That old Bethlehem story

If you tell people there was no ox or ass in the stable where Jesus was born, they sometimes become quite irate, especially if they are convinced Christians. They believe in the marvellous Christmas story, and to deny the ox and ass seems tantamount to denying the Babe of Bethlehem.

Of course, the ox and ass are not in fact mentioned in the Gospels. The artists painted them in, not just because Jesus lay in a manger, but on account of the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘The ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s crib.’

Geza Vermes mentions these beasts as examples of extra-evangelical elements, along with the ‘three kings’, who are not called kings in the Gospels, but magi. That there were three is simply inferred from their threefold gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Our only real sources for the nativity of Jesus are the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, since Mark starts with the grown-up John the Baptist, and the evangelist John starts with the transcendent Logos becoming flesh. Geza Vermes thinks that the two nativity narratives were nailed on to the prototype Matthew and Luke, which do not refer back to them. He also concludes, from the difficulty in reconciling the two accounts, that much is included because it was the sort of thing that seemed suitable to such an elevated subject. ‘The nature of the birth stories and the many fabulous features incorporated in them, angels, dreams, virginal conception, miraculous star,’ bring Dr Vermes to the view that the Infancy Gospels are ‘not the stuff out of which history is made’.

But it is not the miraculous details that are always the most troublesome to fit in. There is the flight to Egypt, to avoid the massacre ordered by Herod (a man much given, according to a few other sources, to murderous violence).