Dr. Ben Witherington: What they want to do is, they want to stress the differences in such a way that it then warrants the conclusion that "since the birth narratives are sort of riddled with contradictions, then you know, we can assume that the rest of the stories that come after that have to be very critically scrutinized, and there’s only going to be a distinct minority of that evidence that could possibly be historically veracious". It sort of sets them up for a way of coming to the conclusion that only a distinct minority of the rest of the tradition is trustworthy.

Dr. Ben Witherington: Well, I would say that it takes, and it did take, in the first century A.D. a great deal of courage to be a Christian, and to claim that a crucified manual worker named Jesus from Nazareth, against all expectations, turned out to be the savior of the world, now this is a fantastic claim. Early Jews were not looking for a crucified Messiah, so far as we can say. Greco-Roman persons were certainly not looking for a crucified manual worker being their Messiah. So here we have these people, evangelizing the world and claiming this is the truth that you need to know about: Jesus died and rose again, and this demonstrates who he is. It takes an awful lot of guts to put that message out there. Now you can say an awful lot about what people are willing to live for, but what people are actually willing to die for is another question. These early Christians were prepared to die for an honest testimony about those facts. It’s hardly likely that these are things that they would make up about Jesus.

Dr. Craig Evans: The opinion is not very good, to put it mildly. Continental scholarship, they either haven’t heard of the Jesus Seminar or if they have, they dismiss it derisively. British scholarship, it’s just the same way. "The Jesus Seminar! Oh, you must be kidding. Does anybody take them seriously?" That’s the European response. I’ve seen that firsthand.

Dr. N. T. Wright: Those conclusions represent one section of American scholarship. It’s not even all American mainstream American scholarship. And here in Britain and in Europe most of the scholars who are working on the Gospels and so on frankly wouldn’t give that stuff the time of day. My guess is that most British, French, Belgian, German scholars today, if they have heard of the Jesus Seminar, would simply say, "Well, I’m afraid that’s some funny people in America and we’re carrying on with our scholarship and we’re not going to bother about that."

Dr. Craig Evans: No, they do not. They try to be influential and they’ve had positions of leadership at the Society of Biblical Literature. I’m an active member of the Historical Jesus section of the Society of Biblical Literature. Three to four hundred typically show up typically at their meetings. That’s about ten times what typically show up at a Jesus Seminar meeting. And the Jesus Seminar guys, when they present their distinctive views like a non-eschatological Jesus or the Gospel of Peter as a primary source for the other Gospels, those views are simply—to put it in slang—blown out of the water. These are minority opinions and they do not hold sway in the larger cross-section of Gospel scholars throughout North America.

Dr. Gabriel Barkay: Following the Six Days War some archeologists have studied the site of the Church of Nativity and found out that it is right on top of the ancient mound or ancient tel of early Bethlehem. Bethlehem of First Temple Period of the Davidic Dynasty’s time, and Bethlehem of the time of Jesus was built right on the site where today the complex of the Church of Nativity is built. Excavations by the Italian scholar, the late Father Bellarmino Bagatti revealed under the complex of the church a series of caves. Most of the caves were dwellings of antiquity. So it is very much plausible that we deal in the case of the Church of Nativity where the real site existed in the time of Jesus.

Dr. Stephen Pfann: In ancient villages, as in villages just before the modern time, they were made up of two or three major patriarchal families. And generally, with each one of the homes associated with a patriarch, there would be a guestroom. And this guestroom would be reserved for people coming in, friends of the family, people from outside. And it would be the good pleasure of the patriarch or leader of the family, to be able to be the host to these guests. And in the case of Jesus and his birth, we find that Mary and Joseph end up coming and finding that there is no room in the inn, according to Roman standards, if you had a Roman city, but in a village what you have are guestrooms in patriarchal homes.

Dr. Claire Pfann: We sometimes read Luke and we picture Joseph and Mary traveling in the rain on a cold December night. And Mary is in labor, in pain, about to deliver this baby and Joseph frantically walks from door to door knocking on the Motel 6’s of Bethlehem—which there weren’t any, of course—trying to find accommodations. But actually, if we really read what Luke has to say, he says they went to Bethlehem, which was Joseph’s ancestral home. That means they had extended family there. They were going to a place where they were known and loved, and where they would receive hospitality. It also says in the Gospel of Luke, "While they were there the time came for her to be delivered." Now, that’s a non-specific amount of time. How long were they there before the baby was born? Two days? Two weeks? Two months? It could have been three or four or five months. We really don’t know. So the picture of them being in a familial setting, surrounded by people who they might know, and that might help with the delivery, is actually supported by both Luke and by Matthew.

Dr. Stephen Pfann: The tradition of a site, like a birth site, like Bethlehem is actually strengthened by the fact that the earliest record that we have of the tradition of Jesus’ birthplace goes back to Justin Martyr, who 15-20 years after Bethlehem was totally destroyed by Roman armies, said that the pilgrims came to visit a cave, a cavea. We go there today, it’s at the top of a hill, which is just where a patriarchal home would be built—on top of a hill. And patriarchal homes are kept for many generations, and kept within the family. So the tradition of Jesus’ birthplace there in the middle of the second century, is actually extremely close to the time when those homes were still in existence in Bethlehem. So knowing that Jesus was born there, that his family’s patriarchal home would have persisted there until their destruction around 137 AD, and then just 15 or 20 years later Justin Martyr saying that that’s where people commemorated his birth, actually brings it into the category of probably being the place where Jesus was born.

Dr. Randall Price: Now we find also that when you go back to the history books and look at Paulinus of Nola, he notes that Hadrian who was the Roman emperor from around 117 to 138 AD built a sacred grove to Adonis over the site of Jesus birth to efface Christianity. And this was the very purpose of Roman religion to supersede previous religion. So indeed they recognized already that something very dramatic in the case of Christianity had occurred at that spot. And then we have at the beginning of the 4th Century, Helena the mother of Constantine, coming to identify the spot that tradition says Jesus was born, and she identifies that place today as the Church of Nativity built on the foundations that she laid. Then in 385 AD St. Jerome comes to that spot to be there to translate the Vulgate and yet he says already in the time of his arrival it’s the most venerable spot on earth. So these things together point to the fact that from earliest antiquity, Bethlehem was the one place noted in the Christian world as the birthplace of Jesus.

Dr. Stephen Pfann: There’s only one tradition concerning Jesus’ birthplace, and that’s Bethlehem. Just as every science has to have some kind of a gradient in terms of credibility on any subject, as archaeologist we also have to create a gradient which we can use against the evidence that we have. And I’ve been working with an A B C D rating, a four-step rating for credibility. "A" would be that it’s certain, "B" is probable, "C" is plausible, and "D" is rumor or speculation. Now it all depends upon what kind of facts you have on the ground.

And only the most certain types of facts is that something is still in existence there with an inscription or something of this sort that actually helps you to understand that this is really certainly the place. Probable means that you have all kinds of corroborative evidence from archaeology, from the literature, methographic studies, that would maintain something being probably the way that it was. Then it goes down the line that way as the evidence becomes weaker and weaker.

I would say that at this point, in terms of all that we know about traditional sites, that [Bethlehem] is probably the place where Jesus was born.

Dr. Claire Pfann: The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem has strong evidence to support it as being the place of the birth of Jesus. Certainly, the church lies on the heart of ancient first century Bethlehem, that small Jewish village of extended patriarchal homes. And if we look at the archaeology of that type of hillside, terraced homes with courtyards, cave basements, and sleeping units attached, we would see, if we could just lift that church off, the kind of archaeological pattern that would characterize Bethlehem in the first century. Tradition has held it as the birthplace of Jesus for all these centuries, a tradition that was probably kept alive by the Jewish Christians in the land from the time of the Resurrection of Jesus as they searched back into His origins.

Dr. Edwin Yamauchi: Well, first of all we have to dispense with certain popular Christmas ideas about the Magi from the crèches and Christmas cards and Christmas carols. First of all, the New Testament text does not call them kings; it does not tell us that there were three, but that’s an inference from the fact that there were three gifts. And the Magi were not necessarily wise men. The word Magi is the Greek plural of the word Magos and originally this was a Persian word. And in the Persian tradition, Herodotus, the Greek historian, tells us in the fifth century that these were the Medes who served as priests and diviners for the Persians. But by the fourth century in the Hellenistic period the word had come to mean astrologer. There is a very strong tradition of astrology as a science that developed out of Mesopotamia and this was then transmitted to the West to the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews.

Dr. Edwin Yamauchi: Well, we believe, or I believe, that this occurred. It’s not a Midrash, as some scholars suggest, but something which actually happened and which is a wonderful anticipation of Gentiles being brought into the Kingdom of God. And the irony is, of course, that these Gentiles from the East, by perhaps a misguided sense of astrology, nonetheless thought that something wonderful was happening in Judea, that a King was being born who was to be worshipped with gifts, were willing, under limited knowledge, to take action and to bow down to this newborn baby, when Herod the Great, who had his scholars advise him of the prophecy of Micah that the Messiah was going to be born in Bethlehem, didn’t move a foot or half a yard to do anything about this. Rather, he wanted to kill this infant born in Bethlehem.