero's assessment of the dating of the gospels is highly problematic. The best explanation for the ending of Acts is that it was written no later than the mid 60s, which means Luke was written no later than that timeframe. See here for more on that subject, including an explanation of why appealing to Acts 1:8 to reconcile the document's ending with a later date doesn't work. Furthermore, the similarities among the Synoptics make more sense if they were written closer rather than further apart in time, and an earlier date for all three makes more sense of why they're as different from John as they are. If accepted, the scholarly consensus supporting a pre-70 date for Mark suggests we should place the other Synoptics some double-digit number of years earlier than Pinero does. Besides, as I discussed in a recent post on Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, it's commonplace for non-conservative scholars, like Raymond Brown, to argue that beliefs like the Bethlehem birthplace were affirmed by multiple sources predating the gospels of Matthew and Luke.

And Mark's gospel is far more supportive of a traditional view of Jesus' childhood than Pinero suggests. See here. You'll have to read the post just linked for all of the details I discuss there, but I'll briefly address one example. Even in Mark, Jesus chooses to live in Nazareth as an adult, then chooses to live in Capernaum, a pattern that lines up with the references to Zebulun (where Nazareth was) and Naphtali (where Capernaum was) in Isaiah 9:1. I've written extensively on the significance of Isaiah 9:1 and Jesus' fulfillment of it. You can search our archives for those posts, but go here to start with the most foundational one. (Since another post addresses a neglected topic that's highly relevant to Mark, I'll cite that other post that discusses how Jesus' view of himself as the figure of Isaiah 9 makes the most sense of his commitment to Galilee in Mark 14:28 and 16:7.) Jesus' view of himself as the figure of Isaiah 9:1-7 is implied by all four gospels. Though Mark doesn't state the conclusion as explicitly as Matthew and John do, it's likely that Jesus sees himself as the figure of Isaiah 9 and frames his public ministry by that identity in Mark, as in the other three gospels. That, in turn, has implications for the Davidic ancestry referred to in Isaiah 9, the deity of the figure there, his identity as the Servant of the Lord referred to elsewhere in Isaiah and what's said about that figure's childhood, the common practice of connecting Davidic ancestry and a Bethlehem birthplace among Christian and non-Christian sources in Mark's day, etc.

There's much more agreement between Matthew and Luke than you'd think from reading Pinero. See here for 40 examples of agreements between the two sources regarding Jesus' childhood. For many examples of agreements between the infancy narratives and sources other than the authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, see here.

Concerning the alleged implausibility of a December 25 birthdate, including the issue of whether the material in Luke about the shepherds is inconsistent with that date, see here. I doubt Jesus was born on December 25, but it's not as implausible as people like Pinero suggest. It's a good date for celebrating Jesus' birth, and it didn't come from paganism.

Some of Pinero's claims about the census of Luke 2 are misleading. He writes, "History shows no census during the reign of King Herod". We have a lot of evidence for Luke's knowledge of history, accuracy, and access to relevant sources. See, for example, here, here, and here. He lived in the Roman empire, would have experienced Roman censuses to some degree himself, and would have been in close contact with many other sources with relevant knowledge. The idea that he was as uninformed and misinformed on census issues as Pinero and other critics suggest is absurd. Luke is referring to a census-taking process under Augustus, which occurred in different regions at different points in time. We have a lot of evidence for such a widespread practice under Augustus. See here and here for more about census issues, and see here for a refutation of Pinero's claim that Luke is referring to an ancestral census, a claim that should have been abandoned a long time ago. And Joseph wasn't just going to the place of his ancestry for the census. It was also where he lived at the time, as I've discussed elsewhere, like here.

On the Bethlehem birthplace, see my recent discussion of sources outside of Matthew and Luke who affirmed that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The closing section of the post here, the section with a list of hyphenated points, discusses some of the problems with denying the Bethlehem birthplace. (To find the beginning of the hyphenated section, do a Ctrl F search for "very unlikely".) For a collection of posts on Bethlehem issues more broadly, including discussions of how problematic it is to claim that Jesus was born in Nazareth, see here.

Pinero comments, "Several astronomical events could have been this glorious star", but the evidence suggests the star was a supernatural entity rather than something astronomical. See here and here. His appeal to the term "magi" to identify them as Persians is outweighed by other evidence suggesting they were Arabian. For evidence supporting the magi material more broadly, see here.

Pinero writes, "no historical record corroborates Matthew’s account of a massacre…Such an incident would have appeared in other accounts, especially as Josephus was writing less than a century after Herod’s death." Pinero doesn't mention any source other than Josephus who supposedly should have mentioned the event. That's common practice among critics of Matthew's account. They act as if they have multiple sources in mind, but only refer to Josephus. For a refutation of the idea that Josephus should have mentioned the event if it happened, see here. As I discuss there, we do have partial corroboration of Matthew's account in some non-Christian sources, most notably a passage in the Assumption Of Moses probably written shortly after the event in question. The passage doesn't specify the event mentioned in Matthew, but is best explained by it. That's weaker corroboration than we'd like to have, but it's not equivalent to no corroboration. And we're talking about an event we have so little reason to expect to be corroborated if it occurred (because of the event's heavily pro-Christian nature; because no other New Testament document covers that period in Jesus' life; etc.).

These are just several examples of what's wrong with Pinero's article. If you want more on these issues, go to my collection of Christmas material linked earlier.