The Humanity Of Christ

Jesus was likely not born on December 25th out of all the days of the year, with the Bible's story of his birth not directly commenting on which day or month of any particular calendar system it occurred.  Nonetheless, the arbitrary affiliation of December with the birth of Jesus receives more attention than much more substantial matters pertaining to the incarnation and its ramifications, if it happened.  The logical possiblity of a divine being taking on a human body (though Jesus is not Yahweh and the Bible does not explicitly clarify whether Yahweh created him), as well as the moral necessities that follow if such a thing did happen, are of much greater philosophical depth and consequence than which random day of a standardized calendar Christ would have emerged from a human womb.

The Biblically unspecified issue of whether Jesus was literally brought into existence by Yahweh is of some relevance to the incarnation and death of Christ, for if the entity sometimes called "the Father" truly begot his "Son" in an ultimate sense, Jesus would not have existed past-eternally as would Yahweh.  For such a created pseudo-divine being to take upon a human body and eventually die would not be as strange as if it was truly a lone uncaused cause that did this, though Trinitarian theology is already logically impossible in itself and in how it relates to other Biblical events and doctrines.  If Jesus and Yahweh, along with the Holy Spirit, are all fully one and the same and yet still distinct (a contradiction and thus impossibility already), the death of one of them would be the death of them all, and yet there would then be no world for Jesus to be resurrected into since contingent things depend on Yahweh's existence according to Acts 17:28.

However, there is nothing logically impossible about a spiritual being that precedes the cosmos entering the universe in a physical form while still being fully divine to whatever extent it was before this incarnation.  For something to be impossible, it must contradict logical axioms, and contradicting other necessary truths that follow from axioms or contradicting itself would be subcategories of this, since all truths and possibilities by necessity cannot conflict with the intrinsic truths of axioms.  For Jesus to exist and not exist at once or for him to be only human and only divine simultaneously is impossible.  No divine power can sidestep logical necessity.  It is just that the incarnation itself is not something impossible, nor is it as difficult to grasp as some people think in spite of its layers.  Possibility alone does not mean something is true, but it does mean there is nothing metaphysically impossible about it, however bizarre it might seem.

The humanity of Christ is also of great importance in connecting with something that would already be clear from the Genesis creation account, which calls God's creations good (Genesis 1:31), and the moral details of Mosaic Law, which condemns adding to God's commands (Deuteronomy 4:2).  The human body might be susceptible to decay and eventual death on this side of Eden due to biological death being a foreshadowing of the cosmic death human sin deserves, and it can be used for irrational ends of many kinds, but it is not itself immoral.  Having a human body, celebrating the body, and enjoying the body's various pleasures in any way not condemned in Biblical commands, is something that is objectively nonsinful by true Christian standards, and if this was not the case, Jesus could not remain totally innocent after the incarnation simply by having a body.  That "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14) and that Jesus is supposed to be without sin (directly implied in John 8:46) would not even be possible if the body was sinful.

These are not exactly popular things to acknowledge aloud at Christmas even among most Christians.  The evangelical focus on irrelevant or assumed issues at this time of year is of course given to false or shallow ideas, for the most part.  Some of these truths even inherently exclude tenets of evangelicalism like conventional Trinitarianism and legalistic prudery.  Evangelicals sometimes prefer to dwell on idiotic things like the phrase "happy holidays," pagan traditions, or the cultural association of Jesus with December rather than the logical possibility of the incarnation, its moral ramifications, and other issues pertaining to an incorporeal, divine being that existed before the universe physically entering it.