In the latest episode of the Truth Driven Thinking podcast, “Bible Geek” and self-professed “Fundamentalist” Robert M. Price discusses many of the historical inaccuracies, mistranslations, and lack of hard evidence surrounding the Christmas Story, and generally reduces my childhood nativity memories into a fine powder. As he is quick to point out, though, he loves Christmas, the myths and the legends, as I do, but let’s be clear on the very tenuous foundation for any real historical significance.

Among the issues he addresses are:

• Why humans have been celebrating a holiday on 25 December very long before the birth of Christ
• Is the “virgin birth” just a case of semantics?
• Why would two of the gospels elucidate the lineage of Joseph back to David if Joseph was just the ‘adopted’ father, anyway?
• How the writer of Matthew likes to play with language, and may have just been retelling the birth of Moses
• How the birth could not have been both ‘at the time of the census’ and ‘during the reign of Herod’
• The myriad of ways the census angle itself is just not credible
• There is more (though not necessarily more credible) evidence pointing to Jesus’ birth at over 100 years B. C. E.
• Was anyone even inhabiting Nazareth when Jesus is supposed to have lived there?
• What were the magi, and how many of them were there?

It’s a completely entrancing and fascinating 90 minutes, interviewed by Stephen L. Gibson, author of Truth Driven Thinking and A Secret of the Universe. It is totally worth your time to listen if you are at all interested in looking at evidence and have a quest for the truth. As Gibson will tell you, this is not to say there’s a claim on the truth, but rather attempts to use reason, historical evidence, and science to give an increasingly accurate approximation of the truth.