Pagels begins by explaining that she, like many, had always assumed that there was a single story of Jesus’s birth, an impression formed by childhood church pageants that merged the different gospel accounts into one narrative. The Gospels of Mark and John say nothing about Jesus’s physical birth or infancy, while the Gospels of Matthew and Luke tell birth stories that are strikingly different. Both writers agree Jesus descended from King David, was born in Bethlehem, and experienced a miraculous virgin birth, but they diverge on nearly everything else.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Magi guided by a star arrive in Jerusalem seeking a newborn king, terrifying the current king, Herod the Great. The star leads the Magi to Joseph’s family house in Bethlehem, where they offer royal gifts. Matthew points out that Joseph is a distant descendant of King David, making his son a potential usurper of Herod’s throne. After the Magi depart, Herod orders the slaughter of all male infants under two. Joseph takes his family into hiding in Egypt, returning only after Herod’s death, when they settle in Nazareth. The Gospel of Luke tells a different story: The impoverished Mary and Joseph travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem for a Roman tax census. With no room available, they shelter in a barn where Jesus is born in a manger, witnessed only by local shepherds. Before the birth, the Gospel of Luke notes, the angel Gabriel appears to Mary to announce the birth. Mary questions how she can become pregnant as a virgin, before acquiescing as the Lord’s “slave.”

Historians have found no contemporary evidence for Matthew’s star, Herod’s infant massacre, or Luke’s tax census requirement. Scholar Raymond Brown notes that Roman biographers often associated astronomical signs with rulers like Julius Caesar. Scientists like the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler have speculated that the star might have been a supernova, comet, or planetary conjunction, but these theories remain inconclusive. Literary scholars suggest that Matthew modeled his narrative on the biblical prophecies of Isaiah about a “great light” and gifts of gold and frankincense, as well as on the story of Moses escaping the pharaoh’s slaughter of Hebrew infants. The birth narratives appear to be literary adaptations meant to align Jesus’s message with the historic struggles of the Jewish people rather than report accurate accounts of his life.

The absence of Joseph in both Mark’s and Paul’s writings leads some authors to speculate that Joseph may not be historical. Matthew and Luke provide contradictory genealogies, naming different grandfathers for Jesus and diverging completely thereafter. Raymond Brown notes that Matthew’s record scheme of 14 generations of Jesus’s genealogy does not add up mathematically, and both Joseph-based genealogies sit awkwardly with Matthew and Luke’s insistence that Joseph was not Jesus’s biological father.

Pagels argues that the virgin birth narratives were written to counter rumors of illegitimacy hinted at in Mark’s gospel, the account written closest to Jesus’s death. Mark reports that when Jesus preached in his hometown, his family tried to restrain him, believing that he was “insane,” and that scribes accused him of demon possession. Mark recounts Jesus’s neighbors in Nazareth contemptuously calling him Mary’s son, implying that he had no recognized father—an insult in their patrilineal culture. Matthew and Luke revise this, removing references to family concerns about his sanity and changing “son of Mary” to “the carpenter’s son” or “the son of Joseph.” Historian Morton Smith suggests that these changes make it probable that Joseph was not Jesus’s father. Mark also depicts Jesus rejecting his biological family in favor of his followers.

Early rabbinic sources circulated derisive comments that Jesus was conceived out of wedlock with a Roman soldier named Panthera. The early Christian teacher Origen worked to refute these charges, which the Greek philosopher Celsus had publicized around 170 CE. Celsus quotes a Jewish source claiming that Jesus fabricated the virgin birth story to hide his true origins. Scholars throughout history have put forward that Jesus might have been born out of wedlock, either as the result of an assault on Mary by a Roman soldier or because of premarital sex between Mary and Joseph. Pagels notes that the potential circumstances of Jesus’s birth, while used by some detractors to mock Jesus, would not necessarily weaken his Gospel-recorded teachings on radical social reform and the inherent value of all people. 

As evidence for the possibility of Mary surviving a sexual assault, Pagels cites historian Josephus on violent Roman suppression of Jewish revolts in Galilee around the time of Jesus’s birth. Judas the Galilean, a rebel against the Roman occupation, led a revolt from Sepphoris, only three miles from Nazareth. Roman governor Varus’s forces burned Sepphoris, enslaved its population, and crucified 2,000 rebels in retaliation. Josephus reports that Roman soldiers were famous for committing sexual violence against the local population after a victory. Archaeological historian Marianne Sawicki states that it is plausible that Mary was a victim of this violence. A tombstone for Tiberius Julius Abdes Panthera suggests that his unit may have been in Judea during Varus’s campaign, corroborating the rumors that Panthera was Jesus’s biological father. However, Pagels emphasizes that this evidence remains circumstantial at best.

Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus’s bloodline includes four women recorded in the Old Testament. Notably, all four had sexual histories considered scandalous at the time: Tamar (who posed as a sex worker to trick her father-in-law), Rahab (a sex worker who hid Hebrew spies, allowing them to defeat their enemies in battle), Ruth (a widow who seduced the wealthy Boaz and married him), and Bathsheba (whom King David raped and later married after arranging the death of her current husband). Pagels suggests that Matthew included these women, who were universally vindicated despite themes of sexual immorality in their stories, to contextualize Mary’s premarital pregnancy. In Matthew’s account, Joseph plans to quietly break their engagement, which Pagels interprets as him assuming Mary was raped by a Roman, but an angel appears in a dream telling him that the child is from the Holy Spirit, prompting Joseph to marry her and adopt the child as his own.

Matthew and Luke both invoke Isaiah 7:14 as prophecy of Jesus’s birth, placing him in the context of the fulfillment of a Jewish prophecy. Isaiah’s prophecy, when translated from Hebrew to Greek to accommodate the Gospels of the New Testament and non-Jewish adherents to Christianity, sparked debate among early Christians. Isaiah’s prophecy states that the Messiah will be born of a young woman, the translation of the Hebrew word almah. Greek writers translated this to Parthenos, meaning “virgin.” The Jewish philosopher Trypho used this translation issue to dismiss the claims of a virgin birth. 

The Gospel of Matthew, to align Jesus’s life further with Jewish history and myth as portrayed in the Old Testament, models his narrative of Jesus on Moses’s life. Matthew creates parallels such as the flight to Egypt, 40 days in the wilderness (mirroring the 40 years the Jewish people wandered in the desert under Moses’s leadership), and delivering new law from a mountain. Luke, meanwhile, wrote for Gentiles and presents himself as a careful historian addressing the unknown man Theophilus, either a Roman patron or a character meant to represent all Christians. Addressing a character to persuade them of a point was an established and popular philosophical strategy at that time period, Luke frames his story with biblical accounts of miraculous births to married women, focusing on Elizabeth (mother of John the Baptist, modeled on Sarah) and Hannah (the mother of the prophet Samuel). Luke emphasizes Mary, casting her pregnancy as joyful and having her sing a song of praise. 

The Gospel of Mark omits the entire birth narrative, instead presenting a symbolic birth story: At Jesus’s baptism, God’s voice from heaven declares Jesus his son. The Gospel of John similarly skims over the birth narrative, instead declaring that Jesus is the divine Word, who comes from God. Gnostic texts like the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Truth expand on this more mystical approach, describing a divine trinity of Father, Mother, and Son, later translated as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The concept of divine Mother as Holy Spirit was lost when the feminine Hebrew term “ruah” was translated into masculine Latin “spiritus” or neuter Greek “pneuma”. John and the Gnostic works place Jesus’s conception outside of the realm of human history, visualizing him in a wholly spiritual context instead.

Pagels concludes that while the narratives of Jesus’s origin differ, all agree that he embodied some type of divine presence on earth and had a unique connection to the Jewish God from his birth.