called Nazareth and told Mary that she was going to give birth to a baby, and she was to call him Jesus, the Saviour. Without having sexual intercourse with a man, Mary gave birth to the boy, not in Nazareth, but in the town of Bethlehem. Mary gave birth to Jesus in a stable, because there was no room for her and her fiancé, Joseph, in the inn. The birth was heralded by angels; and Mary had laid the little child in a manger, the Holy Family was visited by shepherds and by wise men from the East, who had been led there by a star.

This story had been taken hold of my imagination long before I ever studied history at school. So powerful was it that I would not readily subject it to the ordinary processes of historical analysis.. I continued, however, to suppose that it was a story with a real historical setting. The Gospel according to Luke dates it most specifically to a time when Ceasar Augustus required that everyone in the Roman Empire should take part in a census. It happened at the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria (Luke 2: 2). Herod was King of Judea at the time (Matthew2: 1). This would seem to place the birth of Jesus very accurately, until you discover that Herod died four years before the Common Era began, and that Quirinius was not the Governor of Syria during the reign of Herod. No historian of the Roman Empire makes any mention of a universal census during the reign of Emperor Augustus...

The story of the baby being born in a stable at Bethlehem because there was no room for him at the inn is one of the most powerful myths ever given to the human race. A myth, however, is what it is. Even if we insist on taking every word of the Bible as literally true, we shall still not be able to find there the myth of Jesus being born in a stable. None of the Gospels state that he was born in a stable, and nearly all the details of the nativity scenes which have inspired great artists, and delighted generations of churhgoers on Christmas Eve, stem neither from history nor from Scripture, but from folk-lore. Once we go into the matter, we discover that the real Jesus, the Jesus of History, is extremely unlikely to have been born in Bethlehem. It is much more probable that he was born in Galilee, where he grew up.

4. Wilson, Colin, Rogue Messiahs: Tales of Self-Proclaimed Saviors, pp. 18-25: The only messiah of that period who is remembered today was called Joshua, better known by the Greek form of his name, Jesus... Study of the scriptures had led him to believe the world would end within the lifetime of people then alive; there would be wars, famines, and earthquakes, and the dead would be brought back to life. The sun would be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, and the stars would fall from the sky.

The message by which we remember Jesus love one’s neighbor and do to others as you’d have them do unto you was already a part of the Jewish tradition. More than a thousand years of oppression the Jews had been enslaved by the pharaoh Rameses II as long ago as 1250 B.C. had developed a spirit of pacifism and submission to the will of God; so Jesus’s injunction to love your enemy was merely a restatement of the Mosaic teaching...

...One of the most fundamental beliefs of Judaism was that the sufferings of the Jews were caused by the sin of their forefather Adam. Paul announced that this “original sin” had been canceled out by the death of Jesus on the cross, so that anyone who became a Christian was now redeemed...

Before 100 A.D. it was clear to everyone that Jesus’ prophecy was not going to be fulfilled. But by that time, Christianity had became widespread that this made no difference. The expectation of the end of the world was now transferred to the