Bruce Gardner
A Christmas message

Mistaken, pious souls may shelve Bible problems, eager not to 'offend Heaven' with cheeky speculations. However, if we take the trouble to read the Old Testament, we find Abraham, David, Job, Jeremiah and other heroes bending God's ear with queries and complaints. By His response, they got insights that silent piety would have kept from them. Unlike some of our Scottish bureaucrats, God loves passionate enquirers.
     For example, it is not rocket science to observe that a nine-months-pregnant woman would not have found a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem easy. One commentator notes the journey was 70 miles, as the crow flies, but Galilean Jews regarded the land between them and their cousins in Jerusalem as territory infested with Samaritan heretics. They did not choose, as a rule, to go directly south that way: they preferred to travel east to the Jordan River, cross to the Syrian side, then south to Jericho, where they re-crossed the river and then went up 15 miles or so to Jerusalem and, in this case, another six to Bethlehem. (This background made the tale of a Good Samaritan on that road, helping a man who fell among thieves, richly ironic.) Also, however, it takes no mathematical genius to see that this detour made the journey longer by 50 miles. Such a gruelling journey by a pregnant Mary on a donkey seems unthinkable.
     How then? One little clue may be suggested by a detail in Luke 24:41-42, where the risen Jesus wants to prove to his disciples that He is not a ghost: He eats broiled fish. This harmless little fact opens a door of possibility for the 21st-century reader.
     John Wenham, a scholar who once lived in Jerusalem, wrote an amazing book, 'The Easter Enigma'. It is a reconstruction of the resurrection stories, in which he offers us one harmonic story of the varied evidence. He does not insist that his harmonisation is correct: he simply shows that a reconciliation of apparently contradictory accounts is possible. One spin-off from Wenham's exhaustively prepared book, with its detailed, even timed observations on the ground, is that he argues that there was a business link between the fishermen of Galilee and their major outlet in the capital city, particularly the family of John Mark, in whose Upper Room the Last Supper was held.
     A few fish still swim down the Jordan before dying in the Dead Sea, but if the Galilean fish trade was involved, fish was transported, either salted or fresh (somehow), from Galilee to Jerusalem. Over such a long journey, with such a cargo, it may well be asked: with a river to one's right, as one travelled the length of the Jordan to Jericho, would one opt for the road or a shallow-bottomed boat? If a boat or barge were to carry fresh fish in containers, or packed salted fish, could a pregnant girl not gain a place on it too? The journey would have been halved in effect if Joseph walked or rode on a donkey, while Mary floated safely on a barge. To protect perishable fish-cargo, too, a shelter would have been hung over it. Faith must find archaeologists to help study this possibility.
     It was faith that drove Wenham to challenge the conventional belief that resurrection accounts are incapable of harmonisation: faith drives research into Biblical data. At the end of the day, faith is not credulity: it looks into possibilities that might interpret the available evidence. Faith has a sincere thirst to know: this makes faith no barrier, but rather a stimulus, to further research. Rather than ask no questions in false piety (for we are creatures born to discover our World), we ask, believing that an answer may be found and that honest research could be rewarded with new discoveries. This is the thinking faith of Scotland, which made us such a creative force in the world. It may be that one speculation will lead nowhere; yet we have a right to think it through. Another line of enquiry may empower discovery: we may even create something new.
     The Christmas message of God's fearless love, with 2010's possibilities, encourages us to revive a distinctive, historic ethic: to ask because, under God, we have a right, like the wise men who quested across the known world to get answers to questions.
     Thinking Scots, born of a faith heritage, cannot be deterred into yielding up their right to know, or into not bothering their pretty heads about salaries of public servants, the transparency of quangos, or the inner workings and cost of Scotland's Whitehall. We might even ask ourselves, with the courage and honesty of a free people under God, who are finally answerable to God alone, if our Christian faith could set us free again.
     May this Christmas bring blessed freedom to ask your own, far-reaching questions.