The Case For Christmas (ft. Lee Strobel)
Inside This Episode
In this enlightening conversation, Lee Strobel shares his journey from skepticism to faith, particularly focusing on the significance of Christmas and the virgin birth. He recounts a pivotal experience with a poor family that opened his eyes to the power of Christmas. The discussion delves into his investigation into the historical evidence surrounding Jesus’ birth, the role of Mary, and the implications of the virgin birth. Strobel also highlights the importance of sharing the gospel during the Christmas season.
Find Lee’s revised “The Case For Christmas”: https://www.amazon.com/Case-Christmas-Journalist-Investigates-Identity/dp/0310254760
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Transcript
Eric Huffman: How accurate is the story of Christmas?
Lee Strobel: There's a pretty strong evidence that the story that we typically hear at Christmas is probably not 100% accurate. And the reason I say that is...
Eric Huffman: For most of his life, former atheist and investigative journalist Lee Strobel believed the Christmas story was built on faith, not fact.
Lee Strobel: As a skeptic, I'm thinking, you know, this idea that there was a child born 2,000 years ago on December 25th, of all things, who redeemed the world and so forth, just seemed awfully far-fetched to me. It wasn't until a few years later, after my wife became a Christian, that I decided to take my journalism training and legal training and disprove Christianity, when I realized in light of the avalanche of evidence, it would have taken more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a Christian.
Eric Huffman: Today, Lee shares the evidence that convinced him that Christianity and Christmas are undeniably true. After you became a Christian and started looking closer at Christmas, did you still have questions about the validity of the Christmas narrative?
Lee Strobel: Well, I wanted to establish how well is it documented. In one of those letters, he refers to Jesus as being, quote, "Really and truly born of a virgin." I think that's kind of a wink to the fact that, yeah, yeah, yeah, this was not your typical birth.
Eric Huffman: What surprised you most through the process of investigating Christmas?
Lee Strobel: Well, there probably was no innkeeper and there probably was no inn.
Eric Huffman: Well, Lee Strobel, welcome to Maybe God. I'm so glad you're here.
Lee Strobel: Oh, I'm glad to be here. Good to be with you again.
Eric Huffman: Of course. Much like me in my past, you are a skeptic by nature. For many years, you worked as an investigative journalist, award-winning journalist in Chicago. And for a lot of that time, you were an atheist, outspoken atheist. What was your attitude about Christmas in particular back then?
Lee Strobel: You know, I love Christmas as an atheist. I mean, what's not to like? I mean, you got parties going on. You've got people giving you gifts, people seem friendlier, more upbeat. I just enjoyed it. What I didn't like was when people tried to tell me that it was anything more than just a recapitulation of pagan festivities. And they tried to tell me, "Oh no, this has historical significance." "Yeah, yeah, yeah, forget that." But what's not to like about the season itself?
Eric Huffman: Right. No, it's a party, right? I mean, it's one party after another.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, that's right.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. What was it specifically about the Christian Christmas story that gave you pause or, you know, sort of made you wonder as an atheist?
Lee Strobel: Well, you know, as a skeptic, I'm thinking, you know, this idea that there was a child born 2000 years ago on December 25th of all things, who redeemed the world and so forth, just seemed awfully far-fetched to me. Did I believe that Jesus existed? Yeah, maybe. Did I believe He was the son of God? No. And so I just kind of recoiled against people who did.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. On the surface, the Christmas story seems to have all the hallmarks of legend or myth.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Eric Huffman: And if you don't really know the substance of it, it's just easy to sort of count it as among the other ancient myths that, you know, are historically questionable to say the least. From the atheist perspective, especially.
In the beginning of your book, The Case for Christmas, you write about an experience that you had as a journalist in Chicago with an impoverished family that sort of opened your mind to begin a real pursuit of truth around Christmas. What was that experience like?
Lee Strobel: Yeah, it was 1974. I was a new reporter at the Chicago Tribune. I was assigned to do a 30-part series on the most impoverished families of Chicago. So each day I would profile a different family. So the first one I did was a woman named... her last name was Delgado. Perfecta Delgado. She was in her 60s. She had arthritis severely. She couldn't work. She was raising two grandchildren, a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old.
And they were absolutely without material possessions. I mean, they were as poor as you can find. They lived in a two-room hovel. There was nothing in there, no appliances, no furniture, no bed, no carpet on the floor, nothing whatsoever, except a rickety card table in the kitchen with one cup of rice.
The two girls had one short-sleeved dress each and one thin gray sweater between them. This is Chicago in November. They would walk the mile to school, and one would wear the sweater halfway to school and freeze along the way and then give it to her shivering sister who would then wear it the rest of the way. So these people had nothing.
And yet what struck me was there was no sense of victimization or anger or depression in their little home. I mean, they loved God, and they trusted God. And they trusted that God was going to take care of them. And it was just kind of an odd thing for me to encounter. I was kind of scratching my head over the faith they had.
Well, I actually put the address that they lived on West Homer Street in the article in the Tribune. It was published on Thanksgiving Day. On Christmas Eve, I'm working at the paper, and there was no news going on. So I got in a car, and I drove out to West Homer Street to visit them and see how they were doing.
Well, one of the granddaughters opens the door, and the house looks like Macy's. I mean, the Tribune readers had showered them. They had furniture, they had appliances, they had food just flowing out of the cabinets and the refrigerator. They had beds, they had rugs, they had pictures on the wall, they had a big Christmas tree with unopened presents underneath, thousands of dollars in cash that was sent to them.
But what shocked me was what interrupted me on this Christmas Eve was the grandchildren and Perfecta boxing up much of their newfound wealth to give it away. And I said, "What are you doing?" And they said, "Oh, well, we cannot have plenty while our neighbors have nothing. I mean, this is what Jesus would want us to do."
And I said, "Well, you know, do you appreciate what all these readers of the Tribune did?" And she said, "Oh yes, this is wonderful. This is a gift from God. We didn't deserve this. This is great." But she said, "That's not God's greatest gift." She said, "That comes tomorrow. That is Jesus."
And I just felt this contrast between them and me. They had hearts that were full of hope and joy and faith despite their poverty. I had everything I needed materially, and yet my heart was as barren as their apartment used to be. I mean, I was just kind of comparing myself to them and thinking, "Maybe they know something I don't know. Maybe they know Someone who I don't know." And so that just planted a seed in me. And I remember that for years, and it was just one of those eye-opening things.
And I think generally people are more spiritually open during the Christmas season. And I think that was just an example of someone like me, a skeptic, and yet being touched by the simple faith of these wonderful people.
Eric Huffman: It would have been really easy to kind of write that off as just another sort of example of Christians engaging in wishful thinking or something, but something about her spirit, her authenticity clearly struck you. You were Scrooge. I kept thinking about Dickens.
Lee Strobel: I didn't think of that, but you're right, I kind of was.
Eric Huffman: It reminds me of... some preacher said one time that some people will read the Bible, but most people will read the Christian and how important it is to have a really Christian outlook and worldview if we follow Jesus, because you never know who you might impact at any given time.
Hey, Maybe God family, Eric Huffman here. I just wanted to pop in and wish you a very Merry Christmas. If you're heading into this new year with big questions about God, faith, or the Bible, you're not alone. I hope you'll subscribe to Maybe God and be a part of this community that's not afraid to wrestle with your toughest questions and deepest doubts and to search for the truth together. We'd love to walk that journey with you. So thank you so much for subscribing. And now let's get back to my conversation with Eric Huffman.
Was that experience what sort of propelled you to want to study the actual story of Christmas? How did that unfold?
Lee Strobel: No. It was a seed that was planted, but it wasn't until a few years later, after my wife became a Christian, that I decided to take my journalism training and legal training and disprove Christianity so I could rescue her from this cult that she got involved in. I ended up spending two years of my life doing in-depth research into the historical evidence for the resurrection, especially, but also for Christmas and other aspects of the Christian faith. How did I know it was true? I looked at science and so forth until November 8th of 1981 when I realized in light of the avalanche of evidence that points so powerfully toward the truth of Christianity, it would have taken more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a Christian. I mean, the scales just tipped decisively. So I can't say that was decisively my encounter with the Delgados, but it was certainly a seed that God planted.
Eric Huffman: Sure. And I hope everyone that's watching or listening knows about your original bestselling Christian book, The Case for Christ. I mean, how many lives has that book changed? It changed mine in a way. It's one of the first books I read after my conversion.
Lee Strobel: That's awesome.
Eric Huffman: Because the real sort of line in the sand for Christians is the resurrection. The Bible says that if you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, not that He was born of a virgin. So the biggest issue for us is whether Jesus was raised from the dead.
And I remember even after coming to faith in the risen Christ, I still had questions about Christmas. It still sounded to me like ancient mythology, the whole virgin birth thing, December 25th. I had heard all of that being connected to other ancient myths. We'll get in the weeds more later about that. But after you became a Christian and started looking closer at Christmas, did you still have questions about the validity of the Christmas narrative?
Lee Strobel: Well, I wanted to establish how well it is documented. And so I looked at the four Gospels, for instance, and I noticed that only two of the Gospels really deal with the birth of Jesus in any explicit way. So we have Luke, who was writing from Mary's perspective, probably because Luke was a sort of first-century investigative reporter. That's why he's my favorite Gospel writer. And he may very well have interviewed Mary. He may very well have interviewed Joanna and Susanna, who he also quotes in his Gospel.
And then we have Matthew who writes from Joseph's perspective. And Matthew, of course, became a leader of the early church in Jerusalem. And guess who the other leader was? James, the half-brother of Jesus. So James apparently communicated directly to Matthew about the birth story, probably from the perspective of his father.
So we have these two different and yet complementary, they're not conflicting, but two different accounts that date back very, very early that deal historically with what happened. And you wonder, well, why didn't Mark say something about the birth story? Well, not every Gospel deals with every aspect of Jesus' life.
But what's interesting to me is in Mark 6:3, he refers to Jesus as Mary's son. Well, you wouldn't do that in first-century Jewish culture. It would always be the father's son. It would have been Joseph's son. Even if Joseph were already deceased at the time, you would always refer to the child as the father's son, not the mother's son. And yet he does.
And I think that's kind of a wink to the fact that, yeah, yeah, yeah, this was not your typical birth. And then John, of course, has this sweeping, beautiful theological opening to his Gospel. It talks about in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word came into our world and dwelled among us. I mean, that's the incarnation right there.
But what's also interesting is one of the disciples who was mentored by John was a guy named Ignatius. And in the year 108, Ignatius is being carried off to be executed in Rome, and he writes six letters. And in one of those letters, he refers to Jesus as being "really and truly born of a virgin".
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Lee Strobel: Well, where'd he get that idea? Probably from the guy who mentored him—John. So I think we've got good historical data that the birth of Jesus actually took place in circumstances that are described in the Gospels.
Eric Huffman: I've always thought of John as sort of Mary's perspective because of the event at the cross where Jesus said, "This is your son now" about John "and this is your mother" about Mary, and sort of gave them to each other as He breathed His last breaths. And I've always thought John's perspective is so different. Maybe that's Mary's influence.
But I think you're right that Luke, being the historian that he was, anybody that's read Luke or Acts knows how he sets out by saying, "I interviewed everyone I could, all these eyewitnesses. I did my homework." And of course, he would have interviewed Mary. She was still around after the crucifixion.
Lee Strobel: And or her friends. And he specifically mentions Joanna and Susanna. So he knew them. He was aware of them and they of course knew Mary. So he's getting good stuff, as a reporter would say.
Eric Huffman: I love that. I love that as a journalist you gravitate to Luke.
Lee Strobel: He's my favorite.
Eric Huffman: And he wasn't one of the disciples before, you know, and so that's the only way he would have known these people is by approaching them for journalism purposes to get his story straight.
Lee Strobel: That's right.
Eric Huffman: What surprised you most through the process of investigating Christmas? What stood out to you as compelling evidence?
Lee Strobel: Well, there's a lot of things that really strike me. One of them is that when you look carefully at the original Greek in which the New Testament was written, there's pretty strong evidence that the story that we typically hear at Christmas is probably not 100 percent accurate. The reason I say that is the typical story is that Mary and Joseph are compelled to go to Bethlehem because of the census. Joseph was of the house of David, had to return to Bethlehem the town of David, so that he could be counted.
The typical story is that she's giving birth as they arrive. They go to an inn or a lodge. The mean old innkeeper says, "Sorry, no room here," so they go off to a stable or a cave. They give birth among the animals and the baby is laid in the clean hay of a manger.
Well, there probably was no innkeeper and there probably was no inn. And the reason we suspect that is, first of all, Bethlehem was a small town. It was not on major crossroads. Did it have an inn or a lodge? Maybe, maybe not. We don't know.
Secondly, it would have been inconceivable in first-century Jewish culture for an innkeeper to turn away a pregnant Jewish woman. You could not have done that. You would have been ostracized by the community. You wouldn't run out of town on a rail if you did that. It would not be.
But the other thing to understand is the Greek word "kataluma" that's used to describe what happened, it says there was no room for them at the kataluma. That gets translated often as "inn", but actually, I think the best translation of it is as a guest room, as a room. And the reason I say that is Luke had a word, pandocheion, that he used when he wanted to describe an inn or a lodge, and he does it in the story of the Good Samaritan. So, he had a word that he would have used if he meant to indicate it was a lodge, but he didn't use that. He used kataluma.
And so you have to picture what a house looked like in that time in Bethlehem, a Jewish home. It was one big room that was broken into two parts. So, there's the larger area, that's the living area, that's where people would gather and have meals and sleep and so forth.And then there was a couple of steps down, and that was the animal area. And at night, they would bring in the animals into that area.
Now, the animals were like pets to them. They had, what, a couple of sheep, couple of goats. If you ever petted a baby goat, by the way, they're very cute. So they're like pets. And the floor of that area was slanted outward so they could clean it easily. And so they would bring the animals in at night. Well, sometimes the animals would come up the couple stairs into the living area. And as I say, they were like pets. So, they actually had mangers in the living area, these are little troughs for feeding with hay, and also in the animal area. But some of the wealthier homes had a kataluma, which is a guest room. It had a separate entrance and was a separate room.
And I think most scholars would say that what happened was Mary and Joseph were coming to town. They went to the home of a relative and said, "Hey, we're here for the census." And they said, "Oh, I'm sorry, there's no room in the kataluma (no room in the guest room). But here, you can stay in the living area." And so, Mary apparently had that birth of Jesus in the living area. Maybe some of the animals did come up the stairs out of curiosity. Maybe they were hanging around.
Eric Huffman: Well, there was a manger there, so there must have been some animals.
Lee Strobel: That's right. And there was a manger there where she apparently put the newborn child. And what's interesting is as early as... I was able to find, 1,395, I think it was, John Whitcliffe in his translation of the New Testament, used the word "guest room". Now, the King James Version used inn, and that sort of caught on. But even today, the New International Version, which is a very popular scholarly translation of the Bible, uses "guest room". They don't use "inn".
Eric Huffman: Well, and I think it's the case that Luke uses that same word kataluma again later in his gospel when he describes where they have the Last Supper. Jesus says, "Go and ask someone to use their kataluma, their upper room or guest room for the Last Supper." And so, yeah, it's a little bit confusing why... although I do understand the interpreters were doing the best they could with the King James. And they're like, "Why would they have been turned away from the guest room? It must have been an inn." You know, it's sort of an interpretive error.
Lee Strobel: It could be.
Eric Huffman: But boy, you start messing with the Christmas story-
Lee Strobel: I know.
Eric Huffman: ...and you're going to get some enemies, man. Did you have any hesitation about calling into question the inn and the innkeeper?
Lee Strobel: No, because I mean, I think it's clear where the evidence points. The funny thing was I was actually writing this book last Christmas Eve, and I had gone to church that Christmas Eve earlier, and the story they told had the innkeeper in it and everything. And I thought, "Oh, golly, I don't want to pull any roach off."
Eric Huffman: But you've got to have enough roles in the Christmas play for every kid to-
Lee Strobel: Yeah, that's true.
Eric Huffman: Man, you're messing with some deep lore, you know, and the Charlie Brown Christmas and everything is out the window now, thanks to Lee Strobel.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, exactly. Great. Great. That's what I want to be known for.
Eric Huffman: So no inn, no innkeeper. It sounds like no birth emergency when they arrived in Bethlehem.
Lee Strobel: No, that's the other thing. I mean, there was a book called The Proto-Evangelism of James that was written about AD 200. So this comes well after the actual events themselves. It's not actually tied to any historical figures like James. It's more of a book of fiction. And in that book, Mary and Joseph are approaching Bethlehem and they get three miles from Bethlehem and she had to have the baby. And so they went into a cave there and gave birth. That's where the idea of the cave came from. But it's not a historically reliable account. It just comes too far after the event.
Eric Huffman: So the idea that Jesus was born in a cave, that's probably not something most people have heard or ascribed to, but I've heard that theory. And frankly, when you go to the Holy Land and Bethlehem in particular and visit the site where Christians think Jesus was born, it does feel like a cave. You go way down in it. But part of that is just the topography and how it's changed over time.
But you're not saying that it wasn't in Bethlehem where we think it was, it's just it was a lower part of the house, right? That the rest of the house was built on top of that.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, or a separate part of the house with a separate entrance. The Bible says that the baby was born while they were in Bethlehem. It doesn't say while they were in Bethlehem, five minutes. Was this an urgent thing for arriving to town having the baby? It could have been there five days, five weeks. So we don't really know. Maybe it was an urgent situation. We don't know. But certainly the text does not demand that.
Eric Huffman: When I was a kid, I always pictured like Mary’s water breaking on the back of the donkey and like, it's just, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? It doesn't really read that way when you read the text. It just says while they were in Bethlehem, the time came for the baby to be born.
Lee Strobel: That's right.
Eric Huffman: What evidence do we have that Jesus was actually born in history at the time and place the Bible says He was?
Lee Strobel: Well, you know, the time and place is very interesting. The time, we don't know. We don't know when Jesus was born. The Bible doesn't tell us the date that Jesus was born. The reason was early Christians didn't care about birthdays. They didn't celebrate birthdays. In fact, we have some letters written by Christian leaders making fun of the Romans because the Romans celebrate birthdays. You know, why would you do that?
Now the Christians would celebrate the death of martyrs that day. That's different. But they didn't care about birthdays. Later people began asking, "Well, when was Jesus born? What was the date that He was born?" What's very interesting is in about 200 AD, Tertullian, who was an early church leader, tried to calculate the date that Jesus died. And the reason was there was a strong connection in early Christianity between creation and redemption.
And there was a belief that Jesus would have been born or would have been conceived rather on the same day that He died. In other words, the same day of the year that He died. There's a strong connection, creation, and redemption. And so Tertullian, about 200, calculated that based on the Roman calendar that Jesus died on March 25th. Well, that would mean He would have been conceived on March 25th. And indeed, we have a writing by sexist Julius Africanus, who was an early church historian about the same time saying Jesus was conceived on March 25th. How would he know?
Eric Huffman: He wasn't there.
Lee Strobel: He wasn't there. How would he know?
Eric Huffman: Not even Joseph was there.
Lee Strobel: That's right. That's right. Good point. So they're saying it had to be the same date as His death. Well, if He died on March 25th and was conceived on March 25th, just fast forward nine months of gestation, and that gives us December 25th as being the date of His birth.
Eric Huffman: So some reverse engineering there on the-
Lee Strobel: Some reverse engineering. Now that does take place in the winter solstice area. And there were a lot of pagan festivals that took place back then. I think there's some indications that Christians said, "Hey, basically, look, why don't we have a counterpoint to the debauchery of these pagan festivals?" It was all this drunkenness and sexual immorality that took place. "Why don't we have a counterpoint to that, and we'll observe the birthday of Jesus as Tertullian estimated, December 25th?" There may be that connection as well. We don't know.
Eric Huffman: Interesting. It seems like every Christmas season, every year, there's no shortage of conspiracy theories and things being ranted about on TikTok and X about how Christmas is actually a pagan holiday because of the winter solstice and other kinds of traditions that have emerged. What do you say to all those, I guess they're criticisms, they're intended to be criticisms of the Christian narrative that it's actually just a copy of older mystery religions?
Lee Strobel: This was popularized by... remember the Da Vinci Code?
Eric Huffman: Yeah, of course. That was a huge movie, huge book. And he said, "Oh, Christianity is a copycat religion. They plagiarized this idea of the virgin birth from earlier mythology." And the example he used is a common one use of Mithras. Mithras was a mythological pagan deity who the ancient myths was born, according to Da Vinci Code, was born of a virgin on December 25th. He had 12 disciples. He died for world peace and he was resurrected from the dead. And so the implication is, well, Christianity just stole all those ideas and copycatted them in the story of Jesus.
Well, when you research the actual history, you find that's just not true. You find out that the myth of Mithras, number one, he was not born of a virgin. In the myth, he emerged fully grown naked out of a rock wearing a hat. Now, unless you consider the rock to be a virgin, there was no virgin birth in the case of Mithras.
Secondly, was he born on December 25th? Well, yeah, but who cares? We don't know the date that Jesus was born for sure. That was winter solstice. And so yeah, December 25th, fine. Did he have 12 disciples? No. According to one version, he had one disciple. According to another version, he had two disciples. Did he die for world peace? No. He was known for killing a bull. Was he resurrected? No. We don't have any account in the mythology of Mithras about how he died and therefore no account about any sort of resurrection.
So all of this just dissipates when it's researched. And that was true when you look at all these other claims about virgin births. You look at the claim that Alexander the Great was born of a virgin. His own mother, Olympias, denied it. She said, "That's not true."
Eric Huffman: It's a funny thing to deny.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Eric Huffman: And there were others, right? I mean, Krishna was said to have been born of a virgin, son of a carpenter, I think, Osiris, Attis, other kinds of ancient mythological figures. I remember buying into all this hook, line, and sinker when I was a skeptic, because I wanted Christianity to be false.
Lee Strobel: Dionysus was another one, the god of fertility and wine. And the story there. when you research it, you find Zeus, the imaginary king of the gods, supposedly, according to the story, he impregnated a princess. Zeus's queen got mad about it. So she burned the fetus to a crisp, but Zeus rescues the fetus and sews the fetus into his thigh until his birth. So this is not a virgin birth in any sense.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. What I found when I looked closer into it is that the whole pagan copycat myth theory falls apart when you really research all these ancient mythologies, because none of them said the things about their mythological figures, Dionysus, Attis, Osiris, et, until after Christianity arose and became a force in the world. At that point, you see the narratives around these mythological figures changing to mirror Jesus. So there was a copycat phenomenon. It's just we've gotten it reversed.
Lee Strobel: That's exactly right.
Eric Huffman: They started copying Jesus.
Lee Strobel: That's right. Even Mithras didn't flourish as a myth until after Jesus. Zoroaster was said to have been conceived after his mother drank a sacred drink. Well, Zoroaster, that story preceded Christianity, but the story about the sacred drink and the so-called virgin conception that way comes 900 years after Jesus. So if any borrowing is going on, it's going on, as you say, in the reverse.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. At least insofar as the substantive elements of the Christmas story. I think it's fair to say there has been borrowing. You mentioned the winter solstice holiday and things like that. Christians make no bones about the fact that we've sort of co-opted certain traditions and made them ours in certain ways, whether that's the date or some of the elements of our holiday festivities.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, Christmas tree.
Eric Huffman: Do you think that's a knock against the Christian narrative at Christmas?
Lee Strobel: No. A couple of reasons why. People say, oh, the Christmas tree has pagan roots and so forth. By the way, Jeremiah in his writings specifically forbade the idea of Christmas tree, any tree like that. No, no, no. You go back, and you read it, and what he was rebelling against were craftsmen in that day were taking trees and carving idols out of them and hanging gold and silver things on them and worshiping these trees. So he's saying, "Why would you worship a dead tree as opposed to the living God?" And so we're not worshiping a Christmas tree.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. You think it's sort of harmless symbolism?
Lee Strobel: I think it is, especially when you... I'll often say to someone who says, well, you know, there were some pagan things with trees and people hanging things on them. I say, well, wait a minute. What is the first month of the year? Well, it's January. Oh, well, are you using the pagan name of Janus, this mythological God? That's who January was named after. So every time you use the word January, are you honoring the pagan God of Janus? No, we're not.
Eric Huffman: Of course not.
Lee Strobel: Things often go back to questionable roots. But obviously God knows our heart. God knows our intent.
Eric Huffman: Along those lines, do you think Christian parents should teach their kids about Santa Claus and all that sort of mythology stuff, or?
Lee Strobel: Well, it's kind of hard to ignore it, isn't it, I mean, in our culture. But I think it's a great opportunity to seize. In other words, to be able to say, you know, Santa Claus is really based on a real person.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, an awesome, awesome person.
Lee Strobel: Awesome person, awesome person. Saint Nicholas was born in 270 AD and became Bishop in Myra in the coastal Turkey, and was a man of incredible generosity.
Eric Huffman: Oh, slapped a guy too once, I think.
Lee Strobel: Well, that's probably apocryphal, but he did-
Eric Huffman: I like it.
Lee Strobel: I know. He did go to the Council of Nicaea. He did argue against heresy. There is a tradition that he slapped Arius, the heretic, but that's probably not accurate.
Eric Huffman: I'm gonna hang onto that one, Lee, I like it too much.
Lee Strobel: He certainly slapped him down verbally and so forth. By the way, he was imprisoned for his faith. He was tortured for his faith. This was a great man of conviction and faith. I think sometimes we can take the idea of Santa Claus and say, you know, it's based on something real.
Eric Huffman: It's a teaching opportunity.
Lee Strobel: And you know, when he died, he was martyred in, I think, 343 on December 19th. He's martyred. In early years, centuries ago, people would give gifts on the date of his martyrdom, on December 19th, because he was such a generous individual and known for his gift-giving. It was Martin Luther who actually moved that, to coincide that gift-giving tradition, who actually moved it to coincide with Christmas.
Eric Huffman: Interesting.
Lee Strobel: It's kind of where we get the idea of giving gifts at Christmas.
Eric Huffman: I didn't know the origin of that. That's awesome.
Lee Strobel: Isn't that interesting? And of course, the Dutch are the ones who really kind of created this idea of Santa Claus. I call him Sinterklaas. That was transmitted in the 1700s to the colonies in America. But the funniest thing to me is the current way we think of Santa Claus, you know, with this red suit and the big white beard and the belly, like a bowl full of jelly and all that stuff, actually originated in the 1930s during a campaign at Christmas by Coca-Cola.
Eric Huffman: Really?
Lee Strobel: Yes. It was all these print ads that Coca-Cola came up with with Santa Claus, and they drew him this way. And that was really the first time that all of these images of Santa Claus came together. So we can thank the Coca-Cola company for giving us the image of what Santa Claus is supposed to look like.
Eric Huffman: Santa Claus brought to you by capitalism worldwide.
Lee Strobel: That's right.
Eric Huffman: It's very new, that idea. 1930s, it's not that long ago, you know?
Lee Strobel: Yeah, it evolved over the years. During the 1800s, there were some poems about Santa Claus and even Santa Claus's wife and so forth. So it kind of was coming together slowly, but they're the ones that really put it together visually in the print ads back then.
Eric Huffman: Where did the 12 days of Christmas come from? Did you explore that at all in your studies?
Lee Strobel: I didn't really look at that.
Eric Huffman: I'm just curious. That's been another sort of mystery for me.
Lee Strobel: But the Magi are interesting. I mean, one of the most interesting about the Magi, they're not explained very thoroughly in scripture. We're not quite sure of a lot of the details. We do believe they were astrologers, maybe even mediums of a Far Eastern culture at the time. They studied the stars and so forth.
They came to worship the newborn Jesus, they gave Him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. By the way, the myrrh was used in embalming in those days and may have been a foreshadowing of His redemptive death on the cross. But I read one theologian who said the real significance of the Magi coming to worship Jesus is that in Jewish culture of the day, the belief was that the Messiah would be a political Messiah. He would rescue the Jewish people from their oppression, He would overthrow the government of Rome, and the Jewish people would rise to prominence and rule over the world.
And yet the Magi coming to worship Jesus said, no, no, no, He is the God of everyone. Even the Gentiles coming to worship Him. And it expanded the vision of who the Messiah is to include the entire world, to include even these pagan Magi-
Eric Huffman: Astrologers.
Lee Strobel: ...astrologers, who came to worship Him. I think that's an interesting way of looking at it.
Eric Huffman: I love that story, the wise men. You know, there's a lot that we get wrong about that story in our modern day lore. And I'm not much of a legalist when it comes to some of the Christmas stuff, but on that front, I am. And I tell my church to get their wise men out of their nativity scenes. We're not going to be singing We Three Kings of Orient are because everything about that song is wrong. You know, we don't know how many there were. We certainly don't have any indication they were Kings. I'm not even sure.
Lee Strobel: They may have been emissaries of Kings.
Eric Huffman: Sure. Yeah.
Lee Strobel: That is possible.
Eric Huffman: Right. And then the Orient thing, I think we're not allowed to say that anymore.
Lee Strobel: Far East.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot wrong about it. But I love the fact that God speaks to them in their language of understanding. Through the stars he brought them to Bethlehem. Just an indication of God's wide-reaching mercy and how he can reach whoever He wants on whatever terms He wants and bring them to Christ.
Let's get back to the meat of Christmas now. I'd like us to really explore briefly the historical evidence, maybe outside even just Matthew and Luke's gospels, because that's all we have really in the gospel record. What else can we point to and say, yeah, Jesus was really born... He was a person, you know, in history, born about that time. Are there other early attestations that point to his miraculous birth?
Lee Strobel: Well, there was an excellent book written a number of years ago. It was actually renamed a few years ago, written by Dr. Gary Habermas, who's an historian and philosopher and probably the world's leading expert on the resurrection of Jesus. He did a book, it was later renamed... I'm trying to think of a new name of it. What was it called? It's all gone.
Eric Huffman: I'm looking. I looked up Gary Habermas' Christmas books, and it just says On the Resurrection. That's clearly what he spent most of his life on.
Lee Strobel: He did a book, and in this book examines 110 sources, ancient sources for the birth, life, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus. I remember the name now. It's The Historical Jesus. There's a number of books by that title, but this is the one by Dr. Gary Habermas. So he documents 110 sources from inside ancient culture, from people who may or may not have any connection with Christianity and yet who document things involving the life, teachings, miracles, death, and Jesus.
So we do have a lot of historical attestation for who He is. In fact, there was a new book that just came out. I haven't read it yet. I just got it. It's a scholarly book by a scholar who documents a Josephus, who of course lived in the first century. He was a Jewish historian, but he wrote for the Romans. He was captured by the Romans. He wrote for the Romans. And he has two references in his writings that mentioned Jesus, one of which is more elaborate than the other. The claim by skeptics has been, oh, that elaborate one, that was just an interpolation. That was added later by others. No, there's good evidence that was part of the original.
But this new book looks at evidence that apparently Josephus had some connection with people who had firsthand knowledge of what happened to Jesus. This historian has supposedly documented this. So that's very, very interesting.
Eric Huffman: It is. How early on were people, Christians, gravitating to Bethlehem to sort of honor Jesus and the birthplace of Jesus? Do you have any idea?
Lee Strobel: Well, real early. I mean, you think of King Herod, when he called in his spiritual leaders and said, "Hey, where's this Messiah supposed to be born?" They didn't hesitate. They knew Bethlehem. Why? Because Micah 5:2 says that this would be the place that the Messiah would be born. So the ancient prediction and prophecy in the Old Testament delineated Bethlehem as being the birthplace. And so there was an anticipation that something was going to happen there.
Eric Huffman: And I think in the first or second century, you have evidence of people making pilgrimages to Bethlehem to pay homage to Jesus and to Mary. I'd like to talk about Mary before we run out of time because the virgin birth and Mary's role in the salvation story of Christianity obviously is central to the Christian narrative.
Lee Strobel: Absolutely.
Eric Huffman: And Christians disagree. Protestant, Catholic, you know, whatever. We all have our different takes on Mary. But how important to the gospel is the virgin birth?
Lee Strobel: It's huge. By the way, I love Mary. I think Protestants sometimes, because of their belief that Roman Catholics put too much emphasis on Mary, sometimes I think Protestants back off a little bit. How wonderful is it that of all the creatures in the world, God would choose this teenage girl to give birth to Jesus? I mean, what must she have been like?
Interestingly, too, the Pope, Leo, just recently endorsed a paper from the Vatican that kind of throttled back on some of the Catholic teachings about Mary.
Eric Huffman: Really?
Lee Strobel: And he said, she is not co-redemptorist. In other words, she plays no role in redemption.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Lee Strobel: There were some Catholics that were taking it a little too far and saying that she played a role. So this document that just came out within the last month says, let's throttle that back a bit. I think that's interesting.
Eric Huffman: It is. But why is the virgin birth so important to Jesus's identity?
Lee Strobel: Because He is fully God and fully man. And so there had to be human involvement in His birth as well as this divine incarnation. Why is it important, the virgin birth? Because it allowed Him to be born without original sin or a corrupt moral nature.
How did that happen? Well, it's interesting what Luke says in Luke 1:35. He says, "The angel answered Mary, 'The Holy Spirit will come on you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you, so that...'" in other words, the consequence of that is that the Holy One would be called the Son of God. The Holy One, the one without sin. You have to be truly holy, you have to be without sin.
So somehow Luke is communicating that this incarnation, the conception of a virgin by the Holy Spirit obviates the otherwise possibility that He was gonna be born with a corrupt moral nature. So it dealt with that issue.
Eric Huffman: Interesting.
Lee Strobel: That's why it's important. I think also the prophecy about the virginity of the mother of Jesus, the Messiah, is interesting too. Comes 700 years in Isaiah where there's this prophecy that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. And critics would say, no, no, no, that's not true. The Hebrew word that Isaiah uses, Alma, just means a young maiden. And if he had intended to mean virgin, he would have used bethulah, which is another Hebrew word. So he wasn't really saying that this would be a virgin birth. Well, no, it's true that there was no single word in the Jewish language of that day that indicated virgin. But in that culture, Alma, a young maiden, was presumed to be a virgin.
Eric Huffman: For sure.
Lee Strobel: And bethulah sometimes could refer to a widow. Well, a widow's not gonna be a virgin. So that would not be the word that would be used. Certainly, when the Hebrew writings were being translated for the first time in the Septuagint into the Greek, in reading it back then, and this is before the birth of Jesus, they used the Greek word that meant virgin. That was their understanding of what Isaiah said.
And besides that prophecy comes in a nest of prophecies in Isaiah. In Isaiah 7 you have the virgin birth prophecy. In Isaiah 9 you have the Messiah born and being declared mighty God. In Isaiah 11 He is ruling under the power of the Holy Spirit. And yes, there's a double fulfillment of that prophecy, because people will say, oh, that wasn't intended to talk about the Messiah. It's a prophecy about King Ahaz. King Ahaz lived back then, and the prophecy was, oh, well, a maiden's gonna give birth. And by the time that little kid is old enough to know right from wrong, King Ahaz's problems are gonna be solved. That's a misreading of the prophecy, because, first of all-
Eric Huffman: Falls way short.
Lee Strobel: What's that?
Eric Huffman: I said it falls way short of the actual prophecy.
Lee Strobel: It falls way short, exactly. Because first of all, King Ahaz is very important in terms of the Messiah, because he was from the house of David. Had he been killed, as people were trying to kill him at the time, it would have ended the line of David, because he was from the line of David, from the house of David. If the line had ended with King Ahaz, then the prophecies about the Messiah being born of the house of David would not be fulfilled. So he had a key role here.
Secondly, the first part of the prophecy in Isaiah chapter 7 is about the coming of the Messiah. But then there's a transition in the Hebrew that doesn't even get translated generally into English. And it becomes a prophecy also for Ahaz. And yes, it says by the time this child is old enough to know right from wrong, King Ahaz, your problems are going to be solved. But who is that child? Is that the one that the virgin or the young maiden gave birth to? No.
Earlier, we see that God told Isaiah, hey, when you talk to King Ahaz, bring your son with you. So Isaiah brought his own son. And he's talking to Ahaz here. And he says, by the way, Ahaz, by the time this lad, referring to Isaiah's son, by the time my son gets to be old enough to know right from wrong, all your problems are going to be solved. Don't worry about it. And indeed that prophecy did come true back in those days. But that doesn't obviate the significance of the prophecy earlier in Isaiah there, Isaiah 7:14, that talks about the Messiah and the coming of the Messiah from a virgin.
Eric Huffman: That's super fascinating about it. When I was a skeptic and I was angry at Christians about everything, I just sort of conflated the virgin birth narrative with the purity culture narrative that I was raised in. I thought that lifting up Mary's virginity was another way for Christians to try and control women's bodies and make it about chastity and purity, especially for young women, and how important it is to be virginal and pure and all that. I think that is actually a pretty common interpretation of the virgin birth.
Lee Strobel: Really?
Eric Huffman: I think a lot of people sort of feel like Christians lift up female virginity and put it on a pedestal in a way that we don't for men. And we connect it to the holiness of Mary or the goodness of Mary.
Lee Strobel: That's sort of a Gnostic idea because the Gnostics really talked about the physical body a lot and sex would be like a dirty thing. Not in the context of a marriage.
Eric Huffman: Right, sure.
Lee Strobel: And it seems like that may have come from those kind of Gnostic beliefs that, oh no, he would have been born from a virgin.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, that's absolutely true. But I do think I'd be remiss if I didn't say there's probably some elements of that in the Christian tradition over the years, some bleeding in of that Gnostic idea that sex is dirty, sex is bad. And maybe that had something to do with the idea of the perpetual virginity of Mary that you hear in Catholic circles. I don't mean to throw Catholicism under the bus, but I do wonder if they've taken Mary a little far sometimes. But I don't think Protestants lift her up high enough. And so we're both... we're all have sinned, right, and fall short.
Lee Strobel: That's right.
Eric Huffman: But yeah, I do find your arguments compelling about Mary's virginity and the importance of it being the cutting off of the human condition of sinfulness. Every man is sinful until this one was born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. And that's why we can trust Him as being unique, God among us.
I used to say, well, you don't have to believe in the virgin birth to be a Christian. I still think on one level, the Bible is pretty clear, profess with your mouth that Jesus is the Lord, believe in your heart, God raised Him from the dead. But it's really hard to get to that profession of faith without understanding the nature of Jesus being born of a virgin by the Holy Spirit.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, I agree.
Eric Huffman: I'm starting to preach now, but...
Lee Strobel: It's Christmas, that's okay.
Eric Huffman: What do you think about the idea of the immaculate conception and sort of adding on to the biblical record about Mary and, you know, again, with in Catholic tradition, the idea that Mary herself was born of a virgin? Where does all that come from?
Lee Strobel: Right. When people say the immaculate conception, they think you're referring to the birth of Jesus. No, immaculate conception refers to Mary, the conception of Mary, that she was conceived without sin and she was a perpetual virgin. I just say, you know, there's a problem with that because how did that happen? Was her mother without sin? How far back do you go?
Eric Huffman: Yeah, what about her grandma and great grandma?
Lee Strobel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a problem.
Eric Huffman: And there's nothing biblical-
Lee Strobel: It's not biblical. I mean, to me, you have to base your convictions on something you can have solid trust in. I have solid trust in the teachings of the scripture. Some people go out of that and look at church tradition and things like that to find other groundings for theology. I just think I've not found anything as reliable as Holy Scripture. And so to me, that's my guide. And I don't see anything in there about the immaculate conception of Mary.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, me either. Well-
Lee Strobel: Or her perpetual virginity.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, for sure. There's the other siblings mentioned.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, siblings. They try to get around that by saying those are uncles or-
Eric Huffman: Or Joseph's kids before. You know, in a lot of Catholic art, you'll see an older Joseph, much older and a younger Mary. And the idea is that he just took her into his home out of charity in his heart, but never had relations with her again. That's just sort of, in my opinion, adding on to the biblical story unnecessarily in a lot of cases. In my opinion. I don't want to lose our Catholic viewers.
Lee Strobel: No, no. I would reiterate what you said earlier. I think we, as Protestants, often kind of disregard Mary. We don't give her the honor that she deserves. We honor the saints, we honor Paul and Peter and John and all these wonderful, wonderful individuals. And I'm thinking, man, when I get to heaven, I want to meet Mary. I want to sit at the feet of Mary and say, "Tell me all about what it was like."
Eric Huffman: I remember you alluded to this in the book as well, but I'd heard it before. Larry King, the old CNN interviewer, legendary interviewer. If you're young, you have no idea who Larry King was, but he was a legend. Somebody asked him if he could interview one person in history, who would it be? And he'd said, Mary. Because he would ask her if Jesus was born of a virgin.
Lee Strobel: And he said that would change everything.
Eric Huffman: That would change everything. I used to kind of roll my eyes at that idea, but I think he was right.
Lee Strobel: He might've been, because if that is true, if he was born of a virgin truly, then you can believe the rest of the things about him. You know, that really opens up the possibility that, oh, and he was resurrected. So yeah, that would change everything in many ways.
Eric Huffman: Wow. Well, Lee, you've written a powerful book and revised it recently. The original version was 2005, I think.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, something like that.
Eric Huffman: Case for Christmas. And you've added some revisions. What exactly did you find between 2005 and now that you added in or included in the book?
Lee Strobel: Well, there's, yeah, it's about 90% new. A lot of original research. There's been some new findings. I'll give you one example. One of the things that critics would raise is, oh, Luke was wrong. You know, they love to try to find errors in Luke, which they haven't been able to do.
But they will say, oh, Luke was wrong because Luke says that the census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And they said, well, that's clearly not right because Quirinius didn't become governor until 6 AD. And yet Luke also says that King Herod was alive when Jesus was born. Well, he died in 4 BC. So you got a 10-year gap there. "So, you know, there you go. Luke's wrong. You can't trust him."
There's been some new discoveries in recent years. One explanation that's been used for many years is that maybe the Greek is mistranslated there. It should be translated, this census took place before Quirinius was governor of Syria. And you can translate it that way. And that kind of takes care of the problem.
But there's some research done recently that finds that Justin Martyr, who was a very early Christian apologist, he called Quirinius the procurator in Judea at the time of the census. A procurator is someone who would have been involved in a census under the direction of a governor.
And the Greek word that is used by Luke for governor there is not the typical word that's used for governor. It's kind of an elastic word. It could mean procurator. So the theory now for among many scholars is that there were two censuses. Yes, there was one in 6 AD when Quirinius became governor. That's the famous census because it was a Jewish rebellion at the time and it got written about and other historians would write about it as well. But there was another census when Quirinius was procurator and running the census before he was governor. There were no protests for that census. There was no rebellion. And so other historians don't write about it because these kinds of things happen all the time.
There were two censuses. The first one when Quirinius was procurator and ran the census. Later, he was elevated to governor. And that's a census that everybody remembers.
Eric Huffman: Interesting.
Lee Strobel: So Luke specifies this was the first census that took place.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, one day people are gonna learn to stop messing with Luke because that dude had it.
Lee Strobel: I know.
Eric Huffman: He was an immaculate historian.
Lee Strobel: He was an amazing historian.
Eric Huffman: He really was, especially given the limitations of when he lived.
Lee Strobel: Oh my gosh. He didn't have AI.
Eric Huffman: Oh my goodness. And all the locations he identified and the people.
Lee Strobel: Unbelievable.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, just incredible. When you've made this book available on Amazon, if I'm correct, $4.99 on Amazon Pro.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, you can find it online at Mardel bookstore for $2.50, I think.
Eric Huffman: What a bargain.
Lee Strobel: We tried to keep it very inexpensive so that people could use it as a spiritual stocking stuffer.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, of course.
Lee Strobel: Give it away to people. I was at the dentist yesterday and I also had my annual physical yesterday. Well, I took, I personally bought copies. I bought 300 copies of this book personally. My goal is to give them away to people this holiday. So I gave some to the receptionist at the doctor's office. I gave it to the doctor. I gave it to the dentist. I gave it to the dental hygienist and the receptionist there. I give it to waiters at lunch and servers at lunch. I give them to flight attendants. I give them to hotel clerks. Because the gospel is in it and people are open spiritually this time of the year.
So that's why we kept the price low to say, hey, is something you could buy? In fact, there's some things you can go to and you can get like five copies for 15 bucks. That's three bucks each. And just give them away. I gave them away, no kidding, at Halloween this year. When trick-or-treaters would come, I'd say, okay, here's some candy for you, but this is for your parents. And it's one kid-
Eric Huffman: I bet those kids love getting a book for Halloween.
Lee Strobel: Well, the funny thing is this one kid, he was like 14 years old. I said, "This is for your parents." He looked at me, he was fascinated. He said, "No. I said, I'm going to read this. This looks interesting."
Eric Huffman: Awesome. I think the point that you made is clear that the gospel is in this book and it is, I can attest to that. But more importantly, at this time of year is that hearts are open.
Lee Strobel: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: And more so than any other time of year, probably on average.
Lee Strobel: Yes, I agree.
Eric Huffman: The heart is soft and receptive to some hope and some truth. This book would be a great way to penetrate someone's heart and really open them up to the truth of the gospel. Lee, I'm so grateful that you wrote this book and revised it and made it available.
Lee Strobel: Thanks.
Eric Huffman: I think many people are going to be touched by it. I hope everybody watching here checks it out and let us know what you think about the interview or the book in the comment section. I'm sure Lee would love to hear from you as well. Can't say thank you enough, Lee.
Lee Strobel: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
Eric Huffman: God bless you. Hope to have you back on Maybe God sometime, and Merry Christmas.
Lee Strobel: Yeah, Merry Christmas to you.
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