In an interview on The Real Christmas Story

Tell me about the Robert Miller book, Born Divine.

I like Born Divine because it covers a decent amount of the same ground that Raymond Brown’s book does, but it does a couple of things differently. First of all, it’s not quite as dense as Raymond Brown. Not that Raymond Brown is difficult to read, but it’s an 800-page book, whereas Born Divine is much less intimidating. The thing that really sets Born Divine apart is that it spends a lot of time on other stories about the births of famous people or divine beings, whether we’re talking about somebody like Alexander the Great or Plato or the Greek god Hermes. It talks a lot about other birth stories of that time. And the thing that it does that I like the most, because it connects up with the research I do, is it spends much more time talking about the stories of Jesus’s birth and childhood that appear outside of the New Testament, in what’s called early Christian apocryphal literature. So it goes through the infancy Gospel of Thomas, which talks about Jesus as a child, and a very badly behaving child. It talks about the infancy Gospel of James, which tells the whole story of Mary’s upbringing, and it goes into even later compositions, which is something Raymond Brown doesn’t spend a lot of time on, because his focus is really on the canonical narratives. In terms of understanding the whole tradition and the whole background of the stories of Jesus’s birth, I think that Miller’s book ends up being more well-rounded.

Do you think that if you’re a devout Christian, some of these books may be a little bit hard to take?

Absolutely. It’s a challenge, because there are a number of aspects of the Gospel stories of Jesus that have a fair amount of historical material in them. Let’s take the account of Jesus’s death. Some scholars would quibble with some of the details about Jesus’s death – for example, does he really have this dialogue with the repentant thief? But the basic historicity of the event – that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate for some kind of political crime (namely for being thought to be or calling himself King of the Jews), that stuff is all very historical. The problem with the infancy narratives is that they’re the least historical of the early Christian tradition. They’re also one of the latest parts. Early Christians were much more interested in the stories of Jesus’s death, the sayings of Jesus, his parables and other wise sayings, and the miracles that he performed. Which makes it difficult for a historian like me, when we’re talking about these kinds of things at Christmas time and people want to know more about these stories that they love so much. I have to try and gently suggest that there are reasons to be doubtful about the factual accuracy of this material. They’re still very beautiful stories, and things don’t necessarily have to be historically factual to be true on some religious or spiritual level. But you’re right, if a person is extremely devout, the standard scholarly interpretation of the Christmas story is hard to look at.