What is the real Christmas story?

After their long journey to Bethlehem, so the popular Nativity story says, Mary and Joseph look for a place to stay, but are turned away from an inn. So Mary has her baby in a stable, wraps him in swaddling clothes and lays him in a manger, surrounded by farm animals.

But, moving as the story is, much of it comes not from the New Testament, but from later traditions. Nowhere do the Gospels claim there was a stable with animals present: no sheep, no cow, no camel.

Witherington: There probably wasn’t even an inn in Bethlehem in such a small town anyway.  I think actually what Luke is saying is because there was no room in the guestroom in ancestral home, they were put in the back of the house which is where early Jews would keep their especially precious beasts of burden or other animals.

Wherever Mary and Joseph ended up for the climax of the story, conditions certainly would have been meager.

Imagine no electricity, no running water, no anesthesia, no doctor. Two thousand years ago the process of giving birth was frightening, painful, dangerous and frequently fatal.

Morrison: What was the mortality of the mother in childbirth?

Hazleton: We don’t know the exact numbers.  But we know from looking at other peasant societies that the maternal mortality rate was extremely high.

Levine: To have two children survive to adulthood, one would have had to give birth to five. For a firstborn child in particular there, would have been an enormous concern for allowing that child to thrive.

Hazleton: An immense number died in birth — and mothers too.

Morrison: Describe for me how you see the Nativity scene.

Hazleton:  She would’ve been surrounded by all of Joseph’s female relatives.  There would’ve been a midwife there.  There would’ve been a birthing stone on which the midwife would’ve sat. And Mary would’ve been held up by three relatives, one arm around in back, the other holding up either thigh.

Historians says it would have been normal for female relatives hovering nearby to administer herbal infusions mixed together with hope and prayer to make Mary’s labor pains come faster.

Hazleton: They would’ve encouraged her.  They would’ve sang with her, chanted with her.  There would’ve been a rope hanging from the ceiling for her to pull on as she pushed, pull and push.

And there it was, the miracle at the heart of Christmas: a child is born.  Would anyone in that humble room have known the meaning of the event?

Hazleton: And the moment the child was born, they were all broken out in this wonderful ululations, very high-pitched,  that Middle Eastern women still do in times of joy and so on.  The moment everybody in the household, everybody in the village heard that, they would know a child had been born alive, another member of a Hamullah, of our family, of our village, of our nation.

As Christians know the story, a heavenly choir of angels appeared above the stable and lit up the sky with song. And an angel approached some shepherds, told them about the birth of Jesus, so they hurry off to find him. 

Hahn: It isn’t the rich, the famous, the powerful, it’s the lowly. The shepherds kind of share a sort of equally low-status in first century Jewish Palestine.

Morrison: I kinda get that.  Because that’s the whole nature of the message, that it’s the lowly and the underprivileged that—

Hahn:  The least likely, you know, in terms of politics or economics.

Then Luke has the shepherds go out to the world and spread the word. Or is the storyteller forecasting what will happen years later?

Hazleton: The Gospels, you have to remember, were not written as history.  They were written as theology they were written in Greek outside of Palestine.

And it’s this theology written some 80 years after Jesus’ birth that grew into the biggest religion in the world — two billion people — and became the foundation of Western civilization.

That happened even if the Nativity story didn’t unfold exactly as it’s told by the Gospel writers.

Hahn: Give them the benefit of the doubt.  These narrators are innocent until proven guilty.  I also have the belief that this is inspired scripture.

Crossan: I would plead if you take it literally, get the meaning.  If you take it metaphorically, get the meaning. The debate on taking it literally or metaphorically is a valid debate.  It’s an honest, valid debate.  But it is not the most important debate.  The most important debate is this: Whether you take it literally or whether you take it metaphorically, what meaning are you taking from it?  And could it be that even if I take it metaphorically and you take it literally we might come out with the same meaning.

Here’s why some scholars say Luke deserves the benefit of the doubt about the accuracy of the story.  

Evans: The author of Luke says that he consulted with eyewitnesses.  I don’t think we should assume that he’s just making that up.  And if he has met with eyewitnesses, who were they? 

Perhaps he spoke with shepherds. Or, is it just possible the author of Luke got his story from a first-hand source? From Mary herself?

Hahn: There are so many features in Luke’s story that have led scholars to say, you know, this seems to reflect a feminine perspective.  It seems to draw from the kind of experience that Mary herself could have shared with people.

Evans: It cannot be proven.  But it does open up the door, in a plausible way, to the possibility that the author of Luke in fact met either Mary or relatives, and so actually did know what he was talking about.

Whatever his inspiration, Luke’s story is light, usually the joyful end of nativity plays.

So unlike the other tale the pageants leave out, the story told in the Gospel of Matthew— the one that bristles with danger, and mystery, and death.

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