They have gone on proclaiming, as the writers of the Gospels proclaimed before them, that through the birth of Jesus a life-giving power was released into the world which to their minds could have been no less than the power of God himself. This is the central truth that Matthew and Luke are trying to convey in their accounts of the Nativity. And it was a truth which no language or legend seemed too extravagant to convey. What the birth meant — meant to them, to the world — was the truth that mattered to them most and, when all is said and done . . . perhaps the only truth that matters to anyone.
— Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus