The Christmas stories in the Bible - and they are multiple and contradictory - are obviously myths. They are obviously not to be taken literally. They are meant as signs to the deeper, profounder truth that Christians hold to: that the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.If stories are not meant to be taken literally, then why take them so literally?
The real point is that a myth is not a falsehood taken for truth. It is an imaginative leap into the inner world of human experience.
Myths are the first human attempts at understanding human psychology: our haunted, wounded, despairing, doubting selves made better through storytelling. Myths are neither true nor false, reasonable or unreasonable, they are what make facts meaningful and understanding possible.
