VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Dinah|DATE|1387817435|CONTENT|John Bell states that the baby Jesus was the only ‘minor’ present at the Nativity.  If the story is taken to be factual, then Mary would almost certainly have been aged under eighteen, and possibly as young as twelve.
  
The only accounts of the supposed miraculous events of the Nativity are in the New Testament.  The primitive methods of travel and the distances involved make the logistics of everyone in the Roman world returning en masse to the towns of their ancestors utterly implausible.  It was obviously a device used by the propagandists who wrote the NT to show that Jesus’s birth fulfilled the prophecies of the old one, thus giving claims about him being Messiah credibility.  And surely somebody around at the time would have noticed if some autocratic ruler ordered the killing of thousands of infants?  

As for God risking sending his son to Earth – well, if Jesus was immortal, then where exactly did the risk lie?  And why did this supposedly benevolent God insist on his progeny undergoing a horrible death in order to &#039;save&#039; the human race?  Doesn&#039;t it make God a sadist? The more one thinks about it, the more illogical it becomes.  But of course religion is not designed to encourage people to think.
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