The Nativity
History and Legend
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The Nativity is the very heart of the Christian tradition. For more than 2,000 years, the story of Jesus’ birth has been told and retold, mythologized and sentimentalized. In The Nativity, Geza Vermes untangles centuries of storytelling and places the birth and the events surrounding it within their historical context.
Vermes examines every aspect of the Christmas story: the prophetic star, the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, the miraculous birth in the stable, the arrival of the magi, and the murderous decree of Herod. Delving into all the available evidence—including the New Testament Infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, Jewish documents of the period, and classical literary and historical sources—Vermes explains where actual history ends and legend begins.
A masterful work of biblical scholarship, The Nativity penetrates the deeper meaning of the New Testament. By clarifying what belongs to real history and what derives from man’s hopeful and creative religious imagination, it gives readers a new and more powerful understanding of the events celebrated every Christmas season.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite the cover's gold-stamped Old English script and stylized medieval Nativity scene, this book does not belong in a display of inspirational Christmas gifts for great-aunts, unless the aunties are willing to consider that Matthew and Luke often contradict each other; that Jesus was probably born in the spring; that "virgin" may simply have meant prepubescent; that the census that supposedly brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem never happened (and anyway, Jesus was more likely born in Nazareth); or that virgin births and guiding stars were quite common in classical literature of the time. As Vermes notes, "the truth ...belongs only very slightly to history and mostly derives from man's hopeful and creative religious imagination." Vermes, perhaps the world's foremost authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, writes as a scholar, not as an iconoclast. Dismayed that Christmas "has become the climax of a season of overspending, overeating and uncontrolled merrymaking," he wants to set the record straight. Some readers, however even those who value understanding the first-century historical and literary context may not be satisfied with his conclusion that "the ultimate purpose of the Infancy Gospels seems to be the creation of a prologue, enveloping the newborn Jesus with an aura of marvel and enigma."
