Notes from the Vicar

Christmas 2010

A Warm Welcome to St Mary's this Christmas: there is a lot going on in St Mary's church over the next few days and you are always very welcome. Check the calendar for services that you will enjoy and check out 'Alpha'. You may have a growing interest in who God is. Alpha is a series of evenings with good food, short talks and discussion that you can use to  explore your thoughts and find out more about God. I thought you may be interested  to read the article that follows. Happy Christmas. Look forward to meeting you some time this Christmas and New Year season. Amanda - vicar

BBC trailer for Nativity starring Garrow's Law actor Andrew Buchan

Here is trailer for the four-part BBC one drama of the Nativity which starts next week.

Writer, and executive producer Tony Jordan was asked if his perspective of the Christmas story has changed as he worked on it, adapting it for TV. He answered : "When I first started the project I am not sure I had an opinion about whether the Nativity was true or not. I guess that I just thought it was a lovely Christmassy story with baby Jesus in a manger and I liked it, but I had never thought about it more than that.

For the first couple of months I was talking to historians and scientists who did everything they could to convince me that the story never happened.

They claimed that it was a story patched together from bits of other stories and was concocted by the people who wrote the gospels to make Jesus the Messiah. They invented the census because the Messiah was supposed to be born in the City of David. So they concocted this fictitious census to get him there and that was their take on it.

So after the first couple of months I believed that the story never happened. But then the more research that I did and the more people of faith that I spoke to, I realised that this was a story that wasn't written down at the time, it was passed by word of mouth for a hundred years before anyone thought to write it down. So details and some of the timings get lost by the three hundred thousandth time you tell the story.

To me all the things that the historians held up to say 'this doesn't work' – for example, the dates don't match with the consensus that was held by Quirinius – become irrelevant. This was just a story that was told by those shepherds that were in the stable to some other shepherds and then they told some other shepherds who told someone else and they told someone else and that went on for a hundred years until someone wrote it down.

How on earth can you expect that story to be spread by word of mouth for a hundred years and for the last person who hears it to have all the dates and facts right?

So by the end of the process I am now in a position where I actually think it is true and I think that it happened more or less as I have portrayed it."

Four half-hour episodes tell the traditional tale starting Monday 20th on BBC One in the evenings.