COMMENTARY: Do you see what I see?: A photo of Phyllis Zagano is available via religionnews.com.

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The scholars toiling to disprove the Christmas story are wasting their time, searching the past to disprove the present. Christ was born, and Christ is born again this day. A new book by Geza Vermes of Oxford University sets out to debunk Scripture’s testimony to the birth of Christ. […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The scholars toiling to disprove the Christmas story are wasting their time, searching the past to disprove the present. Christ was born, and Christ is born again this day.

A new book by Geza Vermes of Oxford University sets out to debunk Scripture’s testimony to the birth of Christ. In his “The Nativity: History and Legend” there is no star, no little manger, no angels. Vermes says, “Some of the essentials of the extended Christmas complex are a million miles from fact and reality.” His book tries to prove, among other things, what year and in what time of year Jesus was really born.


What difference does it make? So the details, some large and some small, are not scientifically or historically proven (or provable). So what?

We know for sure that Jesus, whom they called the Christ, lived. We know he lived around the time and places noted in Christian Scriptures. If some of that reporting is in error, think about the mistakes in yesterday’s newspaper; no one ever gets the story 1,000 percent correct. A few facts more or less, the story of Jesus is accepted as true by one-third of the world’s population. Are they all wrong? Have they been misled by some international cabal that steals their money and their souls? Hardly.

Christians believe that Christ is God become human, and the love between the Father and the Son is the Spirit that animates the spark of God in all of us. There are many ways to understand the two main beliefs of Christianity: Who is Christ, and what is the Trinity? They point to our own self-understanding. Who are we? And how do we relate to God?

Which brings us back to Christmas. We don’t have documentary evidence, but do we really need it?

Do we need the work of scientists, or even of historians, to believe the basics of the Christmas story? Do we really need detail about the past to believe God entered history as a human, and that the children born today help prove the point again?

Somewhere today beneath a star _in Bethlehem or elsewhere _ a child is born who carries hope to his (or her) small world, our world. Can we slow down, and see the fullness of humanity in Yemen, and in Somalia? Can we take the earphones off, and hear Christ suffering in Bangladesh, Burundi and the interior of Brazil?

We have to pay attention.

Then we will see the star shining on East Los Angeles and East Timor. Then we will believe that there, in poverty and squalor, a child is born to save us. Do those young, unmarried parents have no permanent abode? Will that cloud their baby’s history? Is that why 2,000 years from now their circumstances will be disputed?


Why are we so mired in fact and reason that we refuse to see? If we follow the star above Zimbabwe and through the jungles of the Philippines, can we believe the newborn king lies there, the one who will erase all cancer, real and metaphorical?

Why do we confuse “facts” with what is real? We prove ourselves a cynical nation when we ask presidential candidates what, exactly, they believe in the Bible. We prove ourselves more cynical if we’re threatened by what academics “prove” about the past.

Whether Christ was born in Bethlehem or somewhere else in Palestine is not the crucial fact. The details of when, where and how have melted. The who and what remain quite clear. The why will never change.

Do you see what I see? We desperately need Christmas. We need the child, born under the star in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. We need as well the one in Yemen, the one in Bangladesh. We need the newborn babe in East L.A. It is through Christmas that the child, this child, sleeping in the night will bring us goodness and light.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic studies.)

A photo of Phyllis Zagano is available via https://religionnews.com.

KRE/PH END ZAGANO

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