Helen Bond

And the birth stories are full of theology and really trying to show people in picture language who Jesus was.

So I think the whole thing about Jesus being born in Bethlehem is to show that this is a town associated with King David.

So the idea is to show he's a second King David.

He's of the royal line.

He's the Messiah line.

So it's all of those things.

And the stable actually only appears in Luke's Gospel.

And the idea there, I think, is that Jesus has come for the poor and marginalized, and he himself was sort of rejected and impoverished at his birth.

So yeah, I think there's a lot going on in those birth stories.

Probably Jesus came from this small, very small village of Nazareth.

It's in Galilee.

It's not too far away from other big towns, but people there seem to be quite insular, quite rural.

His family have a trade.

They're carpenters, probably a fairly large family.

And they're Jewish.

Yeah, they're Jewish.

They're Jewish.

Yeah.

And everything about Jesus fits into that sort of

first century Jewish kind of matrix.