A Christmas Story: An Interview with Diarmaid MacCulloch

“The Bible is a collection of texts beyond and outside us, and we may find its messages strange and even unwelcome. There’s nothing we can do about that, except to examine ourselves afresh.”

The Bible is unquestionably the most scrutinized “book” in history. Yet certain obvious facts about it nonetheless escape notice. For example, as Diarmaid MacCulloch points out in the Review’s December 18, 2025, the Bible is not in fact a book, but “books,” as its original Greek name (biblia) attests: sixty-six of them, or seventy-three, or seventy-six, depending on the Christian tradition. And despite common usage, MacCulloch argues, the Bible is not the “Word of God”—Jesus is, as the Gospel of John attests. “You can’t have two Words of God,” MacCulloch writes. “That’s a liberating thought, which frees one to ask what the Bible actually is.”

MacCulloch has spent much of the past fifty years asking that question. As professor of church history at the University of Oxford, he has written over a dozen books on Christianity, including Lower Than Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, The Reformation: A History, and A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, winner of the Cundhill Prize.

I wrote to MacCulloch to ask him about the value of biblical criticism, trends in Western Christianity, and the persistent resonance of the Christmas story in the modern world.

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Chandler Fritz: One theme of Biblical study that you describe is the discovery of “half-hidden dialogues” among early Christians, such as the conflict between followers of John the Baptist and of Jesus. Is there another subtextual dialogue or drama within the Gospels that stands out to you?

Diarmaid MacCulloch: The obvious one is the way that, in the Gospels, Jesus often seems frankly dismissive of his biological family, including his mother. When Mary and his brothers and sisters came to one of his public events asking to speak to him, his discouraging response was to point to the disciples around him as his mother and siblings. Such references—particularly striking in relation to Mary, who in later centuries became such a focus of devotion in Christianity—may reflect conflicts that broke out after Jesus’ earthly life about authority among Christian leaders, the claims of family members versus others, with the Gospels taking the point of view of the “others.” The tug between family ties and one’s own choice to construct a substitute family has been a constant tension within Christianity, with the balance swaying between them over the centuries. That makes the association of “family values” with Christian faith more than a little problematic.

Generally speaking, what can modern historical criticism offer believers who might otherwise prefer to study the Bible within the church? Is there any overlap between bad secular criticism and bad fundamentalist criticism?

Modern historical criticism helps us to see more clearly what the Bible actually says and, equally importantly, what it does not say. That helps Christian believers recognize what later generations have added to the Gospel message, so then we can try to make an informed decision about what our own faith contains. This is entirely healthy. Informed understanding is always better than blind acceptance of what past authority figures have tried to turn into unchallengeable dogma.

Overlap comes when either camp tries to push a case beyond what the biblical text will justify. We are all tempted to remake the Bible in our own image. That won’t work; the Bible is a collection of texts beyond and outside us, and we may find its messages strange and even unwelcome. There’s nothing we can do about that, except to examine ourselves afresh.

Your latest book, Lower Than the Angels, surveys three thousand years of Christian thought about sex and gender. How does, for example, Mary’s Immaculate Conception fit into that wider history?

Mary’s Immaculate Conception is the belief that Mary herself was in her own birth conceived without sin, so that her son Jesus could be conceived without sin. That in turn is based on two ideas that are not to be found in the Gospel narratives of Jesus’ own conception and birth: first that Mary was physically a virgin when Jesus was conceived, and second that she remained a virgin for the rest of her life, throughout her marriage to Joseph. The first idea is an addition to the Gospel stories, made in a Syrian work of fantasy from the second century CE, intimidatingly known as the Protoevangelium of James. The second idea (the “perpetual virginity” of Mary) actually contradicts what is made explicit in the Gospel texts: that Jesus had brothers and sisters. Once the Church began developing the idea of Mary as a virgin, indeed as a perpetual virgin, this scriptural testimony of a large family for Joseph and Mary became an embarrassment.

In the July 2, 2020, issue of the Review, you wrote about the history and traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which has recently seen its American congregations growing—its liturgy seems to be particularly attractive to young men. What does this movement tell you about wider trends in American Christianity?

What it tells us is that American Evangelical Protestantism has ceased to satisfy many of those who were brought up in it or who have come to embrace it. Evangelical worship may lack structure, depth, or variety, and the arguments that Evangelicalism fishes out of scripture to justify itself may seem inadequate and partial. The Orthodox tradition offers patterns of worship that have evolved over centuries and that seek to embody the whole range of human experience before God, from joy to tragedy. The particular appeal of Orthodoxy for a certain sort of young man comes from the fragility of so much of young American masculinity: disoriented by assertions of female equality and the new self-confidence of many people in their variations on gender and sexual identity.

It’s easy for the insecure to turn to Orthodox churches that for reasons of history are themselves new to encounters with sexual modernity, and seem to provide refuge in overconfident assertions of their tradition. That’s aided by President Putin’s promotion of the Moscow Patriarchate among Orthodox churches, as part of his ambitions to take vengeance on the liberal West for its part in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church have constructed a fantasy of masculine military values that is in reality not especially Russian, but a mashup of nineteenth-century Western militarism and romantic tales of heroic medieval Western crusades. It’s backed by a good deal of Russian money channeled to American organizations and social media outlets eager to promote this perversion of male identity. Masculine insecurity gratefully seizes on the construct and, in some cases, ends up in Orthodox churches that in their American form are not always interested in the breadth of Orthodox tradition.

Given that the story of Jesus’ birth is only found in two of the gospels, each of which treat it quite differently, how is it that the little baby in the manger at Bethlehem has become the most loved Bible story in the modern world?

Underlying the two contrasting narratives, even if they’re run together in children’s nativity plays and the like, is the deeply Christian vision of apparent weakness and vulnerability overcoming the arrogance and cruelty of earthly power. A baby born to marginal people traveling far from home gives people a vision of a new way of being human. The baby grows to be a man, and he is brought to a horrible, humiliating death by those same earthly powers. But in both birth and death, Jesus shows us how God’s almighty and eternal power can welcome us all and overturn our repeated misunderstanding of his commands.

Are there any passages from the Bible you’d recommend for those preparing for the great Christmas tradition of yelling at your relatives?

“Judge not, that ye be not judged”: a command from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7:1.

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