When I got my Time magazine and it was on “The Secrets of the Nativity” I admit, I laughed. “What is up with all this?”

Then I remembered that every December they trot out some semi-stupid semi-biblical “controversy” and put it on the cover. Years ago it was the “Jesus Seminar” (kinda like hiring a bunch of physicists to disprove quantum mechanics. Yeesh. Go get a grant! Oh…they did). Another year it was “Jesus Rocks” (or maybe that was Newsweek? Doesn’t matter, they both suck).

The Time magazine article trots out ridiculous questions, like how come in Matthew’s account the announcement comes to Joseph, but in Luke it’s to Mary.

Gosh, is it possible that both happened?

Geez. Ya think? You ever leave a message to your friend Bob at work, then call his house and tell his wife too?

Well gents, it doesn’t take CSI Bethlehem to figure it out. Let me just give you the forensic evidence for free, untainted.

Matthew wants to explain why Joseph doesn’t go nuts when he finds out his bride is suddenly “preggers” and he hasn’t touched her yet (they are engaged). He doesn’t care, or talk about what happens at the Inn at all! He takes up his narrative days later when the wise men show up at a house with gifts.

As for Luke, he could care less about how Joseph feels. This guy is a trained historian. He wants to record the angel’s visit to Mary and her being chosen, the “Magnificat” and the actual events of Jesus’ birth…what happened that night, not a few days later.

They also bring up a supposed problem with one birth scene happening in the barn, the other in a house.

But according to L. Michael White, religious historian at the University of Texas in Austin, “It’s virtually impossible to reduce the accounts to a core narrative.”

I contacted Dr. White, because I was about to slam him and Time over a couple of issues and wanted him to have a chance to respond before publication.

I was gonna start with the absurdity of Time's going to a “religious historian” on an obvious textual question.

For the uninitiated, that’s like going to your sports doctor (a former football player known in his playing days as “Big Hands Jackson”) for your annual prostate exam.

You do not go to a “religious historian” because his primary job is to document and write (almost fictionalize in most cases) what “may” have happened in periods that have scant information.

The fact is, you would go to a “textual critic”, or maybe a professor of New Testament who specializes in the Gospels.

Guess what? Dr. White is actually both.

Whether there may not be a "core narrative" between the two accounts only becomes a question when you bring up deeper questions than the ones quoted in David Van Biema's article in Time, and is a matter of debate.

I found no great 'Secrets of the Nativity" revealed in the article at all. But it was weird that the Nativity was the cover story given the above and our own experience.

The story continues:

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