[quote=Shadowfax]
Well…? Now you have to go there….[/quote]

It’s too long to type up everything in detail, but here’s the outline.

– The only evangelist who possibly could have seen live Jesus and his mother is Mark. Mark does not say a single word about his birth.

– Luke & Matthew never met Jesus (both these Gospels were recorded about 50 years after his death, most likely by Greeks) and most of their narrative material is simply copied verbatim from Mark.

– Birth stories are among the few pieces of narrative information which Luke & Matthew added to the content from Mark.

– Birth stories of Luke & Matthew have nothing in common except for the mention of Bethlehem, and they explicitly contradict each other in some places. This is exactly what you’d expect if two people independently created fictional accounts of the same event.

– The purpose of these fictional accounts is to “retroactively fulfill” the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to harmonize the fact that Jesus was known to be out of Nazareth (a one-horse town on the outskirts of Israel, three days walk from the capital), with the Jewish expectation that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem (a suburb of Jerusalem).

– The virgin birth was likewise inserted to “fulfill” the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14. This part is particularly embarrassing to Christians, because it only came up because someone read Isaiah in Greek translation, which was garbled in process, and a phrase that should have meant “…the girl [as in, some specific girl that is standing near the speaker, or at least whose identity is implicitly understood both by the speaker and the listener] is or will soon be pregnant”, got translated as “… a virgin will get pregnant”.