by Dick Stewart

Created on: April 02, 2009

Of the various stories Christians consider central to their religion, the nativity of Jesus is perhaps the most important. Theologically, the crucifixion and the resurrection are more significant, but since the Christmas story is the one that is celebrated with such fanfare and commercialism, and marketed so heavily toward children, this is the story that grabs them.

It's a story worthy of George Lucas. A young woman of humble state but royal lineage shows up pregnant before she is legally married. Her fiance accepts her story that God did it, and that the kid will be a superstar. She carries the child while enduring a grueling mid-winter journey, at the end of which she has to give birth in a barn, but it all comes out okay as angels and astrological phenomena guide peasants and three kings to see the child and present him with rich gifts while some kid bangs on a drum. Then they have to flee for their lives.

The Gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest written account of a biography of Jesus, and therefore the closest to whatever source material existed, and it does not mention the nativity at all.

The two later Gospels that do mention it are Luke and Matthew. The later authorship leads skeptics to suppose that they were inventions designed to reinforce the Christian claim that Jesus was the Messiah of Hebrew prophecy. Some scholars who do not have a vested interest in selling the central stories of the Christian church support this view.

Virgin Birth: The purity and uniqueness of Jesus the Christ is wrapped up in the concept of Mary's virginity at the time of his conception. Scripture says that she was visited by the "Holy Spirit," and that was the source of her pregnancy. As it is presented in the bible, with an old woman conceiving first, and her babe "leaping in the womb" upon its mother hearing of Mary's blessing, it's worthy of a soap opera.

While details differ, such virgin conception is not an uncommon idea in the ancient world.

In Hindu mythology, scriptures from early in the Mahabharata era, around 8,000 B.C., say Queen Kunti was impregnated by the god Surya, and later by other gods, so that her husband, under a curse that prevented him from consummating his marriage, could have sons - the five Pandavas, heroes of the epic.

A similar Hindu myth applies to Prtha, an unmarried girl who remained a virgin after being impregnated by the Sun-god. Then there's the 6th century BC Zoroastrian myth of three "saviors," each conceived of a virgin, a procedure

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