This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human history, which was like a new creation of the world, also begins in a cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; […] It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here beneath the very feet of the passersby, in a cellar under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born. But in that second creation there was indeed something symbolical in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God also was a Cave-Man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously colored upon the wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.
--G. K. Chesterton
Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.
[…] If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect […]; the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. […] You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You cannot suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. […] We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.
--G. K. Chesterton
Christmas 2007
Yes, [this history] really did happen. Jesus is no myth. He is a man of flesh and blood and He stands as a fully real part of history. We can go the the very places where He himself went. We can hear His words through His witnesses. He died and He is risen... the myths had waited for Him, because in Him what they long for came to pass.
-Benedict XVI
-Benedict XVI
Christianity is not born as the fruit of our culture or as the discovery of our intelligence... it reveals itself in facts events, which constitute a new reality in the world, a living reality; in movement. Christian reality is God's mystery that has entered the world as a human history.