What is the real Christmas story?

It’s an abiding image of the Christmas story: the long exhausting journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.  Mary, heavy with child, rides a donkey. Joseph is at her side. At least that’s the popular image.

In Matthew’s Gospel there’s no such journey— they’re already living in Bethlehem. Luke has the journey but no donkey, no mention of how they made the trip.

And why, according to Luke, were they heading to Bethlehem?  A decree that everyone in the empire would travel to his or her ancestral home to register in a census so they could be taxed. 

Or so Luke tells us, but there’s a problem in the story: a problem that has occupied many generations of scholars.

Crossan: Luke tells us the story that at the time Jesus was born Augustus had to create a census of the whole earth. Now every scholar can tell you there was no such census ever.

Witherington: Well, I wouldn’t say so.  I mean, it’s an absence of evidence.  Which is not the same as evidence of absence. Augustus wanted the provinces  enrolled. “We want taxes.  We want money.  We want every part of the empire doing their duty.” We have plenty of records of Augustus taking census all over the empire.

Was the taxation census an invented story-telling device to move the Nativity plot along? Possibly. But given how the Roman regime behaved, some taxation scheme or other could be expected.

Hazleton: At least 50 percent of their income went in taxation, either to the Roman occupiers or to Herod and his vast temple building projects or to the temple in Jerusalem.

Together, Herod and Rome were sucking people like Mary and Joseph dry. It was taxation that amounted to extortion. It was so crushing, so widespread, it later became part of Jesus' most famous prayer:

Hazleton: The Lord’s Prayer, which many of us now know as “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  But the first time you come across that in the Gospels, it reads, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are in debt to us.”  And it meant this literally.

Only Luke tells the story of the census and the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem. So scholars speculate about what Mary and Joseph might have faced, there in the city of David.

Hahn: It isn’t just simply, showing up at the census booth and, giving your name and address. You probably ended up having to swear some kind of oath of allegiance to the empire vis-à-vis the procurator, or whatever imperial machinery was there in place—throughout Palestinian. And so I would say, on historical grounds, you have reasons to think that this is a serious attempt by Luke to describe what actually happened.

Morrison: So the story of going to Bethlehem you would find historically probably true—

Hahn: I would.

The Old Testament prophecy about the Messiah would soon be fulfilled— a virgin was about to give birth, the baby’s lineage would go back to King David, and the baby would be born in Bethlehem. But you might be interested in knowing more about how the time, date, and place were determined.

The incredible and sacred place, the Church of the Nativity, was built right over the grotto said to be the very place Mary and Joseph arrived that night—the spot Jesus was born. And the mother of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, made the official location determination more than 300 years later.

As to the day we celebrate, December 25^th, that had been the birthday Sol Invictus—the sun God, Constantine’s favorite god before he became a Christian.

The time of year, there’s no agreement on that, perhaps April, sometime before 4 BC and 6 AD. But almost certainly not the beginning of the year one.

Whenever it all happened, the Gospel of Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph came to an inn, and soon, the sweetest part of the Nativity play.

Hahn: What God is about to bring about is so unbelievable, it exceeds our wildest dreams, that the means by which God is going to bring it to pass will also exceed our natural experiences.

But it wouldn’t be easy. It never was then.

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