How did it arise? One answer is that it was the work of an all-powerful God intervening in human affairs. For believers, in theological “logic”, such a statement is impregnable, but it is insufficient for those who demand natural explantions using standard historical methods. Recent scholarship, assisted by the Dead Sea Scrolls, has thrown much new light on the nature of the Judaism which produced the Christian “Jesus of Nazareth”. To understand the beginings of Christianity one must first understand the Jews of the first century AD.

Little in the New Testament is there by accident. Most of these writings has a purpose, but the authors of the New Testament had habits of thought which were alien to those of the twentieth century. They considered it legitimate to describe what ought to have happened without bothering too much about what did . They accepted the Jesus was the Messiah and so messianic things must have happened to him!

The sources for our Christmas story are the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke. The other two gospels, Mark and John, do not mention it at all, nor does any other part of the New Testament.

The authors of Matthew and Luke were evidently writing from different viewpoints—Matthew was aimed at a Jewish readership and Luke at a gentile one. Their accounts of what ought to have happened are also different and inconsistent.

In Matthew, the story is of a virgin, Mary, betrothed to a man called Joseph. Both, apparently, are residents of Bethlehem. Mary becomes pregnant and Joseph is assured in a dream that this is the work of the Holy Ghost and so he does not put her away. The baby is born in the ordinary way—with no mention of a stable or a manger—and soon afterwards the family is visited by wise men from the east who bring gifts. King Herod hears from the wise men of the birth of a royal pretender and orders all infants in Bethlehem to be slaughtered. But Joseph gets a warning in a dream of Herod’s intentions and escapes with his family to Egypt. Later, on the inspiration of another dream of Joseph’s, the family settles in Nazareth.

The Luke account, on the other hand, has no wise men, no slaughter of the innocents, no flight to Egypt and no dreams by Joseph. Here, a virgin, Mary, is betrothed to Joseph, both of them living in Nazareth. Mary becomes pregnant after a direct revelation to her from an angel. Joseph’s reaction is unrecorded. Because of a unique form of census, Joseph has to go from Nazareth to his ancestral town, Bethlehem, to be registered. There is no evidence, apart from Luke, that such a strange census ever took place. It would have been a chaotic affair, uncharacteristic of the Bomans. In Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary find the inn full up and the baby is born in a stable. Shepherds learn of the birth from an angel and go to the stable to be the first to adore Jesus. Matthew tries to relate the circumstances of the birth of Jesus to traditions associated with the births of other Jewish holy men, notably Moses. These traditions are to be found both in the Old Testament and among non-scriptural Jewish legends. The Old Testament version of Moses is that he was born at a time when Pharaoh was slanghtering Jewish male babies. His mother saved him by hiding him among reeds on the edge of the river. Non-biblical writings supplemented this account by telling how both Pharaoh and Moses’s parents learnt through dreams of the future greatness of the infant. The parallel between the infancy stories is more than a coincidence.

Similarly, the star, the wise men, the placing of the birth at Bethlehem and Joseph’s descent from the royal House of David are all fitted to Jewish tradition and scriptural prophecies. The reasoning of the writer and the early editors of the script appears to have been that Jesus the Nazarene by his life has shown himself to be the Lord’s Messiah, so, his birth must have been in accordance with Old Testament prophecies. Individual Old Testament passages, collected together and interpreted in ways which then were normal, were picked out to form a birth story.

The Luke story is more consistent than that of Matthew and less related to Jewish requirements. It relies upon angels as messengers instead of upon dreams. It gives an active role to Mary and minimises Joseph. It also gives Joseph’s genealogy but with the names, even that of his father, completely different from Matthew’s version. The stable and the shepherds have little theological purpose except to copy other religions. The story creaks only in the census, which is a way of setting the birth in Bethlehem rather than Nazareth. Both the Matthew and Luke birth stories are apparently the newest part of the New Testament. Even after they were first written new material continued to be added.

However, the virgin birth was not to be found in Jewish tradition, but only in gentile Pagan mythology. Mainstream Jews, unlike some Pagan groups, attached no religious value to virginity, though one section of the Essene sect, described in the Dead Sea Scrolls, had introduced to Judaism the practice of celibacy. Some Jewish heroes had been born of mothers who had passed the ordinary age for child-bearing, as with Sarah and Isaac or Hannah and Samuel. There was a special divine providence to “open the womb” but no suggestion that a human father was unnecessary. Matthew is far from clear on the “virgin” birth. What exactly was a “virgin” in those times? There were two definitions. The first corresponded to the modern one, that of a girl whose hymen remained intact, but a second appears in the earliest Jewish legal codes, the Tosephta and the Mishnah, both of which belong to the first two centuries AD. One rabbi quoted in the Tosephta is Eliezer, who was flourishing in the period 90-l30 AD. Eliezer is asked: “Who is a virgin?” His answer is: “She who has never seen blood, even if she is married and has had children”. The Mishnah, the main rabbinical work of the same period, fits in with this. A virgin is “she that has never yet suffered a flow, even though she was married”. These statements reflect the Jewish distaste for mensruation inherited from the Persian religion. In this period, if a man touched a menstruating woman, even accidentally, he was accounted defiled.

In Jesus’s time it was possible for a woman to bear children without ever having menstruated. A girl was counted marriageable when she was 12 years old and many girls were married at that age. Many such young wives would not have reached puberty in those times when food was harder to come by and everyday life harder than today. They could have been experiencing sex with their husbands without having yet ovulated. At their first ovulation they could have conceived a child. To be “born of a virgin” in this sense might have been not uncommon, but might have marked out sons as specially holy because they had been born of a woman who had never been defiled by menstruation.

How did the non-Jewish theme of a supernatural virgin birth take root in Matthew? The question is especially puzzling in view of the pains taken in the opening verses, before the virgin birth is mentioned, to set out Jesus’s genealogy, the purpose of which was to prove that Jesus was Joseph’s son and an heir of the House of David. The relevant passage ends: “…Jacob begot Joseph the husband of Mary. Of her was born Jesus”. This, in various translations, is the accepted, orthodox text of Matthew. But in one very early version, discovered during the nineteenth century, the relevant passage states specifically: “Joseph, to whom was betrothed the virgin Mary, begot Jesus”.

A possible clue to why the virgin birth got into the text can be found in Matthew’s quotation from Isaiah: “The virgin will conceive and bear a son”. This, at first sight, would appear to bring the idea of a virgin birth within the range of Jewish prophecy, but the quotation is based on a mistranslation. In the original Hebrew, the passage refers not to a “virgin” in any sense of the word but to a “young woman”. The word “virgin” crept in by error in the Greek translation, the Septuagint. The existence of this error is accepted today by all scholars, including the Roman Catholic ones who prepared the Jerusalem Bible. “Virgin” is no longer used in Isaiah, although necessarily it has to be retained in Matthew’s quotation of it.

But once the word “virgin” became part of the Greek version of Matthew, it is easy to imagine a non-Jewish person taking it literally, and erecting a theology upon it. The process would have been the more obvious because he was accustomed to myths of supernatural births. The Greek hero Hercules, to take only one example, was supposed to have been born of a union of Zeus with a mortal woman.