From Mark Vernon-It’s Christmas time. It’s the winter solstice. It’s our appropriation of the Saturnalia. Yes, yes. And it’s the official birthday, in the west, of Jesus. So it’s timely to revisit an old question: who did the baby turn out to be?
I’ve been reading around the latest in the quest for the historical Jesus and it’s striking how much has settled in the last few years. Quite a lot about the man is now agreed and what’s agreed amounts to quite a lot.
Aside from the occasional conspiracist, no-one now doubts that Jesus actually lived. As the sceptic and religious studies scholar, Bart D. Ehrman, summarizes in How Jesus Became God (2014): “Jesus was a lower-class Jewish preacher from the backwaters of rural Galilee who was condemned for illegal activities and crucified for crimes against the state.”
Of course, many of the things that the gospel writers say about Jesus are hard to verify historically, and some of them are clearly not historically accurate. Only Matthew describes wise men visiting him at the time of his birth. Only Luke describes shepherds visiting him as a baby in Bethlehem. But we should be too surprised at these inventions. The gospel writers were more interested in conveying the significance of Jesus, rather than capturing the facts of his life. As was common at the time, they used mythical ideas and reinterpreted sacred texts, alongside historical events, to show what they thought was important.
More here-
http://www.markvernon.com/jesus-and-the-apocalypsis
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