There are no other religious festivals as detached from their origins as Christmas, and I suspect there never will be. It’s hard to imagine Diwali, Hanukkah or Ramadan becoming so disconnected from the underlying faiths that they mark.
I don't really have an opinion on Christmas as an increasingly secular holiday. It feels like a good thing to have an inclusive celebration, though I can see why the disconnect from its traditional meaning irks some Christians.
I only make the point because I wanted to write a newsletter about Jesus, but I questioned whether to write it at Christmas because, well, he’s not very Christmassy. But I can’t see him coming up in the news any time soon - so this is as good a moment as any.
Historical figures typically command a huge amount of attention and debate. From Caesar to Cleopatra, Churchill to Khan, Curie to Einstein.
While there is a vast body of work on Jesus, in the public imagination he holds one of two roles: for Christians, he is the central figure of their life, beyond scrutiny or critique; or for atheists and everyone else, he gets a shrug and very little thought.
Yet Jesus is probably the most important historical figure in the history of the Earth. He is, essentially, the founder of the world’s largest religion. More wars have been fought in his name than any political leader. He is the centrepiece of more art than perhaps any other individual. His birth quite literally divides the history of civilisation into two.
It is worth scrutinising him just as an historical figure, outside of his religious significance.
A small obstacle to that endeavour, though, is we don’t know a whole lot about him.
We can confidently write a biography of Caesar, who died around 60 years before Jesus was born. Yet whether or not Jesus even existed is a subject that generates some debate among scholars - let alone what he actually did in his life.
All we really know with any certainty is that Jesus was born, he was baptised, and he died.
Aside from those three events the rest of Jesus’ life is a bit of a blur. It’s largely constructed from the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) - though they are rife with contradictions, and written at least decades after his death.
In fact, it's pretty likely that Jesus never actually called himself God. The Holy Trinity is a central tenet of Christianity, yet it’s not clear whether Jesus ever actually described himself as God. He never says anything even close to that in Matthew, Mark or Luke - only in John, which is generally considered to be historically inaccurate.
So, if Jesus never called himself the Messiah, did he even know he was supposed to be it?
Did Jesus know he was Jesus?
In a way, the explanation of Jesus that makes the most sense is that he is the son of God. That explains everything: the miracles, the veneration, the resurrection.
If he wasn’t the son of God, there are far more questions to answer.
Was he actively pretending to be the son of God? Was he faking the miracles using magic tricks, and deliberately behaving in a way to match up to Biblical prophecy? And if so, was he doing this for fame and notoriety, or because he genuinely thought he was the son of God?
Or was he just a normal guy, that the public believed was the son of God? Did he just go along with it? Or maybe it was only later down the line he got that label, and decades of storytelling ended up exaggerating his status as a miracle worker?
C. S. Lewis posed a similar question in the 1940s, and dubbed it the “trilemma”. He suggested that Jesus must’ve been either a “Lunatic, a Liar, or a Lord”. In other words, Jesus was either deluded, deliberately deceitful, or actually a deity.
Lewis poses this as an argument for Jesus as Christ: we know he’s not a liar (else he wouldn’t be revered by multiple faiths), we know he’s not a lunatic (else he wouldn’t have gained so many followers) - therefore, he must truly be the Lord.
This argument doesn’t quite add up. For one: it’s plausible that Jesus did not consider himself a Lord, simply a good preacher, and he was only posthumously declared the son of God.
We also can’t rule out that he was a liar! Jesus fulfilled Biblical prophecy: who is to say he didn’t do that deliberately and consciously? It was prophesied in the Old Testament that the king would arrive on a donkey - Jesus would’ve known this passage, and only needed to procure a donkey to fulfil it.
(An interesting thought experiment: if you genuinely believed you were a Messiah that had been prophesied about, would you deliberately set out to fulfil the prophecies, or would you wait to see if they just happened to you naturally?)
What about the miracles?
In much the same way, the most straightforward explanation of Jesus’ miracles was that he performed miracles using divine power.
So if he didn’t walk on water, what actually happened?
It might just be legend. The Bible first spread as word of mouth, and then through a huge number of translations. It’s like passing a story through a series of filters: it comes out very different at the end.
Even Jesus’ very first miracle, the virgin birth, might be a mistranslation: the Hebrew word for ‘virgin’ is the same as the Hebrew word for ‘young woman’. So it was up to translators to determine if the Nativity story represented the Second Coming, or an episode of Teen Mom Nazareth.
There is a significant sect of Christians that prefer to gloss over Jesus’ miracles entirely, considering them more metaphorical than literal. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson compiled his own version of the Bible that left out all of the miracles and just focused on the teachings.
Interestingly, there is very little serious analysis that purports Jesus’ miracles were simply swindles or tricks. While I’d suggest it’s a pretty common atheist trope, even atheist scholars don’t believe that Jesus quietly dropped some food colouring in the water when he turned it to wine.
Jesus’ big blunder
Occam’s Razor states that the simplest argument is often the right one. A man who can perform miracles, attracts disciples, rises from the dead and has his story told for generations: the most straightforward explanation for all of this is that he is the Messiah.
So what’s the argument against? There’s one big one.
Jesus, again and again, predicted that his time on Earth would mark the apocalypse. To make matters worse, he pretty explicitly promises it will happen within “a generation”.
In fact, this is one of the foundational reasons that Jews don’t accept Jesus as the Messiah: the Messiah is supposed to bring with them the start of a Messianic Age. That we still have a world, then, is perhaps proof that Jesus does not fulfil the prophecies on the coming of the Messiah, and does not even fulfil the predictions he himself made.
Christians have found ways to reconcile this: that Jesus did bring a sort of metaphorical apocalypse, or perhaps that he is God in human form - and to makes mistakes is the fundamental nature of being human.
But it’s a pretty gaping hole in any theory of Jesus as omniscient: his own words are disprovable.
How about the Nativity?
As it’s Christmas, I’ll end where Jesus started: in a manger.
The story of Jesus’ birth is only recounted in two of the four Gospels: Matthew and Luke. While the two versions share the same foundations, they are also packed with inconsistencies. There’s no mention of the wise men in Luke; and no mention of the shepherds in Matthew.
The Nativity story is almost certainly not historically accurate. One very foundational component - that Mary and Joseph were forced to travel to Bethlehem to register for a census - does not have any basis in provable historical reality.
So how did it come about?
One explanation: it was an invention to elevate Jesus’ status.
Jesus was not the only guy going around performing miracles; and he wasn’t even the only person that people saw after his death.
How, then, do you build a claim that he is the Chosen One?
The answer for Christians is that he fulfils the prophecies set out in the Old Testament.
In Zechariah, it’s prophesied that the king will ride a donkey. Jesus rides into Jeruselum on a donkey. The book of Isaiah gives a long description of the suffering that Jesus went on to face during the crucifixion. And so on.
It seems the Nativity story is an opportunity to show Jesus fulfilling more prophecies: for example, that the king would be born to a virgin. It’s also part of a historical tradition of having miraculous and memorable ‘origin stories’ for prophets and kings.
If historians are almost certain Jesus wasn’t born in the way depicted in the Bible, they are definitely certain that he wasn’t born on December 25 (the odds are, I suppose, about 1/365).
The timing of Christmas likely originated from the Roman Saturnalia festival, to give the growing number of Christians in the Roman Empire an excuse to celebrate the long-standing festival.
No matter whether he was the son of God, a prophet, or just another guy - the impact of Jesus is astronomical and worth far more time thought than most of us give him.
The Bible is almost always studied as a theological document rather than an historical source, when it is both. In much the same way, Jesus is far more than just a religious figure, he's also an historical one. If nothing else, without him this week’s newsletter would be the Saturnalia special.