Of course it’s just a story: no star, no manger, no trip to Bethlehem, no angel. But the magic and meaning isn’t lost by calling it what it is: a story. Rather, the story communicates something the truth never could. Christmas isn’t less because it’s a story; if it weren’t a good story, it wouldn’t be Christmas.

            There are four canonical gospels in the New Testament:  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  Two of them have Christmas stories:  Matthew and Luke.  What we know as The Christmas Story is a combination of the Matthew and Luke stories, plus some other additions, but the two stories are actually very different.

            In Luke, the story begins with Zechariah, the husband of Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth.  Zechariah is told by Gabriel, an angel, that Elizabeth is about to become pregnant and give birth to a son who will be John the Baptist.

            When Elizabeth is in the sixth month of her pregnancy, Gabriel appears to Mary, a virgin pledged to be married to Joseph.  Gabriel tells Mary that she has found favor with God and will give birth to the Son of God.  She asks how this can be and the angel says she will be made pregnant by the Holy Spirit.  Gabriel tells her to name the child, “Jesus”.

            In response to the news, Mary speaks the poem we call the Magnificat.  And there’s a pleasing scene where Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth, and the unborn baby, John, stirs in Elizabeth’s womb when he hears Mary’s voice.

            Next, in Luke’s Christmas story, we learn that Mary and Joseph are required to travel from Nazareth, where they live, down to Bethlehem as part of a census required by Caesar Augustus.  It’s Luke that tells us there was no room at the Inn.  And it’s Luke who tells the story of the shepherds being visited by an angel, and then the shepherds rushing to see the baby laying in the manger.

            Luke’s Christmas story ends with Jesus being presented at the Temple as an infant, following Jewish law, and then Joseph and Mary take their baby back home to Nazareth.  In the next story in Luke, Jesus is twelve years old and teaching at the synagogue.

            Matthew’s Christmas story, begins with Joseph discovering that his supposedly virgin fiancée, Mary, is pregnant.  He means to leave her for not being faithful to him but in a dream an angel appears to him and tells him that her pregnancy was caused by the Holy Spirit.  So, Joseph marries her.

            In the next passage, Jesus is already born.  It begins, “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod…”

            Everything else about Jesus’ birth comes from Luke, not Matthew.  In Matthew, there’s no mention of Caesar Augustus.  There’s no census or tax.  There’s no trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem.  There’s no “no room at the inn” and there’s no stable and no manger.  In Matthew, it seems that Mary and Joseph are already residents of Bethlehem.  The place where Jesus is born is called a house, presumably Joseph and Mary’s house.  And there are no shepherds in Matthew.

            It’s from Matthew, though, that we get the story of the three Magi.  “Magi” is a title related to our English word magician.  So these guys are wisemen or astrologers.  Nowhere in the Bible are these visitors referred to as Kings, by the way; that’s a much later addition to the story.

            Matthew tells the story of the Magi following the star.  The Magi arrive in Judea looking for the Messiah.  King Herod, hears about the Magi and calls them to his palace.  He tells them that when they find the baby they should come back to tell Herod, so Herod can go worship the baby also.  But secretly, Herod feels threatened by the birth of this baby, prophesized to become the King of the Jews.  He wants the Magi to identify him for Herod, so Herod can have the baby killed.

The star guides the Magi to Mary and Joseph’s house.   They give Jesus their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  But then, having learned in a dream about Herod’s plan, they go home without telling Herod.

            The next part of Matthew’s story is a story known as “The Flight Into Egypt”, which is the violent ending to Matthew’s Christmas story.

Herod, knowing that somewhere in Bethlehem the future King of the Jews has been born, but not knowing which baby, orders that every boy in Bethlehem under two years of age should be killed.

Ugly stuff.

            But Joseph, who had been warned about Herod’s plan (again in a dream) escapes with Mary and Jesus into Egypt, and the family stays there until Herod himself dies and it’s safe to return.

            That’s Matthew’s Christmas story.  The next passage in Matthew is Jesus as an adult meeting John the Baptist.

            So you might wonder, why does Luke say that Mary and Joseph are from Nazareth, but Matthew says they live in Bethlehem?  You might wonder why if there truly were a census that required masses of people to travel from one place to another, why doesn’t Matthew mention it?  If Herod ordered a “slaughter of the innocents” in Bethlehem around the time of Jesus’ birth, why doesn’t Luke mention it?  Why are there no shepherds in Matthew and no star or Magi in Luke?

            There are other parts of the Christmas story, too, as we know it, that aren’t in either Luke or Matthew.  Tired, pregnant Mary being led on the back of a donkey?  That’s not in Luke.  And in Matthew, Mary doesn’t travel anywhere because she’s already at home in Bethlehem.

            Nor does Luke mention any other animals in the stable.  No ox.  No lamb.  No cooing dove.  No Little Drummer Boy.

            Here’s another detail you probably thought was in the Bible but actually isn’t:  nowhere does the Bible say that Mary and Joseph were poor.  In fact, Joseph is said to be a skilled craftsman, so he was more likely middle-class, as much as that label applies to ancient culture.

            And there’s no snow in the biblical Christmas story.  Neither Matthew nor Luke make any reference to the time of year.  It wasn’t until a few centuries later that December 25 was assigned to be Jesus’ birthday, not coincidentally the same date when the Romans celebrated the solstice as Sol Invictus, the birthday of the sun:  S U N.  So with a winter date assigned for Christmas, suddenly the scene takes place in the cold and snow, when it never had before.

            Besides Matthew and Luke there are several other non-canonical books that have stories of Jesus’ birth.  In most of them he’s born in a cave, not a stable or house.  In many of them there’s a midwife with Mary, an addition to the creche that neither Luke nor Matthew mentions.

In the gospel of Mark there’s no birth story at all.  Mark begins with John the Baptist and we first meet Jesus as an adult.

            The gospel of John begins not with a birth story and “Away in a Manger” but with the phrase, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  After that mystical beginning, John, like Mark, introduces Jesus as an adult being baptized by John.

            The Christmas Story, as we tell it today, as we told it last week in our children’s Christmas pageant, is a mash-up of two very different stories from Matthew and Luke, ignoring several contradictions between the two, leaving out some ugly passages that ruin the holiday spirit, plus some additions to the scene like snow and the animals in the stable that were added centuries later.

            So in our Opening Hymn we sang the line, “From afar three magi journeyed to that stable rude and bare” taking the characters from Matthew and dropping them into the scene from Luke.

What to make of all these gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions?

I hope it’s not too shocking to hear your minister say that the most likely conclusion drawn from the evidence of the contradictory Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke and the non-canonical gospels, and the fact that neither Mark nor John tell a birth story at all, is that the Christmas story is total fiction.

            It’s just a story.

            One line of Biblical interpretation holds that every word of the Bible is literally true.  The Gospel stories are the Gospel truth, as it were.  But an honest reading of the plain text of any part of the Bible shows that just isn’t possible.  The Bible is filled with inaccuracies, impossibilities, and contradictions with the historical and archaeological record as well as self-contradictions within its own text.  So, unless you have some religious reason to read Matthew and Luke as a documentary of “the way it really happened”, then it’s best to dispense with a literal reading of the Christmas story.

            A skeptical reading of the Christmas story is to do what Margaret Gooding referred to in the reading we used for our Call to Worship.  That is, to grant that the Christmas story refers to real events, but reinterpret the details, not as Matthew and Luke did, as miracles pointing to a supernatural savior, but as misunderstandings by ancient people with limited scientific knowledge.

            In this version of the Christmas story, a star, or something like a star, is assumed to have actually appeared in the night sky around the time that Jesus is supposed to have been born.  Something big and strange in the sky that ancient people might interpret as a miraculous sign.  Later astronomers searched for likely candidates.  Johannes Kepler thought the star might have been a conjunction of the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars that he calculated had happened in the year 6 BC.  Halley’s comet would have been in the sky in 12 BC; that’s another candidate.  Contemporary sources in China mention two Nova that appeared in the years 5 and 4 BC.

            So, like Margaret Gooding, we start out hearing a children’s story, “They told me that when Jesus was born a star appeared in the heavens above the place where the young child lay” a story that we believe, because, like her, “When I was very young I had no trouble believing wondrous things; I believed in the star.”

            And then later, “They told me a super nova appeared in the heavens in its dying burst of fire.”  And now we believe the nova story because, like Margaret Gooding, “When I was older and believed in science and reason I believed the story of the star explained.”

            Or take the story of the virgin birth, for another example.

            Both Matthew and Luke tell us that Mary is a virgin when she conceives Jesus by the Holy Spirit.  In Luke, the angel Gabriel tells Mary what is going to happen.  That’s called “The Annunciation”.  But nowhere in Luke does it say that Joseph is made aware.  In Matthew, the angel appears to Joseph and explains to Joseph why the woman who is pledged to him in marriage is found to be pregnant.  In Matthew there’s no mention that Mary is ever told what’s going on.

            A literal reading of the Christmas story would say that Mary really was a virgin because the Bible says so.  Jesus really was conceived by the Holy Spirit.  And the two stories don’t contradict each other, they complement each other.  You have to put them together to get the whole story, just the way that you have to include the shepherds from Luke and the Magi from Matthew.

            A skeptical reading of the story is that Jesus was conceived in the normal human way and that Joseph is the father.  And if Mary was pregnant before they were married, well that’s certainly not the first time that ever happened.  Luke or Matthew, or someone else, came up with the Holy Spirit story as one of several attempts to make details of Jesus’ birth fit their readings of the prophecies about the Messiah.

            But there is a third way to read the Christmas Story, I think better than either the literal or skeptical readings.

            And that’s to read the story, not as “miraculous but true” and not as “true but not miraculous” but simply as not true.  False.  Made up.  The creative invention of a purposeful, imaginative story-teller.

            But I say that with no disrespect.  I don’t mean that as blasphemy the way the Bible-literalists would hear it.

            I don’t mean made up as a lie intended to deceive, I mean made up as fiction:  a story.  It’s just a story.  But not “just” a story implying that it’s something silly we might dismiss as having no value.  It’s a good story created for the same reason most stories are written and told, because the author had something to say, something important and helpful and valuable, and a story was the best way to tell it.

            So Hemingway writes The Old Man and the Sea, and Mark Twain writes Huckleberry Finn, and Chaucer writes The Canterbury Tales.  And Eric Carle writes The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

            Luke and Matthew wrote their gospels about 100 years after Jesus’ birth, and about 70 years after his death.  No one who was at Jesus’s birth was alive when they wrote their stories.  And until Jesus began to attract attention in the few years before his death, he was just an anonymous peasant, and nobody kept records of that sort of person.  So Mark, who writes his gospel about 20 years before Luke and Matthew, begins his version with the earliest thing probably anybody really remembered about Jesus:  that John baptized him as an adult.  The important thing for Mark about Jesus is that Jesus as an adult created a movement for social change based on Jewish ethical teachings of justice, liberty, and equality. So he starts his story there.

            But twenty years later, with the memory of Jesus fading even further into the past, and the social revolution Jesus preached about not happening, Jesus’ followers needed something more to keep the movement alive and attract new converts.  So when Matthew and Luke sat down to write their gospels, they had the gospel of Mark in front of them, but they decided that the hero of their story needed an origin story.  Something exciting, larger than life.  Something that shows this guy was really special.  Something that would really grab the reader’s attention.  Maybe something supernatural, like the origin stories of the Greek and Roman gods, and the gods of Egypt, or Buddha and Zarathustra, as Margaret Gooding reminds us.

            So they made one up.

            And it worked.

            Here we are, two thousand years later, still telling the mashed-up Christmas story of Matthew and Luke.  Despite the plot holes.  And leaving out the weird bits.  But we keep telling the story because it’s a good story.

            If it weren’t a good story, we would have stopped telling it, and stopped asking our kids to act it out every year.  But because the mashed-up magical story is a good story, we tell it, and we embellish it and punch up the drama, and thus we also keep reminding ourselves of the meanings in the story hidden behind the events of the story.

            The skeptical story is a kind of a story, too, of course, but it’s not as good a story.  A traveling star is a better story than a conjunction of planets.  A magical birth with a virgin and a Holy Spirit is a better story than a young couple a little too eager to wait for their wedding day.  A long, hard ride on the back of a donkey from Nazareth to Bethlehem is a better story than if they already live in Bethlehem.  It’s a better story if the couple is poor and the birth takes place in a stable rather than a house or a cave.  It’s a better story if there are sympathetic animals around.  And maybe a little drummer boy.  And with some visiting kings along with the Magi.

            We know it isn’t true.  It’s a story.  But we tell the story anyway, because the story is true in a deeper sense than getting the documentary facts correct.  

            It’s true, because, as we sang in our Opening Hymn, a story of a mother’s tender love reminds us “So may we when life turns hard find in love our stay and guard.”  It’s true, because a story of shepherd’s rushing to see a baby, reminds us, “So may we this happy morn honor every child that’s born.”  It’s true, because a story of wisemen offering “rich and rare” presents, reminds us, “So may we our gifts bestow, whether we be high or low.”  It’s true, because a story, better sometimes than mundane fact, reminds us that like “the angels from on high”, “So may we, with heart that sings, share the truth this season brings.”

It’s a good story, so we tell it, which is important.  And without being actually true, the Christmas story tells a different truth:  this truth, as Margaret Gooding reminds us:  “Some bright star shines somewhere in the heavens each time a child is born.  Who knows what it may foretell?  Who knows what uncommon life may yet again unfold, if we but give it a chance?”