What the Bible does not tell you about Christmas

The squalor of a borrowed stable is a far cry from the sanitised nativity scenes most of us are familiar with. But the real beauty of the Christmas story is that our creator God was willing to fully enter into our world - with all its brokenness, dirt and need

My oldest child had his school Nativity play last week. I sat beaming with pride as he took to the stage wearing his innkeeper costume. Mary had just ridden her donkey to Bethlehem and three kings stood off stage, waiting to make their entrance.

Let me say right now - I love Christmas Nativities. I love the plays and I love the scenes that you find at church or on Christmas cards. Mary and Joseph nestled in a cosy barn, shepherds and wise men looking on in wonder. The baby Jesus, fast asleep in his warm blanket. For believers and unbelievers alike, there are few stories more familiar than the one we delight to hear at Christmas - the birth of Jesus.

And yet, what if this Nativity story isn’t actually the one that the Bible tells? How much of what we think happened actually did happen? Let us take five established Nativity ‘facts’: