The Bible is such a pickle. There are accounts of the nativity in Matthew and Luke only. Matthew has the Wise Men, Luke has the Shepherds. Neither has both. It looks like Luke didn’t like Magi; he has a go at them in Acts, which he may well have also written. They are not kings, of course, but magician people, maybe astrologers, which would explain the star. And there is no mention of there being three of them. We get Gold, Frankincense and Myrhh, three gifts, so we extrapolate this to three magi. In some traditions there are ten of them. Herod commands the slaughter of the innocents in Matthew. Herod died in 6 BCE, so it’s not clear why he would have been around when Jesus was born. There is no documenatry evidence of the massacre of the innocents, not even in Josephus who writes at some length about Herod, including his misdeeds, and does not mention it. In Mark, the original of the gospels, there is no Nativity scene. It starts with the grown-up Jesus of Nazareth. So, all in all, as usual in the gospels it’s a bit of a copy and paste job.
When you think Mark was written 70 years after the event, Matthew and Luke maybe 80 or 85 years after and John even later than that, it is not surprising that these are contradictory accounts. They were not eye-witnesses, they didn’t know anyone who was. They were written in Greek. Jesus spoke Aramaic. We know that Peter couldn’t write. Jesus may have been illiterate too. There is no reason to suppose that these accounts are much more than a set of superstitions. You get the idea. A man was surprised at a big gathering of people that there were enough loaves for quite a few of them. He told that to his mate who wasn’t there. It soon becomes a word-of-mouth miracle. Even today, with our better means of verifying information and post-Enlightenment mentalities, conspiracy theories abound. Merry Christmas.
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