The Christmas story

The Christmas story tells how Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Luke tells it with the manger, the angels, and the shepherds (Luke 2:1–20), and Matthew with Joseph’s dream and the wise men (Matthew 1:18–2:12). Luke’s telling is the Christmas Eve Gospel in most mainline churches, and most children’s pageants follow it.

The story in brief

The emperor Caesar Augustus ordered “that all the world should be enrolled” (Luke 2:1). Joseph belonged to King David’s family, so he went from Nazareth to Bethlehem, “David’s city,” with Mary, who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born.

She gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a feeding trough, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Luke 2:7

Shepherds were in the fields nearby, “keeping watch by night over their flock” (Luke 2:8). An angel of the Lord appeared, and they were terrified. The angel said, “Don’t be afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be to all the people” (Luke 2:10). A Savior was born, and they would find him in a feeding trough. Then a multitude of angels praised God, saying, “Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace” (Luke 2:14).

The shepherds hurried to Bethlehem, found the baby, and told everyone what they had heard. “But Mary kept all these sayings, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).

Matthew tells the birth from Joseph’s side. An angel in a dream told Joseph to take Mary as his wife, because her child was from the Holy Spirit, and Matthew hears in the birth Isaiah’s promise of a child called Immanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23).

The setting and background

Luke sets the birth in the reign of Augustus, the first Roman emperor (27 BCE–14 CE). An inscription from Priene in Asia Minor, from about 9 BCE, hailed Augustus as a savior and called his birthday the beginning of good news for the world. The Lutheran scholar Stephen Hultgren notes that Luke’s angel gives that language to a baby in a feeding trough.

Bethlehem, a few miles south of Jerusalem, was the hometown of David, who kept his father’s sheep there as a boy (1 Samuel 16:11). Its name means “house of bread” in Hebrew.

A manger was a feeding trough for animals. Luke’s word for “inn,” kataluma, is the word he also uses for the “guest room” of the Last Supper (Luke 22:11). Kenneth Bailey, a Presbyterian scholar who taught for decades in the Middle East, described village homes where the animals came inside at night, close to the family’s living space. He argued that relatives took Joseph and Mary in and, with the guest room full, made a place for Mary beside the mangers.

Shepherds were working people out with their flocks at night, and Hultgren calls them “lowly shepherds.”

What the story means

Christmas celebrates the Incarnation, the church’s teaching that the eternal Son of God became a human being in Jesus. John says it in one sentence: “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). Luke tells the same mystery as a story, in which God comes as a newborn who must be wrapped, fed, and carried.

The angel brings joy “to all the people” (Luke 2:10), and the first to hear it are shepherds at work in the night. At Christmas the church hears a welcome for everyone, especially anyone who has found no room, and a peace greater than the one proclaimed in Augustus’s name.

How the early church read it

Justin Martyr, in the second century, wrote that since Joseph “could not find a lodging in that village,” he stayed in a cave nearby (Dialogue with Trypho 78). Origen later wrote that visitors to Bethlehem were shown “the cave where He was born, and the manger in the cave” (Against Celsus 1.51).

Gregory of Nazianzus, preaching on Christmas around 380, urged his hearers to glorify God with the shepherds and sing with the angels. He told them to honor the manger like the beasts in Isaiah, where “the ox knows his owner, and the donkey his master’s crib” (Isaiah 1:3). Artists drew on that verse when they set an ox and a donkey beside the manger, as in the Nubian painting from Faras Cathedral on this page. In 1223 Francis of Assisi set up a manger with hay, an ox, and a donkey at Greccio in Italy, the first Christmas crèche.

What modern scholars notice

Raymond E. Brown’s The Birth of the Messiah shows that Matthew and Luke agree on the core: Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph, and the reign of Herod. Only Luke has the shepherds, and only Matthew has the star and the wise men. Historians find no empire-wide census under Augustus, and the census of Judea under Quirinius, recorded by Josephus, came in 6 CE, about ten years after Herod died. Brown and many others read Luke’s census as a way of setting the birth on the stage of world history. Christians hold such details in different ways, some as history and others as the frame of a deeper truth.

Questions for reflection or discussion

1. Why do you think the good news came first to shepherds working at night?
2. What does it say about God that Jesus’ first bed was a feeding trough?
3. The angel’s news is for “all the people.” Who might need to hear it this Christmas?
4. What part of the story would you like to ponder this year, as Mary did?
5. Where could you make room for Christ this Christmas?

A prayer

God of glory, on a crowded night in Bethlehem you came to us as a child. Give us the shepherds’ eagerness to come and see and the angels’ joy to share the good news with all the people. Make room in us for Christ and for one another. Amen.

For kids

Long ago, the emperor made a rule. Everyone had to be counted in their family’s town. So Mary and Joseph walked to Bethlehem. Mary was going to have a baby very soon.

Bethlehem was full of people. There was no room for them in the guest room. So they stayed where the animals slept.

That night, Mary’s baby was born. She wrapped him in strips of cloth. She laid him in a manger. A manger is a box that holds food for animals. The baby’s name was Jesus.

Out in the fields, shepherds were watching their sheep. Suddenly an angel came! The shepherds were scared. The angel said, “Don’t be afraid.” The angel had good news for all the people. A Savior was born in Bethlehem!

Then the sky was full of angels. They praised God. The shepherds hurried to Bethlehem. They found the baby in the manger, just as the angel said.

Christmas shows us that God came close to us. Jesus came as a tiny baby. He came for everyone. He came for you!