The Nativity story? Read lpetrich's posts above, for starters.
I added to my post while you were posting, apparently. See above, or just respond to this point:
Koy said:
ETA: I mean, "how so" in regard to people who were eyewitnesses standing up and saying, "That didn't happen that way" and there was a change to the story accordingly.
Your objection seems to be that no one would tell a story that has false details (such as requiring citizens to return to their birth homes in order to take a census), because someone in the audience might be old enough to remember whether or not that actually happened.
What difference would that make?
The story we do have (in Mark) does exactly that by including, for example, a "tradition" of Pilate committing open treason against Rome--right in front of his own troops no less--all because he wants to please the very people he's there to subjugate. That did not--nor could not--have ever happened and that fact would be well known to people whether they lived through it or not, yet that blatant lie evidently made no difference. It's
still in the book after all.
Likewise the whole idea of the central character rising from the dead. Evidently there was an entire community--of adherents, no less--that did not believe Jesus rose from the dead, so much so in fact that the leader of their church felt he needed to write a stern rebuke insisting that if they did not believe such a thing, then there was no church! That it ALL hinges on believing that he did, in fact, resurrect from the dead.
And, again, that's still in the book, in spite of the fact that there were evidently MANY people that supposedly lived within, what, twenty-five years of the alleged event (from the time Paul supposedly wrote that letter), who did not believe that part of the story they were told and must have spoken up in large enough numbers to provoke Paul's rebuke at the very least.
