Nativity of Jesus

Also called: Birth of Jesus, Christmas story, Adoration of the Magi

A story told in religious scripture.

A story told in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament: the infant Jesus, conceived by Mary through the Holy Spirit, was born in a stable in Bethlehem, the town of David, and shepherds and wise men from the East came to worship him.

This is the story told in Matthew 1–2 and Luke 1–2 of the New Testament. In Luke, Mary of Nazareth is told by the angel Gabriel that she will bear a son through the Holy Spirit. When the emperor Augustus orders a census, she travels with her betrothed, Joseph, to his ancestral town of Bethlehem, and because there is no room at the inn she lays the baby in a manger. Shepherds keeping watch in the fields hear the news from angels and come to see him.

Matthew tells of wise men (magi) from the East who follow a star and bring gold, frankincense and myrrh, and of King Herod, who, fearing the newborn king, orders all the boys of Bethlehem under two years old to be killed, so that Joseph’s family flees to Egypt. Christians celebrate the birth at Christmas; the date of 25 December was set by the church in Rome in the 4th century. In the same century Constantine built the Church of the Nativity over the cave in Bethlehem said to be the birthplace.

Only two of the four Gospels tell of the birth, and their stories differ widely. Both place it in Bethlehem to show Jesus as a descendant of David and the Messiah foretold in the Hebrew Bible, so many scholars think he may in fact have been born in Nazareth, where he grew up. Herod died in 4 BC, which in Matthew’s account puts the birth before then; most scholars place it around 6–4 BC. Our era was fixed in the 6th century by Dionysius Exiguus, who calculated the year of Jesus’ birth a few years off. The census in Luke is known from other sources as the census of the governor Quirinius in AD 6, which does not fit. The magi and the massacre of the innocents are not confirmed by any other historical record.