Two of today's top Jesus scholars show how history has biased our reading of the nativity story as it appears in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.

The book explores the beginning of the life of Christ, peeling away the sentimentalism that has built up over two thousand years around this well known of all stories to reveal the truth of what the Gospels actually say.

The authors then 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.