The Nativity
History and Legend
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In a similar format to the astonishingly successful The Passion Professor Geza Vermes now turns his attention to the other key festival in the Christian calendar - Christmas. Vermes articulately and controversially disentangles the Christmas story as we know it, relating it to prophecies in the Old Testament and also to later Christian folklore, putting the nativity into its true historical context. This will be required reading for anyone wanting to know the true story behind the Nativity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite the cover's gold-stamped Old English script and stylized medieval Nativity scene, this book does not belong in a display of inspirational Christmas gifts for great-aunts, unless the aunties are willing to consider that Matthew and Luke often contradict each other; that Jesus was probably born in the spring; that "virgin" may simply have meant prepubescent; that the census that supposedly brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem never happened (and anyway, Jesus was more likely born in Nazareth); or that virgin births and guiding stars were quite common in classical literature of the time. As Vermes notes, "the truth ...belongs only very slightly to history and mostly derives from man's hopeful and creative religious imagination." Vermes, perhaps the world's foremost authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, writes as a scholar, not as an iconoclast. Dismayed that Christmas "has become the climax of a season of overspending, overeating and uncontrolled merrymaking," he wants to set the record straight. Some readers, however even those who value understanding the first-century historical and literary context may not be satisfied with his conclusion that "the ultimate purpose of the Infancy Gospels seems to be the creation of a prologue, enveloping the newborn Jesus with an aura of marvel and enigma."
