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The First Christmas

What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Birth

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About this listen

In The First Christmas, two of today's top Jesus scholars, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, join forces to show how history has biased our reading of the nativity story as it appears in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. As they did for Easter in their previous book, The Last Week, here they explore the beginning of the life of Christ, peeling away the sentimentalism that has built up over the last two thousand years around this most well known of all stories to reveal the truth of what the gospels actually say. Borg and Crossan help us to see this well-known narrative afresh by answering the question, ""What do these stories mean?"" in the context of both the first century and the twenty-first century. They successfully show that the Christmas story, read in its original context, is far richer and more challenging than people imagine.

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As you would expect with Marcus Borg this is a really good book. Clear and accurate analysis of the text and story, opening windows on the real meaning behind the story we all know so well.
I love that Borg's faith was living and passionate, that he longed to see God's Kingdom come alive within people and society at large.
I wish I could get this book into the hands of every Church and certainly every member of the Churches I look after.

Fantastic - a real gem

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The narrator is good, being clear and authoritative in tone. The theological and exegetical rigour is seriously lacking, at least in the early stages; this was enough to weary me to the point that plodding on seemed far too

The whole thing collapses very early on with a clumsy attempt to downplay the miraculous nature and wondrous nature of the nativity tellings by passing them all off as being parable or parabolic in nature. This simply doesn’t work because the nature of parables is misunderstood. Parables are never used to explain away or replace the miraculous. Parables are couched in the mundane, the everyday and populated by low resolution characters, such as landowners, kings, servants, treasure hunters, merchants, sons and fathers. No personal names are given to actors within parables, with the some exception of Lazarus.

Maybe it got better or some of my understanding is made sense of later on , but, after this, I couldn’t be bothered to persist with it.

The alienating contradiction of the ‘nativity as parable’ argument

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The text is full of citations from the gospels 1:30 , 3:21, 7:33, 80:15 etc etc and it makes the listening to it dreadfully boring.
He has a few interesting observations but they are so painstakingly and laboriously elaborated that one looses the will to live. I found myself saying several times ‘okay we have got your point move on’!

A few good points but mostly awfully boring

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