The first Noel.

Origen (c.185-251) in his Commentary on Matthew (10.22) deprecated birthday celebrations as pagan and immoral, fit only for the likes of Herod. Not all contemporary Christians agreed. Various dates were proposed for the Nativity, there being no hint of one in the Gospels, apart from an unconscious astronomical one, on which more later.

Clement of Alexandria came up with May 10. Other spring suggestions included April 2 or 19, and May 20. An anonymous treatise 'De Pascha Computus' argued for March 28, a bold synthesis of the vernal equinox, the Creation, and Malachai's prophecy (4.2) of the "Sun of Righteousness".

The first advocate of December 25 was Sextus Julius Africanus in his Chronicle entry for the year 221. This was both a compliment and a challenge to the Roman Saturnalia festival of that season. Africanus, born in Jerusalem, was an expert in comparative chronologies and world history. We know from the Calendar of Philocalus that this date was established in Rome by 336, about the time Constantine built the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem. Gregory of Nazianzus imported it to Constantinople in 379, thus harmonising the 'New Rome' with the old.

Likewise, in his Nativity Sermon of 386, John Chrysostom introduced it to Antioch. Egypt accepted it in 431, Jerusalem in 549. Its strongest rival, January 6 (conflating Nativity with Epiphany), was slow to yield in Syria, and still holds good in the Armenian Church.

Debunking of the Nativity Gospels

A typical attempted debunking of the Gospels' Nativity narratives is that by classicist Peter Jones in the British Spectator magazine (owned by Canadian Conrad Black), December 19/26, 1998. Here are his salient points, verbatim:

"In Matthew Herod and the magi are prime movers, in Luke it is the Romans deciding to take a census. In Matthew the Holy Family lives in Bethlehem and only later moves to Nazareth, in Luke their home town is Nazareth and they move to Bethlehem only for the census. Why should Herod send not his own thugs but a collection of vagrant magi to search for the child? And when the magi did not come back, he slaughtered all the under-twos anyway. Why did the magi need a guiding star? There was surely no mystery about the way to Bethlehem. As for a star that could pick out a single village dwelling ...

"In Luke the census was probably that taken during Quirinius' governorship of Syria in AD 6 when Judaea became a full Roman province. Herod of course would have been dead by then. Roman censuses were taken in the provinces not to count heads but to assess for tax. They taxed by property, yet Luke asserts the census was taken by lineage. This was not the Roman way. Even if Luke had nodded and it was a property tax, Joseph owned property in Nazareth, in Galilee, not Judaea. The Romans had no jurisdiction in Galilee. Perhaps Joseph owned property in Bethlehem? No reason, then, to stay at the inn. In any event the Roman census-taker would have come to Joseph, not ask him to travel to record it, let alone with a pregnant wife.

"In Luke, David's line went back 42 generations, in Matthew 28. How many Davidian Jews would come thundering into Bethlehem to be registered, and how feasible was it to move the whole of Judaea about like this? It was not the Roman way."

Good knockabout rhetoric. But it is not hard to keep up with this particular Jones. Only Matthew (2.1-16) and Luke (2.1-20; cf. Acts 5.37) offer Nativities, and they are very different. No cause for alarm. Each Gospel represents one individual's very personal impression of Christ. We can at least agree with the sceptical Northrop Frye (The Great Code: The Bible as Literature, Toronto 1981, p. 41): "The Gospels are not biography." Unanimity in content and detail was impossible and anyway would be more suspicious than the opposite. As John (21.25) concludes: "And there are many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written." Jones mocks the discrepant genealogies. But what is more calculated to cause problems than such a welter of names? Moreover, he was anticipated long ago by Eusebius' concern (Church History 1.7.4), shared by many, albeit there was comfort in the pamphlet (quoted at length) by Africanus that sorted it all out.

Here are some answers

It is notable that the Nativity should be in Matthew, if tradition is right in making his the first Gospel, and in Luke, the first Christian writer to think in terms of classical historiography, as is evidenced in his Preface, also his shorter but similar opening to Acts. Between them, Matthew's Oriental slant and Luke's Roman one create two complementary (not rival) traditions, similar to the Aeneas-Trojan/Romulus-Italian dichotomy for Rome's foundation. The pair are deftly harmonized in the Nativity Hymn by the 6th-century Byzantine Romanos the Melode, still sung on Christmas Eve in the Greek Church.

It is not surprising that the physician Luke should be drawn to the story of a pregnant woman in difficulties near her time and an extraordinary birth. I do sometimes wonder why Matthew, a former tax collector, did not include the fiscal details. Perhaps he did not want to recall the time when he was one of the "publicans and sinners."

It was natural that Mary and Joseph would want Christ to be born in Bethlehem, as prophesied by Micah (5.2) and emphasized by Eusebius (1.8.1). Matthew does not say that the Holy Family lived there, only that it was the place of birth, quite compatible with Luke. The preference of Michael Grant (Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels, London 1977, p. 72) for Nazareth over Bethlehem rests on misunderstandings of Mark 1.9 and John 7.41: those texts actually represent debates of the time as to whether Christ as the Messiah should stress his Galilean or Davidian credentials.

The Magi

The Magi were seers. Their promotion to regal status in the modern Christmas carol comes via Tertullian's dubbing of them as 'fere reges' ("almost kings"). Herodotus has comparable anecdotes of their ability to intimidate Eastern monarchs and their genealogical expertise. If, as one tradition states, Matthew died in Persia, he would have local interest and knowledge about them. It makes sense that Herod would use them as spies: they were en route to Bethlehem and would be less feared there than his "own thugs". Also, their failure to return provides a plausible reason for his Massacre of the Innocents: by not coming back, they showed that the news would not be to his liking.

Homonyms are a nuisance to ancient historians. Critics of the Nativity stories often deny that Herod the Great (d. 4 BC) fits the chronology. But there is always his son and successor, Herod Antipas, to reckon with--there was nothing to choose between them in villainy.

A guiding star suited the prophecy of such in Numbers 24.17. Heavenly bodies are frequent in ancient history, secular and religious. The murder and funeral of Julius Caesar was accompanied by a comet, possibly Halley's. The Byzantine chronicler John Malalas reports a star that stayed in the West for 20 days. Over the last few years, various astronomers have suggested (e.g.) convergences of Jupiter and Mars/Jupiter and Venus/Jupiter and Saturn, a double set of planetary convergencies causing intensification of the Northern Lights, and a star known as DO Aquilae reported by Chinese observers as new and shining for 70 days in 5BC, one of several candidates for the Nativity year, whose chronology is askew thanks to the erroneous BC/AD calendar invented by the Byzantine monk Dionysius Exiguus--he was understandably thrown by the transition from BC1-AD1, especially as there was no Zero in classical mathematics.

These manifestations are detailed in the computer programme Skyglobe. Bethlehem was five miles south of Jerusalem, any distance was long in ancient travel, the Magi were in a strange land and needed guidance, and the Greek text of Matthew need only mean that it illuminated the right town rather than the right building.

Thanks to the King James Bible, anglophones have forever fixed in their minds the opening of Luke's version: "And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed." This translation is slightly misleading: the Greek verb 'apographesthai' strictly means to be registered as eligible for taxation and other things.

Early Christian chroniclers were understandably struck by the coincidence that Christ was born in the reign of Rome's first emperor. Oddly, though, the sources for Christ's or Augustine's long, trend-setting rule are scant--it is not (e.g.) covered in Tacitus' Annals. So, no modern can claim to know exactly who was doing what, where, when. In his official autobiography, composed and published in AD 14, Augustus mentions three censuses (28 BC, 8 BC, AD 14), their express intent to establish the number of Roman citizens. Others are possible, either regular or irregular to fit a particular circumstance such as the annexation of Judaea in AD 6--Augustus' memoir is one of those documents often more interesting for what they leave out.

Luke's following sentence has caused the most spilling of ink: "And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria." Frye ("Such historical pointers are more embarrassing than helpful") and Grant ("Luke's reference should be discounted") are not the only ones to "solve" this point by disregarding it. Luke is notably punctilious with his Roman administrative details, as the intricate opening to his next chapter, on John the Baptist, proves. And if, as widely thought, he came from Syria, he will have had a particular interest in this event.

Cyrenius is generally identified with Publius Sulpicius Quirinius. He has a life outside the New Testament, thanks to an inscription and a paragraph (18.1.4) in the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus. After a distinguished political and military career, he became governor of Syria c. AD 6 and was in charge of Judaea's annexation. Thanks to victories over some tribes in Cyrene, he was eligible in the characteristic Roman style to add the title 'Cyrenius' to his three regular names.

The greatest 20th-century secular Roman historian, Sir Ronald Syme, in his seminal book on Augustus (The Roman Revolution, 1939, repr. Oxford 1960, p.399 n.2) took Luke seriously as a source. No one seems to have noticed another wrinkle, introduced by the aforementioned Byzantine Malalas: sticking to Matthew's narrative and refining the Nativity date to December 25 "at the 7th hour," he mentions a consul of 2 BC named Cyrenius, and says that the census introduced by the "irascible" Augustus caused great fear (Chronicle, 9.226; 10.227-231). Josephus says it provoked a major anti-Roman uprising led by one Judas of Galilee, not formally part of the now Roman Judaea but a principate still answerable to Rome.

Under dispassionate analysis, then, Luke gains rather than loses in interest. His shepherds are a homely touch, credible--out in the fields at night, possibly for the winter lambing season, they would obviously see any unusual light--and another local and social counterpoint to the foreign Magi of Matthew--the two versions are not contradictory. Luke is in general notable for his solicitude for the poor and the outcasts along with his interest in the role of women.

As to the census, the Romans might well have introduced new rules for this first enumeration of the newly annexed province and (from their point of view) its refractory population. Making the inhabitants do the travelling would be administratively convenient and Romanly symbolic. As Disraeli remarked of a similar British imperial moment: "In my day these people came to me."

The first Noel is only the initial stop on the sceptics' road. Books and articles keep appearing which deny Christ's earthly existence altogether. As I shall show another time, these are even easier game.

Barry Baldwin is Classics professor emeritus at the University of Calgary and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has published voluminously on Greek, Roman, and Byzantine /Christian history, language and literature.