The First Christmas

The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Birth

The perfect follow-up to The Last Week, Borg and Crossan's The First Christmas is an account of the two nativity narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Borg and Crossan focus on discovering the actual literary story that the Gospels tell. Borg and Crossan feel that history has biased our readings of these texts; we are all so familiar with the nativity story that we don't really hear it anymore. The First Christmas will help us see the nativity story afresh and be able to appreciate the powerful message the Gospels contain.
"This book, The First Christmas, treats what may be the best-known stories in the world. The stories of Jesus’s birth are the foundation of the world’s most widely observed holiday. Christmas is celebrated by the world’s two billion Christians, a number about twice that of the next largest religion, Islam. Moreover, because of the cultural and commercial importance of Christmas in Western culture and beyond, it is observed by many non- Christians as well. Indeed, no other religious holiday is so widely commemorated by people who are outside of the tradition that originated it. The idea to write this book about the stories of the first Christmas flowed out of our previous collaboration, The Last Week. There we treated the last week of Jesus’s life as told by Mark, the earliest gospel. From Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem to his execution and resurrection, Mark provides a day-by-day account of Jesus’s final week. Known by Christians as Holy Week, it is the most sacred week of the Christian year."