Since Jesus' childhood spanned so many years and so many issues are involved, there's no quick and easy way to address everything. But I've put together a collection of approaches that can be taken to begin an argument for a traditional Christian view of his childhood. See here.
It's important to be knowledgeable about how much Matthew and Luke agree concerning the childhood of Jesus. They agree more than is usually suggested. See the post here for forty examples of the agreements between Matthew and Luke. For a discussion of the agreements among other early sources, go here. The post here discusses some neglected evidence related to the church of Ephesus. For some recommendations about how to argue that the early sources agree more than people often suggest, see this post.
Isaiah 9:1-7 is significant in the context of Christmas (e.g., what it tells us about Jesus' self-perception, demonstrating continuity between the accounts of his childhood and the accounts of his adulthood). Here's a collection of posts about the passage.
Here are some examples of our posts on Christmas issues, with many others available in our archives:
How The Names Of Jesus And His Brothers Corroborate The Infancy Narratives
How Jesus' Relatives Shaped Our View Of His Childhood
Joseph's Relationship With Nazareth And Bethlehem
Was Luke 1-2 part of the original gospel of Luke?
Material Against Luke's Interest In Luke 1-2
The Significance Of 1 Timothy 5:18
The Historicity Of Luke's Census (Part 1)
The Historicity Of Luke's Census (Part 2)
Why not dismiss ancient accounts of Jesus' childhood the same way we dismiss ancient accounts of the childhood of gods, emperors, etc.?
Does the gospel of Mark contradict the infancy narratives?
Luke 2:39 Doesn't Mean What Critics Claim It Means
The Consistency And Historicity Of The Annunciation Accounts
Do passages like Matthew 2:1, 2:11, 2:22-23, and Luke 2:39 prove that the infancy narratives are inconsistent?
Jesus' Galilean Background And Its Significance
The Significance Of Jesus' Being Raised In Nazareth
Capernaum And Christmas
Evidence For The Bethlehem Birthplace
How much can we trust ancient Christian sources in consideration of their biases?
Written Sources On Jesus' Childhood Prior To The New Testament
The Earliness Of Matthew And Luke
The Authorship Of Matthew
The Authorship Of Luke
The Genre Of The Infancy Narratives
Typology And The Infancy Narratives
Whether Matthew Derived His Material On Jesus' Childhood From His Old Testament Citations
Jesus' Childhood In John 7-9
The Slaughter Of The Innocents
The Virgin Birth
The Mechanism For The Virgin Birth: Joseph's Biological Relationship With Jesus
Jesus' Davidic Ancestry And The Genealogies
The Star Of Bethlehem
Evidence For The Magi
Mutually Exclusive Skeptical Claims About Christmas
The Origins Of The Christmas Holiday And Its December 25 Date
Is it inappropriate to celebrate Christmas?
Christmas Prophecy Fulfillment
You can access our posts with the Christmas label here. Click Older Posts at the bottom of the screen to see more. If you replace "Christmas" in the URL linked above with another relevant phrase, you can find the posts that are labeled that way (Virgin Birth, Bethlehem, etc.).
I placed the text of Matthew and Luke's infancy narratives in some posts and linked the text to relevant material in our archives. See here for Matthew and here for Luke.
We've posted a lot of reviews of Christmas-related books over the years. Here's a collection of those reviews, including links to ones posted at Amazon and Goodreads.
Raymond Brown's book on the infancy narratives is still generally considered the standard in the field. Go here for a collection of responses to the book.
Here's a collection of my responses to skeptical misrepresentations of the church fathers. Some of the issues addressed there are closely related to Christmas.
On the importance of apologetics in general, not just in the context of Christmas, see this post. And here's one about the neglect of Christmas apologetics in particular.
Here are links to my Christmas Resources posts of previous years:
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
After the 2024 post, I discussed several reasons for thinking Bethlehem was Joseph's primary place of residence, not just the place of his distant ancestry. I made some recommendations about how to argue that the early sources agree about Jesus' childhood more than critics suggest. A later post addressed objections related to Luke's census account, whether Augustus would take a census of a client kingdom and the silence of other sources about the census Luke refers to. I also discussed why some of the early sources don't mention the virgin birth. I then wrote a response to a video by Bart Ehrman arguing against the Bethlehem birthplace. My next post expanded upon that earlier one, discussing the fact that arguing against something like Luke's census account or the Slaughter of the Innocents doesn't adequately address the evidence for where Jesus was born. I wrote about some of the reasons why people prefer Christmas to Easter. In another post, I addressed the historicity of John 19:27. I also discussed the evidence for Matthew's authorship of the gospel attributed to him and his significance as a source on Jesus' childhood. Then I wrote about the early prominence of the gospel of Luke and its Christmas material. I posted some comments from Bede about the incarnation and seeking Christ indolently. I linked an interview Lydia McGrew did on the historicity of the Biblical accounts of Jesus' childhood. I also reviewed a new book on Jesus' childhood, Joan Taylor's Boy Jesus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2025). Another post discussed some evidence for the consistency and historicity of what the New Testament reports about Jesus' siblings. Some likely conclusions follow regarding issues like the birth order and ages of the brothers and sisters of Jesus. My next post expanded on those issues, with a focus on whether Mary was a perpetual virgin. A later post addressed the objection that Jesus' brothers and sisters should have believed in him, instead of being unbelievers as the gospels describe, if they grew up in the same home. I posted about the significance of the "her" qualifier in "her firstborn son" in Luke 2:7.
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