Sorry Folks, The Story of Christmas Is Made Up

In just a few weeks, Christians around the world will celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. But what most don’t realize is that this familiar story, which so many of us grew up with and hold dear to our hearts — is almost certainly made up.

Today, we’ll look at this story, examine why scholars think it’s fake, and then consider what it means for those of us who want to follow the religion of Jesus, rather than the religion about Jesus. (What’s the difference? This will explain.)

Because the problems with the Christmas story, for anybody who wants to know what actually happened 2,000 years ago, are numerous and significant. There’s no internal or external corroboration for the stories, there’s good motivation for their fabrication, and there are significant historical errors in both.

The evidence is severely lacking

Everything we know about Jesus’s birth comes from just four chapters in the Bible: Matthew 1–2 and Luke 1–2. These are the only places in the entire Bible that mention Jesus’s birth, and Luke 2 contains the only stories about Jesus’s childhood. (1) The rest of the New Testament, including Paul’s letters which were written decades before the gospels, shows no awareness of these stories at all.

Most notably, the virgin birth, found in both Matthew and Luke, is conspicuously absent from the rest of the New Testament. Neither Paul, who literally thought of Jesus as God incarnate, nor John, who presents Jesus as pre-existent with God “in the beginning,” say anything about a miraculous birth. This silence is striking given how central this doctrine would become to later Christian theology.

Remember: scholars are more likely to believe a story about Jesus is authentic if the same story is told in multiple, independent sources (this is called “multiple attestation”). That’s one reason why scholars think Jesus was actually baptized by John and executed by crucifixion — both events appear in all four Gospels.

Not only that, both of those events are supported by non-Biblical sources. Several Roman and Jewish contemporaries of the New Testament writers document John baptizing people and Jesus’s execution by Pontius Pilate.

There is not a shred of non-Biblical evidence however to support the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. This, of course, is not the end-all, be-all piece of evidence, but its presence or absence is certainly telling.

The two stories contradict each other

Going further, the two accounts disagree with each other on major details. In Matthew’s version, Jesus is from Bethlehem, and his family only ends up in Nazareth because they’re fleeing persecution from King Herod. In Luke’s account, Jesus’s family is from Nazareth and only goes to Bethlehem because of a Roman census.

These aren’t complementary accounts; they’re contradictory ones. And this is to say nothing of the completely different genealogies offered by Matthew 1 and Luke 3. (2)

But both gospel writers claim Jesus is actually from Bethlehem because both faced a significant problem: the Hebrew Bible prophesies that the Jewish messiah will come from there, the hometown of their greatest king, David.

Jesus, however, is referred to over and over throughout the New Testament as being from Nazareth. In fact, outside these four chapters, the word “Bethlehem” appears in only one other verse in New Testament. (3)

Scholars see this as a plausible reason why a gospel writer (or the communities that produced them) would fabricate a whole birth story for Jesus. They needed to explain to a skeptical audience, familiar with the prophesy, that Jesus was actually from Bethlehem. (4)

The history is just completely wrong

The historical problems of these two stories run even deeper. Luke tells us Jesus was born during a Roman census that required everyone to return to their ancestral hometown. But there’s no evidence of such a census taking place during this period. The Romans were excellent record keepers, particularly when it came to taxation, so this part of the story is very likely false.

Not to mention, the idea that Rome would periodically shut down their empire’s economy by forcing everyone to travel to their ancestral homes is, in a word, preposterous. Roman law assessed property in a person’s place of residence, not their ancestral hometown. (5)

Matthew’s account has similar issues. He writes that King Herod ordered all children under two years old in and around Bethlehem to be slaughtered. Yet there exists no record of this massacre in any chronicle or history of the time — not Jewish, not Christian, not Roman. This would have been a noteworthy atrocity, especially since we know quite a bit about Herod the Great from other historical sources. (6)

There are other, smaller, more technical details that are wrong, too. Luke 2 gets the details of the Jewish purification ritual at the Temple in Jerusalem wrong. (7)

All of these things, both big and small, can lead us to only one conclusion: the Bible’s story of Christmas is, in all likelihood, made up. The manger, the shepherds, the wise men, the massacre, the census — all likely historical falsehoods embellished for dramatic or theological effect.

To be fair, we don’t know a whole lot about the birth of most of the towering figures of the ancient Mediterranean world, nor do we know much about about the childhoods of most Biblical heroes. What’s presented in the Bible is a folk story (and if we’re being honest, a pretty great one at that!).

But here’s the thing: none of this really matters for those of us trying to follow Jesus today. What matters isn’t how Jesus came into the world, but what he taught us about living in it.

The historical Jesus — the poor, Jewish peasant from Nazareth who challenged empire and religious authorities with a message of radical inclusion and love — is far more compelling than any miraculous birth story. His message about creating the Kingdom of God here and now through radical love and justice transcends any questions about the historicity of his birth.

It’s not the story of Jesus’s birth that counts. It’s his message for our lives — and what we ultimately do with it — that matters.

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Footnotes:

1. There are several non-canonical infancy and childhood narratives, most notably the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where a young Jesus magically kills another boy who makes fun of him. There is near unanimous agreement among scholars that these have little to no historical value and were written in the second century or later.
2. The two are completely different, but notably Matthew says Jesus is a descendent of David through his son, Solomon, while Luke traces Jesus to David through a different son, Nathan. The genealogies were likely added for theological and literary effect.
3. That verse is John 7:42, which is about an audience that’s skeptical about Jesus’s status as messiah because he’s not from Bethlehem — in fact, he’s not even from the same region as Bethlehem!
4. This is why scholars believe Jesus is actually from Nazareth: the criterion of embarrassment. Later Christian writers had to explain an “embarrassing” fact about their messiah: that he didn’t seem to fulfill a key prophesy about said messiah.
5. Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House, 2013) p. 30. Aslan notes that the Roman governor of Syria, Quirinius, did conduct a census in 6 CE, but it was only of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea — not the “entire Roman world” as Luke claims, and definitely not Galilee, where Jesus’s family lived.
6. Aslan, Zealot, 31. Despite having extensive historical records about Herod the Great’s reign, including detailed accounts from the Jewish historian Josephus, there is no corroborating evidence in any contemporary Jewish, Christian, or Roman sources for the mass slaughter of children described in Matthew 2:16–18.
7. Luke 2:22 talks about a purification ritual at the Temple in Jerusalem for Mary and Joseph, yet only Mary, defiled under Jewish law by childbirth, would be required to undergo the ritual. Similarly Luke misplaces part of that ritual, the offering of “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons” as a sacrifice, as part of Jesus’s presentation as a first born son in the Temple. That sacrifice would have been part of Mary’s purification ritual, not Jesus’s presentation (read it for yourselves in Leviticus 12).