Away in a manger.

LAST year, as every year, I went rather wearily to the school Nativity play. And last year, as every year, the same story was told. An angel in a white sheet told a curiously unsurprised Mary that she was going to have a baby. Joseph, grey-bearded and leaning on a stick to indicate his advanced age, was slightly upset but was quickly reassured that his wife was still a nice Jewish girl. Mary and Elizabeth had some vaguely theological conversations during Mary's pregnancy, and then, when the holy couple had to head south from Nazareth because of the census, Mary was duly loaded onto a donkey. On arrival at Bethlehem, exhausted and with Mary already having some histrionic twinges, they found that there was no room at the inn. The innkeeper, though, was a kindly man, and he let them occupy the stable. And there, although the audience was spared the medical details, the baby Jesus was born. The children playing the ox, the ass and the sheep bent adoringly in paper-mache masks over the doll in the manger, while hordes of tone-deaf angels serenaded the new-born King of the Jews. Shepherds came to the manger. In a new and hugely popular touch, the lambs they carried kissed the baby.

Then there was some vaguely Oriental music, borrowed from the local tandoori restaurant, and in came the Three Kings on supposedly comic camels, pointing ostentatiously to a huge star dangling from a long cane. Mary proudly displayed the child to them, and was ecstatically grateful at the rich gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The curtain fell with all the company assembled round the manger, singing 'Away in a manger'. Mary beamed beatifically as befitted a girl who had viciously seen off all her rivals for the role.

Afterwards, as we ate our mince pies and told our respective children that they were easily the best in the show, there were the inevitable attempts at jokes.

'I was really disappointed', said one father, on his third glass of cooking sherry. 'I was looking forward to the massacre of the innocents, and they missed it out'.

'Of course they did', rejoined another. 'They couldn't find any innocents in this school to massacre'.

A genuinely kind and godly woman, whom I know to be a pillar of her local church, came up to me and touched my arm. She knows that I write Christian books, and obviously felt I should be protected from all this.

'Don't you listen to them', she said. 'It's wonderful, isn't it, to be reminded of that great story?'

'It is', I said. 'It really is'. But all the time I was thinking: which story is she talking about?

Two accounts: one story?

There are two accounts of the nativity in the canonical gospels. They are in Matthew and in Luke. It is not easy to read them together. On the face of it they look like completely different stories. In each of them, sure, Mary and Joseph are betrothed, and in Bethlehem Mary bears a son of unusual origin. But that's where the similarities end. Their family trees of Jesus are as different as a Christmas tree and a festive holly bush. In Matthew, Mary and Joseph appear to be residents of Bethlehem. There's no pre-birth travel involved, and indeed the elaborate story of Archelaus' rule over Judaea is later told to explain why the couple went to Nazareth. In Luke, Nazareth is the family home: he needs the problematic vehicle of Quirinius' census to bring them to Bethlehem. There's no inn in Matthew: Jesus is born conventionally in the house. And it is in the house that the Magi, unknown to Luke, welcome him. For the other traditional visitors you have to go to Luke. There you will find the angel choirs and the shepherds abiding in the fields by night. Although Luke gives them a harrowing pre-natal journey, Mary and Joseph have a much quieter time in Luke than in Matthew. They bring Jesus to the Jerusalem temple in the prescribed way, Simeon and Anna predict great things for him, and then the family goes peaceably back home to Galilee.

Matthew is much darker: Herod, terrified that he might be usurped by Jesus, tries to recruit the wise men as his spies. When this plot fails, he kills all the children in the Bethlehem area who are two years old or younger. But the Holy Family, warned in a dream, has already fled to Egypt, where they stay until after the death of Herod. The original plan was evidently to return to Judaea, but since Herod's son Archelaus was ruling there, there's a change of plan. They divert to Nazareth.

You will search the Bible in vain for many of the other beloved details of the Christmas story. It is brutal to say it, but so far as we know from the gospels, Jesus remained callously unadored by the oxen and asses. [1] There were no royal visitors--no kings: [2] just a group of eastern astrologers whose beliefs would attract the loudest tut-tuts from modern evangelicals. And we have no idea how many there were: it's only said that there were three because three types of gifts were brought. So there are problems. It cannot be denied. Deny it and you're plainly not reading things properly. And unless you realise that there's a problem, there's no chance at all of reaching a solution.

I wrote this article in the British Library in London's Euston Road. Just downstairs from the room where I worked there was a magnificent exhibition entitled Sacred. It was a look at some of the cornerstone texts of the three Abrahamic faiths. I went there often when I could take no more of Matthew, Luke or their detractors. One of the most prized exhibits was a sixth-century AD commentary on the Diatessaron. The Diatessaron was a brave attempt by the second-century Assyrian Christian Tatian to harmonise the New Testament gospels. It doesn't exist anymore, and is known only by commentaries on it. It was strenuously suppressed by the early church. But why? Wasn't it a godly enterprise to show that the various gospel accounts hung effortlessly together? Well, the early church thought not. And they weren't stupid. They could see that Matthew and Luke didn't agree on the nativity story, and that the resurrection stories of the gospel writers were importantly different. They were engaged in apologetics just as modern Christians are. And yet they decided not only that they should live with the difficulties, but that the difficult versions were the only versions that the church should have. They preferred authenticity to ease. They believed in truth, and believed that scripture contained it. They believed far more completely in the authority and the truthful witness of scripture than many so-called 'Bible-believing Christians' today. Would the modern evangelical church have resisted the temptation to edit the gospels into harmony? I hope so, but I sometimes doubt it. If the temptation is resisted, the apologist has a hard task. But not an impossible one. If you take these accounts seriously--if you read them with open eyes--they end up being hugely more convincing than the harmonised, sanitised, emasculated version of the fundamentalist imagination.

Why bother with this inquiry?

Every day Christians across the world stand and say loudly that they believe in Jesus Christ 'who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, [and] born of the Virgin Mary'. This is part of the Apostles' Creed, a statement of the lowest common denominators of the faith. Many think that if you can say the Creed, you're a Christian, and if you can't, you're not. Whether that's right or not, belief in the nativity story or stories is regarded as foundational. But is it?

The only mention of the birth of Jesus is in the nativity accounts of Matthew and Luke. Both Matthew and Luke of course base much of their respective gospels on Mark, which is almost universally agreed to have been the first gospel to be written down. But neither Mark nor John touches very obviously on the circumstances of Jesus' birth, even when you might expect them to. In John's Gospel Philip says to Nathanael: '"We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth". Nathanael said to him, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"' [3] This seems like an obvious cue for the comment: 'Well, as a matter of fact Jesus doesn't come from Nazareth at all. Nor is he really the son of Joseph'. But it never comes. That suggests to many that none of John's sources knew the Bethlehem or the Virgin birth traditions, or if they did, they didn't believe them. [4] Yet John's gospel proceeds perfectly happily without the Virgin birth. [5] None of the majestic theology of John would be any more secure if it rested on a well-attested miraculous birth at Bethlehem.

Some see Mark 6:3 as implicitly accepting the Virgin birth: 'Is not this the carpenter?', asks the crowd there. 'The son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon'. But that's really scraping the bottom of the apologetic barrel. The most we can sensibly say is that Mark doesn't contradict the Virgin birth.

None of the New Testament letters hints at the idea of a Virgin birth. [6] Christian apologists, desperate to find a miraculous conception in Paul, have sought to say that Galatians 4:4 implies a Virgin birth: 'God sent his Son, born of a woman', says the verse. Well, I was born of a woman too, but my father would take grave offence at the idea that he had nothing to do with it. The idiom 'born of a woman' was and remained at least until Elizabethan times a perfectly ordinary euphemism for ordinary biological arrival.

So: if the nativity story didn't matter to most of the New Testament, does it matter to us? Would it really matter if the nativity accounts were excised? Would our faith be any different without them?

It is certainly true that the mainstream church from very early times believed in the Virgin birth [7]. But nonetheless it can be argued convincingly that the accounts didn't really begin to matter theologically until the late fourth and fifth centuries with the elaboration of the doctrine of original sin. The infection of original sin was transmitted by sex, according to Augustine and the other high priests of the doctrine: Jesus wasn't infected because his conception had been sexless. This notion of the mechanics of human corruption is increasingly unpopular today, but it has exerted colossal influence on Christian thought. [8] It can be strongly argued that the doctrines of the immaculate conception of Mary (as distinct from the doctrine of the virginal conception of Jesus) and the perpetual virginity of Mary, were a consequence of this wrong view of sex and sin, which is ultimately a Gnostic one.

Christian theology can get by perfectly well without the nativity accounts. Why, then, spend time and energy examining them?

There are three reasons:

The first is that if they are true, they presumably contain some important information which increases our ability to relate to God.

The second is that Matthew and Luke make many clear assertions about the birth of Jesus. If they are wrong, either the authority of scripture is diminished, or our understanding of what is meant by the authority of scripture has to change.

The third is that it is extremely interesting.

Notes

[1] Perhaps the idea derives from Isaiah 1:3: 'The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib; but Israel does not know, my people do not understand'. Isaiah is responsible for several other elaborations on the basic Christmas story.

[2] Isaiah may be responsible for this too: Isaiah 60:3 says: 'Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn ...', and 60:6 goes on: '... They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord ...'.

[3] John 1:45-46.

[4] It is sometimes said that John 1:12-13 indicates John's belief in the Virgin birth. This says: '... to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God'. The argument goes: Jesus was the Son of God. Children of God are not born naturally. This construction does not square easily with everything else in the New Testament about being 'born again', which seems to be the natural meaning of this passage.

[5] Attempts to assert that the term 'begotten' in John 3:16 implies conception other than in the normal biological way have met with almost universal academic obloquy.

[6] Note that some of Paul's correspondents seem to be very interested in Jesus' Jewishness: see, for instance, 2 Corinthians 11:5-29; Galatians 1:6-11; 2:11-21; 3:6-21. It is sometimes said that in the light of this interest it is odd that Paul, if he knew of Jesus' Bethlehem birth and the connection to the Davidic line, he never mentioned it. The argument is well put by Steve Mason in 'O Little Town of ... Nazareth?', Bible Review 16:1 (2000): 30.

[7] Some at least of the Ebionites, a group of Jewish Christians influential in the early Palestinian church in the first and second centuries, thought that Matthew had misread Isaiah 7:14 (see below), and that Jesus was conceived naturally. But this was very much a minority belief.

[8] Islam also seems to distance God from human sexuality. The Koran asserts that God effected the virginal conception of Jesus in the same way that he summoned Adam into being--simply by commanding: 'Be'. Thus: 'Mary said, "O my Lord, how will I have a son when no man has touched me?" [The angel] said: "Such is the will of God. He creates whom He wills. When He decrees something, He only has to say 'Be', and it is". ': 3:47.

Charles Foster's book, The Christmas Mystery: What on earth happened at Bethlehem? is published by Authentic.