10 Ways to Mess Up Christmas from a Historical Point of View

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10 Ways to Mess Up Christmas from a Historical Point of View 2025-12-31T09:42:52-05:00 Ben Witherington

The wise men were not kings. They may have been counselors and astrologers for kings, but they themselves were not kings. Scratch the ‘We Three Kings’ tune.

Shepherds were not viewed as inherently unclean— The first real king of Israel, namely David had been a shepherd, and had anyone thought of shepherds as inherently unclean you would have had neither the 23^rd Psalm where God is called a shepherd, nor Jesus calling himself that.

The Greek of Lk. 2.6 does not say ‘there was no room in the inn’. Luke has a very different word for inn, namely pandeion—see the parable of the Good Samaritan. Instead, the word both here and in the last supper story means ‘guest room’. Mary and Joseph were not cast out of the Bethlehem Holiday Inn due to no rooms being available. There is no evidence there was an inn in tiny Bethlehem. They went to the ancestral home of Joseph’s family, and because the guest room was already full of relatives, and they needed some privacy, they went to the place either at the back of the house where there was a cave, or under the house, where the beast of burden was fed in a corn crib—i.e. a manger. Notice that CONSIDERABLY later the wise men visit them in ‘the house’ (Mt. 2).

Bethlehem was a tiny village, or as we would say, a one stoplight town. If we were do a reasonable calculation there might have been 3-4 children under 2 when Herod sent his troops to kill the babies. We should not envision a bunch of children butchered in the streets of Bethlehem.

Herod of the Great died somewhere between 2-4 B.C. This means that Jesus was born B.C.— most would say between 4-6 B.C. If the order to kill babies under 2 years of age is any clue, it would perhaps be closer to 6 B.C. In any case, the Magi (from which we get the word magician) came to the house in Bethlehem, long after the shepherds came and went at the time of Jesus’ birth. We owe the miscalculation of the date of Jesus’ birth to a monk named Dionysius. It became part of the calendar in the English speaking world because the venerable Bede accepted Dionysius’ dates, and made them part of what became the standard English B.C. and A.D. calcuations.

The idea of Jesus being born in a barn surrounded by animals is a myth. There is no mention of any animals present at the birth of Jesus at all, nor with Jewish concerns about clean and unclean would there have been. This whole scenario we owe to St. Francis, who loved animals. The nativity scene which puts shepherds, wise men, and animals surrounding the holy family IN A BARN was never a Kodak moment in reality.

While scientists have long mulled over whether the star of Bethlehem was actually a comet, or a conjunction of planets (more likely the latter, since it doesn’t involve rapid movement, but rather an apparent hovering over Bethlehem and the birth place) all this is forgetting that many ancient people believed stars were beings—the heavenly host. It is easier to believe an angel guided the wise men to where the holy family was in Bethlehem, than trying to account for it through natural phenomena.

Herod the Great was indeed, especially in his later years, a paranoid ruler, prepared even to have members of his own family executed if he thought there was going to be an attempted coup. Scholarly attempts to rehabilitation the image of Herod, are misguided. He was only partially Jewish, being also partially Idumean (i.e. Edomite) and it is no wonder many thought of him as an illegitimate king, and not a true Jew.

In order to make sense of the genealogies in Mt. 1 and Lk. 3, one needs to realize that most ancient genealogies were schematized, and left out individuals and whole generations. The Matthean genealogy is patrilineal, leaves out a lot to make the point that Jesus is the perfect heir (the seventh seven) and seeks to show how Jesus was of the line of David, through Joseph, his adoptive father. For good measure, Mary is squeezed into Joseph’s ancestry.com chart. But in truth if Joseph accepted and adopted Jesus as his son, then he was entitled to both his father’s heritage, and also the first share of the inheritance.

Notice as well Mt. 1.25 that says Joseph was not knowing his wife until after Jesus was born. The implication is clear that afterward he did have sexual relations with Mary, and the story goes on to record another six brothers and sisters of Jesus, who are not called either cousins (anepsioi) or step brothers and sisters, from some previous marriage of Joseph. Neither Matthew nor Luke suggests such a scenario. Later ideas about human sexual sharing being tainted or unholy, was certainly not the view of early Jews, who saw sexual sharing as a good gift from God, to fulfill the creation order mandate— ‘be fruitful and multiply’.