What is the real Christmas story?

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

It is quite possibly the favorite of all the stories ever told— a story steeped in joy, radiating an annual surge of good will: The birth of Jesus. 

It’s the foundation not just for Christian holiday traditions, but in many ways, for the whole of Western history, celebrated by some 2 billion people in countries and cultures all over the world. So pure and full of wonder, children act out the magical tale of a young woman who gives birth not just to a baby boy, but the Son of God.

It’s a story many Christians all over the world believe word for word— but how much is history? Wars have started over the question of whether the Nativity story was to be taken literally or as an allegory, a myth.

So to help us through it, we’ve assembled a group of Bible scholars and authors, from those who see it as based on history, to those who don’t.

Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent: A lot of modern believers will say, “All you want to do is tear down this wonderful story we have.  And try to tell us there’s some sort of Santa Claus myth.”

Craig Evans, professor of New Testament studies, Acadia Divinity College: We’re not really trying to tear anything down. We’re trying to understand it. The Bible contains a very important message, and critical study has not overthrown that. Because God hasn’t disappeared in all the criticism.

As the story has been told time and time again, the birth of Jesus begins with a girl who would change the world, a girl called Maryam or Mary. She’s often depicted as a young, doe-eyed brunette.

Lesley Hazleton, author of “A Flesh-And-Blood biography of the Virgin Mother”: We forget that she was not a classic Italian beauty. In fact it’s hard to imagine why we insist that she would be beautiful.

The Bible reveals very little about Mary, but scholars believe she came from a humble background, was probably poor.

Hazleton: She was tough. You had to be tough in that time. You’re living off the land.  It’s a hard, hard life.  She would’ve been out in the hills.  She would’ve been a shepherd girl out in the hills with the goats and the sheep.  And this is a tough way, with very thin sandals, you know, she would—every rock you can feel, every thorn you can feel.

Morrison: This is a little prepubescent girl out on the hills?

Hazleton: Right.

Morrison: Sort of 10 or 11 years old?

Hazleton:  Right.  Because at [that time], at puberty, you got married.  That’s it.

Amy Jill Levine, Jewish scholar of the New Testament: Legally, she could get married some time around the age of 12.  She could be betrothed even earlier than that, but there wouldn’t be consummation of the relationship.

Of Mary’s future husband, Joseph, scholars say we know virtually nothing about, other than that he may have been a carpenter or artisan. Tradition has imagined him as an older man. But was he?

Ben Witherington, professor Asbury Theological Seminary: We have no firm historical evidence that he was other than an older teenage boy engaged to a slightly younger teenage girl.

In fact, you may be surprised to learn the Nativity story is based on just two brief, quite different, and sometimes apparently conflicting New Testament accounts—the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. Over the years, the two versions have blurred into one—the Christmas story most people celebrate.

Most scholars believe both stories were written some 70 to 80 years  after the birth of Jesus. Secular history contains no mention, anywhere, of events in the story.

Evans: Our records are admittedly sparse, sometimes just nothing is there. And so there’s always a certain amount of guesswork, a certain amount of just, well, probability, and we have to learn to live with that.

But we do know though quite a bit about life in this little corner of the world during those strange and difficult times. In modern Nazareth, evidence of those days is completely obliterated. It’s a modern, bustling, noisy tourist-city now, nothing like the impoverished little village it once was. It was perched on its hillside almost unnoticed a few miles from the provincial capital.

Levine: It’s a little town.  And in most little towns people know each other, they know each other’s families.  For the most part, they watch out for each other.

They tend not to like it when one individual goes off on his own or her own, over against what the village tends to stand for.  They tend to be united in this sense.

The world around Mary’s Nazareth was frightening and oppressive: Jewish Palestine, Galilee in the north, Judea in the south, were a far flung and relatively insignificant corner of the world’s greatest empire: Rome in all its glory.  And the greatest of all emperors was on the throne, the emperor Caesar Augustus. He was known across the vast stretches of his empire as the “prince of peace.”

John Dominic Crossan, professor of Religious Studies DePaul University: If you think of it as a bumper sticker on a Roman chariot, “First victory, then peace.”  And he was sincere. And if you looked around the Roman Empire you could say, “Yeah, I see the peace.”  Of course, it’s guaranteed by victory.

During Mary’s lifetime, Caesar Augustus maintained victory over Palestine by installing a puppet regime headed by King Herod The Great, a regime at times so brutal, Augustus himself was said to be repelled.

Evans: Herod’s final days are so appalling that Emperor Augustus remarked, “I would rather be Herod’s pig than his son.”  And of course, the Jewish people don’t eat pigs. So what he is implying is a pig would have a longer life span in Herod in his kingdom then one of his own sons.

Hazleton: No occupation is ever gentle.  But this one was particularly brutal.  Crucifixions took place by the hundreds, sometimes even by the thousands.  It was ruthless.

And ruthlessness bred seething resentments among peasants struggling just to survive.  

The powerless had ways of expressing discontent. Naming a girl child Mary would be one way, in honor of an earlier Mary, a Jewish princess executed by Herod.

Levine: To be sure, probably half of the Jewish women at the time, in the Galilee were named Mary.

Does that say something about their political proclivities? Perhaps.

For generations, the people of Roman-occupied Galilee and Judea had been quite literally crying out for a savior.

Hazleton: Things were so bad that there was an expectation that was these were messianic times and the Messiah was coming. “Messiah” means literally one who saves. And they thought, having a strong king who would stand up to the Romans, get them out of the country, oust Herod who was the puppet king of the Romans. So, they could be independent and free again, their own people. 

Rebellions erupted, rebellions that the Romans crushed without mercy.  Based on his research, Crossan believes Mary witnessed the violence:

Morrison: She and her whole village would have been terrified by the idea that they could be attacked at any moment?

Crossan: Yeah. The legions came from their Syrian bases down south with blood and sword to teach everyone a lesson, and that meant that a village like Nazareth, unless everyone fled, unless every child was hidden, unless every woman was hidden, unless every man was hidden, they would have been enslaved, raped, slaughtered.

But that difficult and dangerous pre-modern world is ignored by the Nativity plays developed over the centuries.

HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW? Take the quiz True or false? "The Three Kings" weren’t really kings. Click here and test your knowledge of the Nativity story.

The setting, as plays begins, is otherworldly. An Angel Gabriel descends from heaven and appears to a  frightened girl called Mary, telling her she would give birth to the savior of mankind, and name him Jesus.

Scott Hahn, traditional Catholic scholar and teacher, Franciscan University: Mary of Nazareth, this young Jewish lady, has been chosen by the Almighty to do what really any other Jewish lady would have longed to do, to bear the long awaited Messiah, who was going to be more than just a successful politician, king, a ruler, conqueror.

And Mary is said to respond to the angel with a question still at the heart of 2,000 years of faith: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”

Witherington: What I would say is if we’re talking about the story of the birth of Jesus – it’s too improbable not to be true.

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