Bethlehem and Nazareth in Matthew

In my last post I showed why it is virtually certain that Jesus’ home town was Nazareth. All of our sources agree that he was from there, and it is very hard to imagine why a Christian story teller would have made that up. But now the question is whether that was also his place of birth.

The only two accounts we have of Jesus’ birth, Matthew and Luke, independently claim that even though he was raised in Nazareth, he was actually born in Bethlehem. So isn’t that the more likely scenario? Born...