Summary of Doubts – Doubting Christmas

In my book Doubt after Doubt: Doubting the Christmas faith, I dedicate a chapter to the doubts I had as a Christian about the Christmas story. In conclusion, here is a summary of why I had doubts:

• December 25^th used to fall on the Winter Solstice – the shortest day of the year.
• The Winter Solstice was considered, by pagan cultures, the birthday of the sun – and therefore the birthday of many pagan Sun gods.
• December 25^th was chosen by the Christian church to honor the birth of Jesus so that Jesus would supersede his pagan predecessors born on this day.
• No one knows when Jesus was actually born.
• Jesus shares many of the same attributes as his pagan predecessors – including being born of a virgin, being the divine made flesh, being a savior, being born before shepherds and more.
• The decoration of Christmas trees is originally a pagan custom.
• Not one word of the New Testament was written during Jesus’ lifetime.
• Jesus offended his hometown neighbors because they had no idea he was born divine.
• The Gospel of Mark is the oldest gospel – the authors of both Mathew and Luke utilized Mark in their own compositions.
• The Gospel of Mark, being the eldest, makes no mention of the virgin birth, the nativity scene, Jesus fleeing to Egypt, the murder of children by King Herod or anything else in relation to Jesus’ birth.
• Matthew’s chronological account of Jesus’ genealogy incorrectly states there were 14 generations from the exile in Babylon to the birth of Jesus, even though he only lists 13.
• The genealogy of Jesus listed by Matthew and Luke are different.
• While the characters and setting is the same, the remainders of Matthews and Luke’s accounts of the nativity scene are different.
• Claims that Jesus fulfilled prophecy point to passages in the Old Testament that are taken out of context or were not fulfilled by Jesus.
• To accept the philosophy that God speaks to us through prophecy, one would need to accept that God has dropped prophecies scattered throughout miscellaneous verses in at least eleven Hebrew-centric writings authored over more than a millennium of time.

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