Well i enjoy a good story but....
"Early Christians showed little interest in celebrating the birth of their savior. The Gospels of Mark and John have no stories of Jesus' birth. Paul doesn't mention them. Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke were written more than a generation after Jesus' death. They are hardly video-tape replays.
It was the competition of emerging Christianity with the mystery cults, most notably sun-worshipping Mithraism, that spurred interest in creating a "Christmas" celebration. The Romans celebrated December 25 as the "Natalis Invicti," "the birthday of the unconquered God," the sun, as a winter solstice festival. It was to that popular pagan festival that the 4th century Christians attached the birth of Jesus. It was quite simply "a pact with pagans."
What really happened on the "first Christmas"? The time of year is unknown. March 28, April 2, April 19, and May 20 all had supporters, both because of astrology and numerology. After all the shepherds tended their flocks around Bethlehem by night only from mid-March to mid-November. They are never out during the cold midwinter season. The first mention of the birth of Jesus on December 25, the date of the Roman Saturnalia, was in the year 336 CE. Since most Christians lived in the Roman Empire, that date won out. It was not until 1223 that the Christmas nativity scene with people and animals was built by St. Francis of Assisi.
The virgin birth. Such notables as Plato, Romulus, Augustus, and Alexander the Great were also thought to have been supernaturally born of virgins. As Jesus rose in stature, it was natural that he should join their company. The Hebrew word for "virgin" is more properly translated "young woman" or "young maiden." In the Gospel of Matthew we have Joseph wondering about the pregnancy of his beloved before they had even lived together. He was about ready to call the whole thing off until an angel set him straight and told him that God was responsible. And, technically speaking, Jesus was illegitimate, since Joseph was only betrothed - engaged - to Mary.
Bethlehem was probably not the birth place; Jesus' parents lived in Nazareth, at that time a rather inconsequential village. And so, later writers wanted to place Jesus in the tradition of the predictions of the Hebrew prophet Micah of a Messiah who would be born in Bethlehem, the historic birthplace of King David. Luke fabricated the story of the famous trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem, inserting the story of a tax payment that was instituted years later.
As to angels, which are very popular today, but no more real now than then: While the Middle-Eastern nativity story used angels as the heavenly symbol of choice, at the equally miraculous birth of the Buddha in India, elephants appeared in the sky; in China the birth of Confucius was accompanied by dragons in the heavens. One supposes that the advantage of Christian angels over Buddhist elephants and Confucian dragons is that they could sing.
The star in the East is problematic. While some Christian believers point to a convergence of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces in 7 B.C.E., the Jesus Seminar and most scholars simply find the luminous star a deft poetic touch. Stars had religious meaning in those days, and the author of Matthew wanted the Messiah's birth to square with ancient Hebrew texts."
More on that old fraud Santa in my next post (he's mot really fat...just big boned)
