"Christians are frightened of the real Christmas story - and it is never told," claims Charles Foster, the author of a new book, The Christmas Mystery.
Charles Foster is a barrister, author, part-time judge of the Crown Court, a tutor in Medical Ethics and Law at the University of Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow of Green College, Oxford. He is also a member of Holy Trinity Brompton.
"Evangelicals are frightened that their notion of how to read Scripture will be shattered, while Catholics are concerned that they will have to look with distressing care at the figure of Mary. We are all frightened of complexity, of having our comfortable preconceptions about God shattered and replaced by the real thing," he says in his book.
"We're frightened of having our precious childhood (and childish) notions of the Christmas message replaced with something more intellectually and emotionally arduous. So we take refuge in pastiche: we conflate Matthew, Luke and downright fairytale into a palatable mush. The result is an easy target for critics of Christianity," he challenges.
"How can we possibly defend the historicity of Christmas if the Christmas story we tell isn't remotely historical, and by our conflation we've shown that we're not actually concerned about historicity at all? The fall-out for other areas of apologetics is obvious."
Foster also believes that the birth accounts in Matthew and Luke's gospels explode some dearly held doctrines from both wings of the church.
"The notion of verbal inerrancy, as understood by large swathes of conservative evangelicals, meets its nemesis in the very first chapter of the very first book of the New Testament. Catholics will certainly be upset that I conclude, in the book, that the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and Perpetual Virginity of Mary (but not the Virgin Birth, of course), have their roots in gnosticism, and were responses to early rumours of the illegitimacy of Jesus," he continues.
Despite all that, Foster says that studying the birth accounts in the gospels resulted, for him, in a breakthrough "into something far deeper, more fascinating, more colourful and more variegated than our dowdy grey ideas of the Incarnation".
He asks, "Did Christmas happen? Indeed it did: but we'll never convince anyone outside the Christian community of that if we're as dishonest and as cowardly in our handling of the sources as we generally are."
