What is the story of Jesus being born?

There are two quite different stories of the birth of Jesus, one in Matthew's Gospel and one in Luke's Gospel.

Matthew's story of the birth of Jesus has Bethlehem as the home town of Joseph and Mary. After Jesus was born, magi("wise men") came from the east following a star to Jerusalem, where they asked King Herod to see the baby born to be king. Herod feared for his kingdom and planned to kill Jesus, so Joseph and Mary fled with Jesus to Egypt until the death of Herod, when the began to return home, but being warned in a dream turned aside and travelled to Nazareth in Galilee instead.

This nativity account seeks to draw a parallel between Jesus and Moses. Joseph's father is called Jacob, just as in the Old Testament (in Luke's Gospel, he is called Heli). Herod's "Slaughter of the Innocents", the killing of all the boys under two years old, parallels the pharaoh's slaughter of all the boys under two years old in the time of Moses. And just as Moses left Egypt to save his people, so Jesus left Egypt to save his people.

A second meaning in Matthew's infancy account is in the visit of the magi. The magi were priests ofthe Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda. The Zoroastrians believed that the Saoshyant would be born of a virgin and come to earth to defeat evil. The author refers to Isaiah 7:14 as evidence that the virginity of Mary had been prophesied. But Isaiah 7:14, in the original Hebrew, actually says, "the young woman", and the young woman in question did have a child a few verses later in Isaiah. The problem arose in Matthew's reliance on a mistranslation in the Septuagint, a flawed early Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures.

Luke's story attempts to place the birth of Jesus in a historical context. Writing probably more than a hundred years after the death of King Herod, the author not only said that Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod but also at the time of the census that took place in the time of Quirinius. The census of Quirinius did not actually take place until 6 CE, more than ten years after the death of Herod, leading Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament) to say that, although Luke likes to set his Christian drama in the context of well-known events from antiquity, sometimes he does so inaccurately.

Luke's use of the poor shepherds who visited Jesus in the humble manger shows the author's concern for the poor of the world, a theme that would repeat throughout this gospel.