Rudyard Kipling wrote a short poem called “I Keep Six Honest Serving-Men.” The first line of the poem goes like this:

I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

These six honest serving men are questions that we can ask of any topic to gain understanding of it. If we want to know about something, we can ask these six questions. The answers will tell us much of what we need to know.

If you cannot answer these six questions about any given topic, you don’t know much about it. If this information is not available, then maybe the topic in question is not valid; maybe it’s a fraud or a hoax or a myth.

What if we applied these six questions to the story of Jesus’ birth? Do the NT writers provide enough information in their accounts to answer these basic questions? Yes, they do. The NT provides all the information we need to answer all the most significant questions about the birth of Jesus.