Some years ago, the BBC chose Christmas time to create a documentary arguing that Jesus was the result of Mary being raped. They did not bother to clarify the sources and only did so when responding to my indignant letter of complaint that, at the one time of year our faith takes centre stage, they felt it appropriate to question some of the most fundamental areas of belief for us – that Jesus, born in human flesh in the brutal and humiliating setting of a lowly stable, was the son of God, born to Mary as a miraculous intervention by almighty God above, beyond and outside of the norms of nature.
The BBC argued to me that, if Jesus were the son of a Roman soldier, or indeed the son of St Joseph, it didn’t necessarily alter his fully divine nature. Except, of course, that it would have, for as St John’s Gospel reminds us during the Christmas lectionary, he came about through the will of God, not the will of the flesh.
Fast forward over a decade, and it’s not the BBC airing such insensitive nonsense, but a man of the cloth: Rev. DR. Giles Fraser, who wrote a robust attack on the virgin birth narrative in his Guardian column this Christmas.
