Now Halloween is over, we can start looking to Christmas. Well actually I guess there's Bonfire night to do first, and if you live in America or Canada then you have Thanksgiving on the 25th Nov. But personally I love Christmas time and the period leading up to it. So excuse me while I post about my confusion over the Nativity.

The people who were at Jesus' birth confuse me. There were three Kings - 'we three kings of orient are' - but were there also three shepherds? And what about the three wise men? Why the obsession with the number three?

How long did it take for the Kings to get to stable, if they had to travel all the way from their Kingdoms? Did they travel together? Who are these Kings and where were they Kings of?

From wikipedia:

"A nativity scene takes its inspiration from the accounts of the birth of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke"

I own a Bible (for research purposes and vampire attacks only) so I'm going to crack it open and have a read of these gospels myself. Let's start with Matthew's gospel.

'there came three wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he that is born the King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him'.

King Herod tells the wise men to find Jesus and to come back and tell him where Jesus is. So he can kill Jesus, presumably.

'the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood where the young child was'.

So this isn't an ordinary star, it's a kind of magic star. One which isn't millions of light years away, it's just really small and directly above Jesus' stable. Or is it capable of some kind of flight? Does it actually lead the three wise men to Jesus? Fuck knows.

After seeing Jesus, the three wise men return to their home country without going back to Herod, because God warned them about Herod in a dream. God tells Joseph to flee with his family to Egypt. Meanwhile Herod, who is exceedingly pissed that the wise men have gone home, kills all the children in Bethlehem under the age of 2. Jesus Christ, indeed.

Now let's go through Luke's gospel. Luke goes into a lot more detail than Matthew. It seems like it's Luke's gospel that we take most of the nativity story from. Here, we're told Augustus Caeser taxed the world (the whole world...), and Joseph has to return to Bethlehem, from Nazareth because of this. Having your tax collected was inconvenient in those days apparently.

The three men are shepherds, and they don't follow a star, they are told to specifically go to Bethlehem. This message is conveyed by an angel, but then they get to see a whole load of mother fucking angels:

'And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God'

They are quite friendly though and wish goodwill to mankind. Thank God they don't want to kill us all instead.

When the three shepherds reach the manger, they don't give gifts. But according to Matthew's gospel, they gave frankenscense, gold and myrr (by the way, my spellchecker doesn't recognise 'frankenscense', and wants me to change it to Frankenstein).

And that's basically the nativity story. You can read it for yourself if you like, Bibles are easy enough to come by.

So where are the three Kings? Surely they come from Matthew's account of the nativity, because Kings can't be Luke's shepherds. So we have to wipe Luke's gospel from our minds. I think this is quite confusing so perhaps it's best to deal with it another day.

So at the nativity there were Mary, Joseph, Jesus, three wise men (according to Matthew), three shepherds (according to Luke), an ox, ass, sheep, goats, and camels (not referred to in the Bible) and oh, traditional interpretations of the story like to add some of Luke's angels in there too.

Very confusing.