The First Christmas
What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Birth
by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan

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Released 2007
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.
 

Book Reviews

	"Borg and Crossan have now established themselves as voices of a new, fresh, and generally compelling read of the Jesus narrative. This book, a counterpoint to their study of Holy Week, brings close attention to the birth narratives in the New Testament, continuing awareness of the imperial context of the narrative, and the powerful play of the Old Testament in the imagination of the early Christian storytellers. In part they make available what scholars have long since held; in part they bring their own fresh scholarship to the text. And in large part they bring their passion that serious readers of the Jesus memory may boldly unlearn and then learn anew what the witnesses tell. This book is sure to make a powerful difference among us!"
	-- Walter Brueggemann, author of Mandate to Difference
	"The First Christmas enriches our understanding of Jesus in desperately needed ways. Readers will find here profound and convincing insights into the meaning of Jesus’s birth—and life—for the early church and will be challenged to discern their meaning for the world today."
	-- Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christian and Everything Must Change
	"Borg and Crossan walk us through the biblical and Roman contexts in which the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke were written, and show how each speaks of the dawning of “The Great Divine Cleanup” inaugurated in the birth of Jesus. You will never hear these familiar stories the same way again—may Christmas bear yet more light this year, throughout the year, and for all the years to come."
	-- Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church and author of A Wing and a Prayer
	"Borg and Crossan have given us new lenses through which to view the light of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s birth."
	-- Reverend John Bryson Chane D.D. Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C.
	"Finding in the Nativity Stories not only poetry and piety but also parable and politics, Borg and Crossan recover the challenge of Christmas for the first century and the twenty-first."
	-- Amy-Jill Levine, author of The Misunderstood Jew