Christmas is upon us. And how does the New York Times demonstrate its holiday spirit?

Why, yes -- through a series of essays debunking and attempting to blow holes through traditional Christian beliefs.

No better way to get into the holiday spirit for them than to spray something disagreeable onto the manger of Christianity. An essay from a cardinal on what Christianity means to him? Not on your life.

Start with this one that ran on Dec. 21 -- columnist Nicholas Kristof interviewed a skeptical Princeton theology professor (there are a lot of them) named Elaine Pagels about whether Christ was really born of a virgin birth, which is pretty much why the occasion is celebrated at all on Dec. 25:

Merry Christmas! This is a time when Christianity celebrates miracles and wonder — and “Miracles and Wonder” is the title of your fascinating forthcoming book. It raises questions about the virgin birth of Jesus, even pointing to ancient evidence that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier, possibly by rape. But before I ask you about that, I want to be respectful of readers who have a deep faith and may be upset by this line of inquiry. How do we follow the historical research without causing offense?

I love these stories from the Gospels. The skies opened up when I heard them. They picture human lives drawn into divine mystery: “God in man made manifest,” as one Christmas carol says. But at a certain point I had to ask: What do they mean? What really happened? They are not written simply as history; often they speak in metaphor. We can take them seriously without taking everything literally.

In other words, she's laughing at traditional Christians as having fanciful beliefs, rubes who get excited about skies opening, when she knows so much more than them. Sure, not every Christian faith is on the same page in this view, and those of other religions don't share these beliefs at all, but the broad thrust of Christianity holds these views through the ages.

She doesn't actually answer Kristof's question about how to not offend others. She does borrow without attribution from Salena Zito's famous line about how ordinary people take President Trump: "seriously, but not literally" (while elites do the opposite) which pretty well tells us she views Jesus the same way as she does Trump.

Kristof had had enough after that non-answer and moved on to the next topic.

So let’s go back to the Nativity. Of the four Gospels, two describe the virgin birth of Jesus, and two don’t mention it. The Gospel of Mark has people of Galilee referring to Jesus as the son of Mary, when the norm was to describe somebody as the son of his father. So did the neighbors growing up with Jesus regard him as fatherless?

We don’t know. Mark is the earliest Gospel written; Matthew and Luke are basically just revising it. Mark has no suggestion of a virgin birth. Instead, he says that neighbors called Jesus “son of Mary.” In an intensely patriarchal society, this suggests that Jesus had no father that anyone knew about, even one deceased. Yet even without a partner, Mary has lots of children: In Mark, Jesus has four other brothers and some sisters, with no recognized father and no genealogy.

You note that Matthew and Luke both borrowed heavily from Mark’s account but also seem embarrassed by elements of it, including the paternity question. Is your guess that they added the virgin birth to reduce that embarrassment?

Yes, but this is not just my guess. When Matthew and Luke set out to revise Mark, each added an elaborate birth story — two stories that differ in almost every detail. Matthew adds a father named Joseph, who, seeing his fiancée pregnant, and not with his child, decides to break the marriage contract. Luke, writing independently, pictures an angel astonishing a young virginal girl, announcing that “the Holy Spirit” is about to make her pregnant.

She doesn't know, she says. And with a leap of logic, she insists that the original Gospel writers "revised" or borrowed from others which is pretty speculative, given that this was not an age of mass communications, and to Christians, is hard to believe. After all, had they all bogarted off one another, then only one Gospel would be needed, not four.

Here's an excellent reply from the words of Pope Benedict XVI:

I love how Ratzinger lays the smack down on scholars who debate the historical veracity of Luke’s account of the nativity. His argument is “Luke was a lot closer to the events than we are. no matter what historical tools we have, the sources closer to the time are more valid@

— Fr. Harrison Ayre (@FrHarrison) December 24, 2024

But while she doesn't "know" any of this basic stuff, nor was she around when it happened, she is very sure about Panthera, which is from an old story passed around by early Christianity's opponents since lost to the sands of time. That's where the absolute truth of the matter is, she has no skepticism there:

The most startling element of your book to me was that you cite evidence going back to the first and second centuries that some referred to Jesus as the son of a Roman soldier named Panthera. These accounts are mostly from early writers trying to disparage Jesus, it seems, so perhaps they should be regarded skeptically. But you also write that Panthera appears to have been a real person. How should we think about this?

Yes, these stories circulated after Jesus’ death among members of the Jewish community who regarded him as a false messiah, saying that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier. I used to dismiss such stories as ancient slander. Yet while we do not know what happened, there are too many points of circumstantial evidence to simply ignore them. The name Panthera, sometimes spelled differently in ancient sources, may refer to a panther skin that certain soldiers wore. The discovery of the grave of a Roman soldier named Tiberius Panthera, member of a cohort of Syrian archers stationed in Palestine in the first century, might support those ancient rumors.

You write that there were early accusations against Mary of promiscuity, connected to this allegation of an affair with Panthera. But you say that Roman soldiers brutally occupied Galilee in the period before Jesus was born, killing and raping with impunity. So, acknowledging that this is uncertainty stacked on uncertainty, if Panthera was involved, was it probably a case of rape?

Jewish revolutionaries, fighting “in the name of God and our common liberty” to free their land from Roman domination, attacked a Roman fortress and killed many soldiers. The governor brought in Roman soldiers who crucified perhaps 2,000 Jews, then garrisoned thousands of soldiers less than four miles from Nazareth. The historian Josephus says that the soldiers stationed there ravaged the area, taking advantage of local people in every way they could. Josephus also notes that Galilean Jews were especially worried about their daughters’ virginity. Noting such diverse evidence, I thought that these stories sounded plausible in a way I had never imagined.

Who needs angels and annunciations and visits to Elizabeth in Judea when you've got Panthera on the prowl, raping and pillaging, to make it all make sense?

After that, she yaps about miracles being interpretive, not real miracles, which doesn't actually explain why early Christians were willing to die gruesome deaths for their faith in the years that followed. Who'd want to die for what might have maybe a piece of fortuitous luck? You can get those things without having to die Christian martyrdoms, so it's pretty loser-ly as an idea.

Plus, the examples she cites to explain Christianity's miracles, like a car that didn't hit you, don't quite measure up quality-wise to thousands of loaves of bread out of nowhere, blind people suddenly seeing, or dead people crawling out of the grave -- which were big and obvious miracles that don't work well as maybe-natural events of dumb luck.

Kristof gets a little comical when he tries to circle back to the not-offend-others angle:

You have a foot in each of two worlds, faith and academia, that often seem like rival sides of the God gulf. Can we find paths of mutual respect to bridge that chasm?

The Gospels most often speak in the language of stories and poetry. Intellectualizing these traditions — or turning them into dogma — doesn’t make them spiritually deep. What we call Christianity is not a single thing. Instead, it consists of a 2,000-year-old collection of stories, prayers, liturgies, music, miracles — sources drawn from traditions as different as Eastern Orthodoxy is from Pentecostalism or Christian Science. No one can swallow the entire tradition: It’s undigestible. Instead, anyone who identifies as Christian chooses certain elements of it.

A professor friend said to me: “I’m an atheist. How can you believe all that stuff?” First of all, as I see it, “believing all that stuff” is not the point. The Christian message, as I experienced it, was transformational. It encouraged me to treat other people well and opened up a world of imagination and wonder.

 She responds with a sea of moral relativism, which shouldn't surprise anyone. As for belief, well, belief is not the point. She favors being nice to other people and I guess looking at the great art out there inspired by Christianity. Who needs belief?

She likes the Christmas decorations, though.

As a historian, I question the literal truth of the virgin birth story. But I still love the midnight service on Christmas Eve, where the story is gloriously told and sung as miracle.

What palaver. Go for the trivia, folks, leave the belief to us scholars -- who don't believe. What a Christmas message.

That's not the only tripe of this kind the Times has decided to run in this Christmas season either, debunking Christianity among the too-clever-by-half.

Today they ran one by a guy named Peter Wehner, a @neverTrump, who serves as one of their house Republicans.

The headline:

Why It Matters That Jesus Came From a Dysfunctional Family

Which is pretty disgusting all by itself.

So Joseph and Mary were barking and fighting with one another on the way to Bethlehem like they were in a Hollywood sitcom? Joseph was fond of the bottle? That's a really good way to have a dysfunctional family. Mary was an unwed mother with multiple fathers for her many kids? That takes us back to Paget and her new theology. Joseph was a wife-beater? Don't think so.

None of these manifestations of a dysfunctional family have been so much as hinted at in the Gospels, and the entire claim is dubious.

In his piece, Wehner specifically cites Jesus's lineage as dysfunctional, calling Jesus's ancestors a load of "murderers, adulterers, prostitutes and people who committed incest, liars, schemers and idolaters." He doesn't get into specifics.

Really? You probably wouldn't have gotten Joseph and Mary, who were Jesus's parents, had every last ancestor been as disgusting as described.

Sure, the Bible is loaded with imperfect people, some chosen anyway despite their imperfections. But all were faithful ultimately to God. You don't see that kind of faith in dysfunctional families, all of which are the products of selfishness, deracination and human weakness. These ancestors of Jesus were members of The Tribe.

This claim not only smells of dysfunction and skeptical projectings about history, it reeks of anti-Semitism, given that this long Jewish lineage is apparently all bad guys now.

It's as obnoxious an essay as the earlier one.

And that tells us a lot about the leftists at the Times: That they seek to poison Christianity any way they can, when it's time for believers to focus on their big holiday.

What a crappy Christmas message from people who clearly hate Christianity. That's the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from this collection of insulting nonsense and drivel. What will they run tomorrow?

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