Matthew and Luke both have birth narratives but each has a different story. Matthew, the next gospel after Mark, seems in its original form to have known nothing unusual about the birth of Jesus. The first two chapters are an afterthought. The gospel really begins, at the third chapter, in the same place as that of Mark. Then someone prefaced it with one of the two genealogies of Jesus that were in circulation (1:1-17). Next—the new beginning is quite clear—somebody added a short account of how Jesus was born (1:18-25). Lastly some other hand added the legends of Chapter 2. The Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem as the Old Testament is interpreted as saying:

But thou, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.

Micah 5:2

Matthew renders this citation as:

And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.

Mt 2:6

Not much difference, you might think, but Ephrathah has been omitted and the prophecy has otherwise failed unless Jesus became, at some stage, the ruler of Israel.

The significance of dropping “Ephrathah” is that, with it included, it is much clearer that a legendary son of Judah, Bethlehem Ephrathah (1 Chr 4:4), 123 of whose children supposedly returned with Zerubabel from exile (Neh 7:26), is meant and not a town. In the quotation from Micah, “thousands” is more accurately translated as “houses” or “clans” as it is in the RSV, and Matthew actually gets it correct in referring to Bethlehem as a prince! Confirmation that the reference is to an aristocratic “father” and not a place is that the pronouns and adjectives applied to Bethlehem are masculine, whereas towns are uniformly feminine in Hebrew grammar. Since Jesus does not seem to be a member of the House of Bethlehem, Matthew has to pretend that the Bethlehem meant was the town. So, in Matthew, Jesus’s parents came from Bethlehem in Judæa but on returning from Egypt they settled in Nazareth in Galilee. Jesus was born at home in a house in Bethlehem. In Mark, Jesus is simply of Nazareth and Bethlehem is not mentioned.

In Luke, the Holy Family lived in Nazareth and went to Bethlehem to be taxed, where Jesus was born in a stable. The Emperor Augustus decreed that “all the world should be taxed”, and each man was to go, with his family, to the city of his fathers. This meant a journey of eighty miles for the poor carpenter and his pregnant wife, and since every family in Judæa had to get to the city of his ancestor of a thousand years earlier, Judæa must have presented a highly interesting spectacle. The most practical government of ancient times, the Roman, is supposed to have ordered this piece of lunacy, through the Governor Cyrenius (Quirinius). But we learn from the historian Josephus that what Cyrenius really did was a much smaller matter, and that it was done in the year 6 AD, or ten years after the death of Herod. Moreover, northern Palestine was not under Cyrenius, but under the independent prince Herod Antipas and the Jews had so little in the way of tax-registers that in the year 66 AD they had to calculate the population from the number of paschal lambs.

A papyrus discovered in Egypt in 1905 AD and now kept in the British Museum is an edict dated 104 AD of the Prefect of Egypt, Gaius Vibius Maximus, declaring that a census by households had begun and that everyone away from their normal administrative district had to return to their own “hearths” to register, unless they had a sound reason for registering in a town because they had some essential function. Dishonest apologists tell us that this is the same as moving to the district of their ancestors, just as it was supposed to have been in the bible narratives. The whole sense of it was that people who were working away from home had to return home to be counted unless they had some duty that could not be left unattended, when they could register their presence locally. In the bible, Joseph’s “hearth” was supposedly established in Nazareth and he had no reason to go to Bethlehem, some notional ancestral region.

The birth arrived, and it was romantic, in the manger of a stable, usually depicted as a cave. The cave at Bethlehem said to be the birthplace of Jesus was, the Christian father Jerome tells us, actually a rock shrine to the god Tammuz (Adonis—Lord) whose symbol was a cross. The Christians took over a Pagan sacred site as they did many times over, and adopted the cave, a common symbol of Pagan religions. Apollo, Cybele, Demeter, Hercules, Hermes, Ion, Mithras and Poseidon were all adored in caves. Hermes and Dionysos were wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in mangers.

By introducing the village of Bethlehem, Luke and Matthew connect Jesus as messiah with David the warrior king whose home town this was. There is nothing else in the gospels to associate Jesus with Bethlehem. In Luke 1:26, Nazareth is a city! But Nazareth was probably not even a village—it did not exist until Christianity became the official religion of the Empire in the fourth century AD when Helena, the mother of Constantine, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was horrified to find Nazareth did not exist. She named an obscure site in a suitable location Nazareth to fit the story.

Neither Luke nor Matthew refer to the birth story again and indeed it contradicts the main story. Presumably his family or at least his mother would have been aware of all that feting by kings and shepherds, and glory in the heavens, and the reason for it all. Yet later they are continually puzzled and disappointed by Jesus’s behaviour. And why bother trying to establish a divine conception when both refer to Joseph in the main narrative as the father of Jesus. The Ebionites accepted Joseph as the natural father.

Jesus himself never claimed to have been born miraculously. He did not once allude to it, though it is hard to see why he should not have done to prove his divinity if, as Christians claim, he was divine. The Virgin Birth was tacked on to Luke and Matthew, years after the event, to prove Jesus’s divinity. and to hype up the new god. Yet now most Christians are outraged if its truth is questioned.

The mystical Book of the Revelation of John the Divine does not mention it, though it would be perfect for inclusion in such an allegorical piece. None of the Jewish patriarchs were born of virgins and, though older women beyond the menopause had their wombs “opened” to conceive Isaac, Jacob and Samuel, no divine impregnation was suggested.