In The First Christmas, two of today's top Jesus scholars, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, show how history has biased our reading of the nativity story as it appears in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The First Christmas explores the beginning of the life of Christ, peeling away the sentimentalism that has build up over 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 familiar narrative afresh by answering the question;What do these stories mean?; from the perspective of both the first and the twenty-first centuries. They successfully show that the Christmas story, read in its original context, is far richer and more challenging than people imagine. This book is in the same vein and by the same authors as the successful The Last Week - What the Gospels Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem.