After Mary sings the Magnificat (1:46-55), Luke tells us she stayed with Elizabeth for about three months before returning home (1:56). Immediately after she departs, John the Baptist is born (1:57). In the following chapter, the much more famous narrative of Jesus’s birth is told. But the key facts have already been laid out with the precision that only a medical doctor would include.

Working solely with the calendar of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Luke has told us that Jesus was a person with sufficient individual identity that His cousin could recognize him through the assistance of the Holy Spirit (1:41-44). But Luke has also told us that when this occurred, Jesus could only have been a maximum of four weeks old and probably was much younger than that.

Gabriel announced the conception to Mary in Elizabeth’s sixth month (1:26). Thereafter, Mary traveled to the hill country (1:39), where she stayed for about three months (1:56) before leaving prior to John the Baptist’s birth (1:57). This means that fetus Jesus must have been less than four weeks old when she arrived, a maximum given the parameters. But, given the fact that she went immediately and in haste (1:39), a much more likely reality is that He was only a few days old (perhaps not even implanted yet) when John recognizes Him. Mary certainly wouldn’t have even been able to know by ordinary means that she was pregnant yet.

So the pressing point of all this analysis is not that John (in his third trimester) was a person in the womb when he leapt for joy. The unavoidable and much more forceful point is that Jesus was in the very earliest portion of His first trimester when He was recognized by John as a person. And unless Jesus is not a human child, this means that all children are people at this early stage.

I realize that all of this will be of very little interest to those of you who either do not care about the Bible or else do not care whether the fetus is a person. I also know this doesn’t really do much to address the question of the legality of abortion, since the basis of my investigation is a faith text.

But for those tens of millions of Christians who every year celebrate this story and also believe that early term abortion is compatible with their faith, the point seems embarrassingly clear: It is no longer honest to say that we can’t know whether the first trimester fetus is a person.

So as we prepare to celebrate Christmas and the birth of our Savior this year, I have a simple question. Since we now know that Jesus was somewhere between a few days and a few weeks gestation when he was recognized in scripture as a person, then who or what is it in the young woman’s womb today if not a person—and somebody’s grandchild?