The Nativity of Jesus

Both Matthew and Luke place Jesus's birth at Bethlehem, but the two Gospels reach that location and narrate the surrounding events quite differently. Luke frames the birth around a Roman census that brings Joseph and the pregnant Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the ancestral city of David, where Jesus is born and laid in a manger because there was no room at the inn, a phrase whose translation and precise meaning continue to be debated by scholars. Matthew, by contrast, does not mention a census or a journey from Nazareth at all, and appears instead to assume that Joseph and Mary already lived in Bethlehem, only relocating to Nazareth later, after their return from Egypt, because Matthew's narrative requires a specific explanation for how the family came to live there instead.

Matthew places the birth during the reign of Herod the Great, who is independently known to have died in 4 BCE, while Luke ties his account to a census under the Roman governor Quirinius, independently attested but dated by the historian Josephus to 6 CE, a full decade after Herod's death, a discrepancy scholars have not been able to fully reconcile.

Neither Gospel gives an explicit year using a dating system directly comparable to modern chronology, and the widely used calendar era counting years from Jesus's birth, established centuries later by the monk Dionysius Exiguus, is now generally regarded by historians as having miscalculated the actual year by several years in either direction.

The date of 25 December for Christmas is first securely attested in the fourth century CE, and historians have proposed two main explanations for its selection, neither universally agreed upon: one links it to the Roman winter solstice and the feast of Sol Invictus, celebrated on or near the same date, suggesting the Christian feast was positioned to supplant or absorb a existing pagan Roman festival; the other, sometimes called the calculation theory, derives it independently from the fixed 25 March date of the Annunciation, itself calculated from an older tradition associating that date with the crucifixion, on the reasoning that a great prophet's conception and death should fall on the same calendar day. Most historians regard the two explanations as not mutually exclusive, and some evidence supports each.

Modern critical scholarship, following the analysis Raymond Brown set out in his standard commentary on the infancy narratives, treats Bethlehem as the birthplace assigned by both Matthew and Luke primarily because Hebrew Bible prophecy, particularly a passage in the book of Micah, named it as the expected birthplace of a coming ruler from David's line, raising the possibility that theological expectation shaped the reported birthplace rather than the reverse.

None of this uncertainty is treated by mainstream Christian tradition as undermining the core claim that Jesus was born and that his birth is theologically central to Christian faith; the debate concerns specific historical details of place, date and surrounding circumstance that the two independent Gospel accounts describe in ways not fully reconcilable with each other or with the wider historical record.