In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. One of the questions, of course, which is asked about Saint Luke's gospel and it is Saint Luke who has the best narrative for the what we call the infancy stories. They say, well, how did he know? He wasn't there when all this took place. Well, of course, one of the easy answers say, well, of course, when he he took his pen in hand, God guided him and gave him all this information.
Well, that's possible, but I don't think any sane person today is inclined to to take that absolutist attitude. The hand of God isn't to be neglected or or or forgotten in these matters, but we don't have to bring in any such phenomenon as that. Notice what Luke says here. I repeat those words. He says, remember, this is an astounding thing.
Keep this in mind. And here you have a man of prominence. Zachariah was a well known character. This is all around Jerusalem. This isn't up in the lake country with a bunch of of ignorant fishermen, of of people whose names nobody knows, a bunch of anonymous people.
You're talking about Zachariah here, who was a well known personage, who was up in years. You're talking about his wife, who was up in years, and everybody knew that she was sterile. And lo and behold, you hear she produces a baby under very curious circumstances. Recall the instance of of when Zachariah goes in, just the routine thing, goes into the temple to offer the the incense and the prayers, and he's delayed. He doesn't come out.
And when he comes out, he can't speak. And now, lo and behold, as soon as he writes the kid's name is going to be John. Soon as he writes it, out comes speech. Now you're these were prominent people. Meanwhile, you have a visit from way up in the North from Nazareth, you have Elizabeth's cousin, a little girl up there named Mary.
She comes down here, and there's something very odd going on with her. She's a virgin and just pregnant under very phenomenal circumstances. Whatever they be, they were phenomenal. There that's not forgotten. And then listen what Luke says, all of this throughout the hill country of Judea was recounted to the last detail.
Now Luke is writing, I mean writing, in about seventy five AD. Maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later, but not much later than '75 is a very conservative guess. It may have been considerably earlier than that. And you say, how could he have known these things? First of all, he could have known them through through Mary.
There are plenty of people he could have known them through. They all didn't die and disappear all of a sudden, as they did in some of these cities in Mexico. People have memories. And an oriental has a memory which is a memory. Today, you know, we I mean, our generation, if I may identify myself with yours, We have gotten so tied up, you know, with with putting things in writing or putting them on tape or recording them on video that we forget we have memories.
I had a grand aunt, my mother's aunt. She could recite poetry by the hour. Now I mean by the hour. I can't recite poetry by the minute unless I have the book before me because I'm literate. But we we've gotten away from the from the idea of memory.
Well, any of you who traveled in the East, you know that how tenacious they are. You how to you take that book of roots. How tenacious the Africans are of their tradition. You see, you don't have to write things down to have them retained in the memory of men and women. It was probably centuries before Homer was ever put in print, well not in print, but in writing.
And so let's keep our perspective that that did it did all of this happen just exactly word for word as Luke tells us? When when Mary came down and and and Elizabeth saw her, did Elizabeth break forth in those actual words, and did Mary respond in the actual words of the Magnificat? Maybe she did. I don't know. But my point is this, when Alexander defeated Egypt and when he got up and gave and gives a great speech which we have, does that mean that he actually gave that speech word for word?
Of course not. But does it mean he didn't defeat the Egyptians and wasn't celebrating a battle? Or that he didn't that that speech didn't in a way in a way or another way reflect his feelings at the time? But above all, whether the speech was an absolute fiction, it doesn't make a fiction of the of the defeat of the Egyptians by Alexander. Now, the ancient historians were great at writing these speeches.
That's the way they did it. But that doesn't deny the fact of the of the instance of the phenomenon. And so I know there's been all kinds of stuff written about these, what they call the infant narratives. And all kinds of stands are taken. But I take my stand on just the book, what the book says.
And that's where everybody has to begin. Nobody can go back beyond the book. We can we can build a background, oh yes, you can do that, but you come back. This is what you're talking about, the text. And the and the text you're talking about is a Greek text.
And there's no difficulty with the text. I mean as far as the language goes. The problems here are much deeper, much more are much more profound. Now just because we cannot put all of this together in a nice little explanation of just how Lou did get this message. Just because we cannot write the infant narratives with all kinds of footnotes, with a lot of references to German authorities, and modern modernistic authors, and secularists who don't want anything supernatural about it.
No. I I have an appeal to the supernatural as far as the texts go. I don't have to. There's enough of supernatural, believe me, in the birth of Jesus Christ, and in the birth of Saint John for me. But to think that something as absolutely spectacular remember, John's birth was more spectacular than our Lord's.
Keep that in mind. Much more spectacular. The antecedents are more spectacular. They're much more public. Much more public.
The fact that Zacharias losing his speech was public. The fact that his aged wife who was sterile has a baby, that was public knowledge. Public, everybody knew it. You can't keep a pregnancy hidden long. The fact that the baby's born, and as soon as the baby's born, the father recovers his sight just because he says the kid's name is going to be John, put that together.
That was public knowledge. And Saint Luke says, these things were recounted down to the least detail. That's what the man says. You know, what amuses me, it really does, is the way people will will be nitpicking about the some of these texts of the New Testament, these these infant infancy narratives, and how they deal with other historical texts. It's just amazing.
But anyway, that's neither here nor there. Folks, these stories we have of the narrative of Jesus Christ, the basis of them, the essential facts as narrated have never been disproved. Oh, they've tried to do it. Everything under God's earth has been done to disprove it, but they have never been disproved. And some of the most rationalistic critics have contributed the greatest proofs or evidence, let me say, to the substantial character of the texts.
Keep that in mind. Your faith rests on very substantial motives of credibility. God saw that that's the way it would be. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit. Amen.