As previously established, I love Christmas. I think HNAC Alison would too. However, I’m pretty sure HNAC Alison would take issue with the whole historicity of The Bible and this would stop her considering any of the claims of The Bible when it comes to the birth of Christ.

I’m no historian, and what follows in this post and tomorrow’s is not being presented as rock-solid confirmation by any stretch of the imagination. I’d just like to show you a something that has always amazed me about Christmas.

This being the fact that it fits together so perfectly.

Start with the book of Isaiah, written approximately 700 years before the birth of the Christ child:

Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali but in the future he will honour Galilee of the Gentiles, by the way of the sea, along the Jordan.

Not too many sentences later, a context for these lines is given:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given…He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom.

So you’ve got three main things in those lines:

• A baby boy will be born
• Galilee is going to be an important place
• The baby is going to be a King in the family line of David

If you’ve got a Bible and flip back a page at this point, you come across God himself declaring the following:

The Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel.

Approximately the same time as Isaiah was working as a prophet among the Jews, there was another guy called Micah doing the same thing. He wrote the following:

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.

I “love” when my students submit assignments and as I’m reading them through I come across passages that are word for word the same for two different students. “All my own work”? I don’t think so.

When it comes to Isaiah and Micah, they obviously didn’t get their notes for the assignment from the same website.

And this is the part I like. The fact that they contradict each other.

It looks like a total stuff up.

In the spirit of prophecy (and the spirit of blog posts of approximately 500 words) I’m going to leave you with the tension of the apparent error in the text for twenty-four hours.

It’ll all make sense in time.

Just like prophecy.

Yours in doubts,

Alison