Well you have to give him credit; you never know what he is going say (or go back on) next! Donald Trump is not even the president and yet he has already consigned Barak Obama to the dustbin of history, at least as far as the media is concerned.

And now it’s the CIA that seems to have run foul of his barbed wit with his team rejecting its conclusion that Russian hackers tried to sway the election in his favour as ‘ridiculous.’

And he’s clearly not worried about upsetting the intelligence establishment either given this dismissive assessment of their capabilities “These are the same people who said Sadam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” It’s tempting to say “With friends like this who needs enemies.”

‘Dismissive’ is the key word because Trump seems to be constantly deaf to challenge and wilfully blind to the facts time and time again. But let’s not be too hard on him. In behaving like this, he is no different to the rest of us. I would hazard a guess that lots and lots of people again this year will heartily celebrate Christmas whilst dismissing the account of Jesus’ birth as a sentimental story that should be confined to annual nativity plays.

But far from being a fairytale, Christmas is a constant reminder that the Christian faith cannot be divorced from history and precisely because of this demands serious investigation. Take the much-loved story of the three kings for example. It’s often viewed as nothing more than a lovely legend, but it is exactly the sort of thing that could easily have happened in the ancient world. There was a real spirit of expectation abroad when Jesus was born as we can see when we turn to Roman authors such as Suetonius and Tacitus. The Jewish historian Josephus offers us evidence of this too for he tells us his people had a belief that ‘about that time one from their country should become a governor of the habitable earth’ (Josephus Wars of the Jews).

And it’s also worth remembering that familiarity can tempt us to be dismissive too. I thought of this when I discovered that Mr. Trump had told Fox News that he did not need daily intelligence briefings. “I’m a smart person,” he said. “I don’t need to be told the same thing in the same way for eight years.”

Well it may come as news to Mr. Trump, but we can be told the same thing time and time again yet still not hear what people are trying to tell us. It’s all too easy to filter what we are hearing through what we expect to hear, not least when we’re dealing with familiar stories.

Take Matthew’s account of the three wise men. Most people tend to assume that there were three kings who followed a star to Bethlehem where they discovered the baby Jesus lying (if not crying) in a manger. But Matthew gives us no ground for viewing their visit this way. They were not kings; we are not told the star led them to Bethlehem; and they certainly didn’t find Jesus in a stable. In fact, we have no real reason to believe that he was even in Bethlehem at the time.

And the moral of the story? Always check the facts, you never know what you might learn.

Rob James is a Baptist Pastor broadcaster and writer who currently operates as a church and media consultant for the Evangelical Alliance Wales. He is available for preaching and teaching throughout Wales and can be contacted at [email protected]