The Magi and the Star

During a 2007 BBC radio interview, the archbishop of Canterbury deconstructed elements of the Nativity story. "Stars simply don’t behave like that," Rowan Williams said. Asked about the existence of three wise men, he replied, "It works quite well as legend."

But years ago Father Walter Brandmüller, president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, published an essay applying the historical-critical method to the question of the Nativity story. (The essay is reprinted without cumbersome footnotes in Light and Shadows: Church History Amid Faith, Fact, and Legend [Ignatius].) He found that an unbiased examination of the historical evidence for the Nativity does not undermine, but corroborates, Christian Tradition.

Brandmüller cites the Anglican scholar J.A.T. Robinson, whose 1976 study Redating the New Testament challenged the 19th-century "scientific" consensus that the Gospels were written after 70 A.D. The late dating conveniently gave Scripture scholars maximum latitude for their speculations. Robinson points out that the Acts of the Apostles (the sequel to Luke) do not mention the deaths of Peter and Paul (circa 67) or the Roman-Judean war, which started in 66. Based on a careful evaluation of both internal and external evidence, he concludes that all four Gospels were written before 70 A.D.

Brandmüller comments: "The fact that the Gospels not only are based on eyewitness and hearsay reports but also were written for contemporaries made it impossible to include fictional accounts, which could have been exposed at any time as untrue by contemporaries who were still living."

He then presents the documentary and monumental evidence for the census of Caesar Augustus and the archaeological traces of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. "The mere fact that Emperor Hadrian found it necessary to replace the most popular Christian shrines with pagan temples so as to eradicate all thoughts of Christian salvation history-he even had a grove in honor of Adonis planted over the Grotto of the Nativity-shows that the memory of Jesus’ birth was very much alive at the beginning of the second century." Relying on the local tradition, Emperor Constantine had a church built over the grotto in the fourth century. "The Church of the Nativity is still standing there today."

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