What Do We Actually Know About Jesus' Birth? Not Much

I by no means want to be the Grinch at the holiday season, but as one who values true and accurate history, much of what we hear this time of year from both pulpits and the media about the Christmas story is nothing more than fabrications and embellishment of the two contradictory nativity accounts in the New Testament - nativity accounts that themselves are subject to question from a purely historical perspective.  Professor Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and  a leading authority on the Bible and the life of Jesus, has a piece in Newsweek that underscores the dubious nature of much of what is taken as fact by the public and Bible thumping Christianists.  Here are some excerpts about both the flaws in the Gospel accounts and other aspects of the Christmas story that were fabricated out of thin air over the centuries:

[T]here are Gospels about Jesus that have come down to us from the ancient world, which present information at odds with widely held views.

As Christians around the world now prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth, it is worth considering that much of the “common knowledge” about the babe in Bethlehem cannot be found in any scriptural authority, but is either a modern myth or based on Gospel accounts from outside the sacred bounds of Christian Scripture. Some obvious examples: nowhere does the Bible indicate what year Jesus came into the world, or that he was born on Dec. 25; it does not place an ox and an ass in his manger; it does not say that it was 3 (as opposed to 7 or 12) wise men who visited him.

For many centuries, most Christians garnered their information about the birth of Jesus not from the New Testament but from popular writings that were not officially considered Scripture. One of the best known of these books is called the “Proto-Gospel of James,” composed probably in the late second century, a century after the canonical Gospels, and accordingly, far less likely that they contain anything like historically accurate information. But Christians throughout the Middle Ages were rarely interested in historical accuracy; they loved stories and reveled in their meaning, especially stories having anything to do with the appearance of the Son of God in the world.

This past November, Pope Benedict XVI published his third book on the life of Jesus, this one focusing on the New Testament accounts of his birth, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives.  .  .   .  .  it will be widely welcomed—not only among Catholics but also, one might suspect, among conservative Christians of whatever stripe, for its affirmation of the Gospel accounts not only as theologically valuable but also as historically accurate.

The book will not be as well cherished, however, among those who are less interested in affirming the narratives of Scripture than in knowing what actually happened in the past. And there is indeed a very wide swath of scholars—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, agnostic, and others—who have a very different view of the accounts of Jesus’ birth in the New Testament and who realize that there are problems with the traditional stories as they are recounted for us in Matthew and Luke, the only two Gospels that contain infancy narratives.

For centuries scholars have recognized that the birth narratives of the New Testament are historically problematic. For one thing, the two accounts—the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two chapters of Luke—are strikingly different from one another, in ways that appear irreconcilable. To start with, they both give genealogies of Jesus’ father, Joseph (it’s an interesting question why they do so, since in neither account is Jesus a blood relative of Joseph), but they are different genealogies: he is said to have a different father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather, and so on.

[T]hey are doing so [providing a genealogy] because they both want to relate Jesus to the ancestral line of the Jewish patriarchs, but neither of them has access to the kind of reliable data they need for the task. So they have provided genealogies that have been invented for the purpose and that, as a result, are necessarily at odds with each other. And that is just the opening gambit. The discrepancies occur repeatedly throughout the chapters.

Moreover, both accounts contain contradictions with the known facts of history. Just take Luke as an example. Only in this Gospel do Joseph and Mary make a trip from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem in order to register for a census when “the whole world” had to be enrolled under Caesar Augustus. The whole world? Luke must mean “the whole Roman Empire.” But even that cannot be right, historically. We have good documentation about the reign of Caesar Augustus, and there never was a census of his entire empire. Let alone one in which people had to register in their ancestral home. In this account Joseph and Mary need to register in Bethlehem (which is why Jesus is born there) because Joseph is descended from King David, who came from Bethlehem. But David lived a thousand years earlier. Is everyone in the entire Roman Empire returning to their ancestral home from a thousand years earlier?

This is not a story based on historical fact. It is a narrative designed to show how Jesus could have been born in Bethlehem—whence the Messiah was to come—when everyone knew in fact that he came from Nazareth.

There are other kinds of implausibility in the accounts—leaving aside the much-debated question of the virgin birth itself. In Matthew, for example, the wise men follow the star to Bethlehem, where it stops over the house where Jesus is (why, by the way, is Jesus’ family living in a house, if they just came to register for a census?). How is it that a star—or any celestial body—can lead anyone to a particular town? And how can it then stop over a particular house?

[T]hese Gospel sources, whatever else they are, are not historically reliable descriptions of what really happened when Jesus was born. 

These are books that meant to declare religious truths, not historical facts. For believers who think that truth must, necessarily, be based on history, that probably will not be good news at all.

In sum, we know little or nothing about the real fact of Jesus' birth - assuming he even existed.  Yet the Christianists demand that all of us take the Bible as the literal truth, ignoring the major historical problems that plague the Gospel accounts.  Equally bad is that they similarly demand that the writings of ignorant nomads who possessed less knowledge about the earth, solar system, and universe, not to mention medicine and biology and physiology, than most America eighth graders be regarded as the inerrant truth.   Believing that the Bible is the inerrant truth and that it must be taken literally is, in my opinion, tantamount to confessing that one is an idiot as the chart below illustrates.

Click image to enlarge

I believe that there is a creator or some sort.  I simply no longer believe that the Bible tells us the truth about that creator.  Most of the New Testament was written as a propaganda piece to further the fledgling Christian religion.  As is still the case with the Vatican today, the accurate historical truth is never allowed to get in the way of the agenda for power, control and earthly wealth.