Dear friends,
Christmas is a great time for gifts, and Two Ways News comes to you free of charge and provided by generosity. If you would like to support the ministry, please see the details of how to give here or at the end of this article. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this Christmas special.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: In today’s episode, we will talk about the when, what, who, why, and how of the birth of Jesus. When was Jesus born? Was it December 25th, and if so, what year was it?
Peter Jensen: We’re not sure of the year, but it was almost certainly between 5 BC and 3 BC. Christ was born in the years ‘Before Christ’. It’s a paradox that exists because the estimation turned out to be slightly wrong. The birth of Jesus has been located BC, but it’s within a very short distance of when AD begins. The chief reason is that there’s a reference in Matthew’s gospel to Herod the Great and his attempt to assassinate Jesus by killing all children under 2 years old. Herod died around 4 BC, meaning that Jesus must have been born during that era.
We are not told the day within the Bible, and there’s very little evidence one way or another. Some people refer to the presence of shepherds in the field and say that it’s more likely to have been in September, for example. But it’s not decisive. It has often been suggested that 25th December was chosen in the early centuries because it was the same day as a Roman feast. More recently, scholars suggest that it was chosen because it occurs 9 months after Passover, and it was at the time of the Passover that the angel came to Mary. If it mattered, we would have been told.
Phillip: We do not know if Jesus was born on 25th December, but we are sure that he was born around 4 BC.
Peter: Yes, and we are sure that he was born. That’s the ‘when’ question, but I’ll let you answer the ‘what’ question. Famously, he was born of the Virgin Mary, who was unmarried at the time, although betrothed to Joseph. Is it because he was half man, half God, and therefore had to be born of a woman, but not of a man?
Phillip: The virgin is the first issue to be raised. The prophet Isaiah speaks in chapter 7 of “the sign of the virgin”, which is also picked up in Luke and in Matthew. Some people believe Mary was simply a young woman, as the Greek word can mean ‘a young woman’, but when you read it in the context of the scriptures, the whole point is that she was not united to her husband until after she conceived. So the New Testament clearly describes a virgin having a baby, which, in the days before IVF, was completely impossible. The scriptures say that Mary was a virgin, but no other conclusion is made other than it being the sign of God.
Certainly, it does not make the false point that Jesus is half man, half God. He is fully man. We know this from Luke 2:52, “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and man.” It’s extraordinary that he is clearly a man like any other, born as a baby, growing up physically and in wisdom; he doesn’t come as God fully formed in his knowledge of everything. He is fully a man who has to grow up like any man grows up, not only in stature but also in learning; and not only in good repute with other men but also with God. So Jesus is fully man but also fully God. It’s not because of the virgin birth that he’s fully God; he is fully God because God has made him such. The conclusion that we wish to draw is that he had to be born of a virgin in order to be fully God, but that is not the conclusion that the scriptures draw.
Peter: Let me put it this way: around Jesus, there cluster miracles, except the word ‘miracle’ is not a word that I favour; ‘signs and wonders’ is more accurate. At various times in biblical history, there is an outbreak of signs and wonders to draw attention to what is going on. Unsurprisingly, therefore, when Jesus comes, there are many signs and wonders culminating in his resurrection. But they begin with a virgin birth. So it’s not so much that he’s born of a virgin for a technical reason, because he’s half God, half man; it’s because at the very beginning, something happens to indicate the importance of the event.
Phillip: He is fulfilling Old Testament prophecies and expectations, so he doesn’t come without a context. He comes with God’s prepared context, so it doesn’t surprise us. But some people talk about it as an immaculate conception, which is inaccurate.
Peter: Sometimes people think that Immaculate Conception is the same thing as Virgin Birth, but it isn’t. Immaculate Conception is a Roman Catholic teaching that was solidified in the 19th century, but it had been around before then. The idea is that the sinlessness of Jesus is owed to his mother, who was herself sinless. It’s her Immaculate Conception that is being referred to. ‘Immaculate’ means ‘without stain’ or ‘without sin’, so Mary herself is thought to be without sin.
Phillip: That is thought to enable Jesus to be without sin.
Peter: It’s an explanation of the mechanism of Christ’s deity and sinlessness, but it’s not biblical. There’s no hint of it anywhere in the Bible.
Phillip: I would have to ask, what happened to her parents that she could be immaculate?
Peter: The question is asked, and there are answers from the Roman Catholic side. But we don’t know who her mother was. In Catholic thinking, it was a woman called Anne, but we’re not explicitly told. That is not a biblical account, nor is it necessary. It’s a misunderstanding of what the virgin birth is about.
Phillip: Jesus is a real man, but not a sinful man; however, it’s not caused by his mother. But then, who is he? Is he God’s son?
Peter: He is. Dr Jim Packer, in his book, Concise Theology, puts it this way
While we cannot affirm that a divine person could not have entered this world any other way than by virgin birth, Jesus’ miraculous birth does in fact point to his deity and also to the reality of the creative power that operates in our new birth (John 1:13). Also, while we cannot affirm that God could not have produced sinless humanity apart from virgin birth, Jesus’ humanity was sinless, and the circumstances of his birth call attention to the miracle that was involved when Mary, a sinner (Luke 1:47), gave birth to one who was not ‘in Adam’ as she was, nor therefore needed a Saviour as she did.1
Phillip: It is important that she needed a saviour. There are a few words to describe Jesus: for example, ‘Immanuel’, which means ‘God with us’. So in Jesus, we have a full human, but we also have God.
There is only one that is God. It’s not like he is a god; he is ‘God with us’, the God of the Bible, who is with us. But that divinity of Jesus was quarrelled over and discussed for some centuries after the Bible. There’s a wonderful word which today is not used, but has terrible consequences for us. It’s the word ‘theotokos’. It came as a key word in the year 451 at the Council of Chalcedon. The discussion was about this issue of whether Jesus is simultaneously fully God and fully man. As a litmus test, Christian Orthodoxy came up with this word ‘theotokos’, which says that Mary was the mother of God. Most of us Protestants, when we hear the phrase ‘Mother of God’, are tempted to completely disregard it, but that is a great error.
Peter: Yes, we need that word because we want to assert that this was nonetheless God himself. Not a god, not a sort of godlike figure, but the Word made flesh. John 1:1 tells us, “In the beginning was the word, the word was with God and the word was God, and the same was in the beginning with God, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” So he is God, and this goes back to the mystery of the Trinity: there is one God, but three persons in one God; the persons are equal, but it is the Son who comes amongst us.
Phillip: This word ‘theotokos’, meaning ‘mother of God’, is theologically orthodox and right, because it asserts that when Jesus was the man, and the son of Mary, he was at the same time the one and only God: the Son, the second person of the Trinity. So Mary was indeed the mother of God. But it can become a matter of false piety, of worshipping Mary and giving her a higher status than the Bible would give to her. The phrase gets taken out of the context of theological dispute and put into the context of people’s prayer life, which is not what it was meant for in the first place, and it is not accurate or helpful.
Peter: We have this extraordinary privilege of being able to address our Heavenly Father in the name of the Son and the power of the Holy Spirit. Then it is suggested we address other human beings, for Mary is one of us at that level, and the saints. It distracts our attention from the truth.
Phillip: The truth being that Jesus, the man, is God. God the Son has become the Son of God, here in this world as the man. A few times in the New Testament, he is explicitly called God, as in Romans 9:5 and in Titus 2:13. So it’s not a common thing to have Jesus called God, but it is completely consistent with fundamental ideals of Christianity. Certainly the John 1 passage makes it quite clear.
Peter: I always remember ‘Doubting Thomas’.
Phillip: In John 20:28, the disciple Thomas says to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” It sounds like terrible blasphemy, like the instance in Revelation 22:8-9 when John bows down to worship an angel in heaven, and the angel rebukes him
You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship God.
But Jesus accepts Thomas’ worship, which clearly leads us to understand that Jesus is God; at the same time, it is very important to remember that Jesus is human.
Peter: That’s why we are baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s one God, three persons.
Now we come to the ‘why’ question: why did God become man in Jesus? This is the mystery of the divine Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. John 6.28-29, for example, refers to the way in which Jesus has been sent
Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
The Father sends the Son. It’s not by accident that the Son who comes amongst us takes on human nature. It doesn’t diminish his equality with the Father, but it is an indication of something like order that in the Godhead, the Father sends the Son, and later the Spirit.
Phillip: While the Father sends the Son, the Son, in obedience to the Father, comes of his own initiative. It’s not that the Father packed him up and sent him off so that he had no say in it himself. Philippians 2:8 tells us, “Being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Similarly, 2 Corinthians 8:9 reads, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” Therefore it was Jesus who chose to become poor because his Father sent him.
Peter: It was for our sake that Jesus, through his poverty, would become rich. Matthew 1:21, in talking about the birth of Jesus, says, “She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
Phillip: That verse tells us the very purpose for Jesus being sent, and it’s a purpose for all of us as well as for the glory of God. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. 1 Timothy 1:15 tells us, “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”
If you want to do what Jesus would do, go into the world to save sinners. You won’t be able to do it the way he did it by dying on the cross, but you can do it by preaching the gospel.
Peter: Yes, and by pointing to Jesus, the one who saves sinners.
Phillip: Jesus came bringing his kingdom, and he will return with his kingdom.
Peter: Yes, and he preached the kingdom. “The kingdom of God is at hand.” There’s a revealing interchange with the Pharisees recorded in Luke 17:20
Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”
He is saying that the kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed. The King had arrived and was living amongst them, yet we human beings crucified him. In a miraculous way, our sin against God turned into our salvation, because the Saviour was bearing our sins. It is extraordinary.
Phillip: It is in his resurrection and ascension and in return that we see him as the King. So on the day of Pentecost, Peter preaches in Acts 2:36, “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
Jesus becomes the Christ by the appointment of God through his death and resurrection. That is, the King was crucified, but in his resurrection and ascension he was crowned. But you don’t see that until his return.
Peter: Jesus will be seen because he has not and will not shed his humanity. He is still one of us. He came to save us, and in doing so became one of us. He is, as the scriptures call him, the last Adam. When he comes again, God has fixed, as Acts 17:31 tells us, “A day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed.”
Phillip: It is an extraordinary idea that as the Ancient of Days sits in the judgement of the world, there’s one like the Son of Man who is given all authority and power. The universe has changed. God, the unchangeable, has changed, in that God has embraced humanity, his creation. The incarnation is an extraordinary concept, because it isn’t like he became a human for a little while, then stepped out of his human ‘skin’; he becomes a human for eternity.
So why did he come? The whole gospel is in that question.
How, then, do we celebrate Christmas?
Peter: Well, the Scottish Presbyterians of an age gone by believed that we shouldn’t celebrate Christmas. It would be okay to celebrate the new year, but not Christmas, as it was considered worldly to do so. We were brought up with a Christmas much influenced, I think, by 19th and 20th century Charles Dickens and the highly commercialised Santa Claus.
Phillip: When I became a Christian, I had a reaction against all that cultural Christianity which had blinded and deceived me. I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t take it as far as the Scottish Presbyterians, because I want to celebrate the Incarnation, but I didn’t see Christmas as a family affair. I want to celebrate the Incarnation, but I don’t want to celebrate the Christmas season. I want to celebrate the reality and the truth; therefore, Santa is to me an objectionable character because he takes the place of Jesus as the centre point of the celebration.
Peter: Does your branch of the Jensen family celebrate Christmas by having lunch together?
Phillip: Yes, because that’s a good way of celebrating Jesus’ birthday.
Peter: The family getting together at that point is so crucial, which is also why Christmas is so awful for so many people.
Phillip: If it’s a celebration of family, and family is dysfunctional, then Christmas is a very painful season. As a replacement for the Incarnation, family life is a failure.
Peter: If you think about Jesus, who came into the world to save sinners, and everyone who gathers around the table is a sinner, you may realise the importance of forgiving each other because we are forgiven. That may help families.
J.I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs, 2001 (Tyndale House Publishers)
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this series of 5 talks on the book of Isaiah entitled God’s Preparation for Christmas.
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