Since it IS Christmas time......

it's a jigsaw puzzle to keep those pesky skeptics out, and if it was all easy to understand and simple the ruling elite class called "priests" wouldn't be needed. the bible, according to this sort of person, can never be understood by anyone who doesn't already believe in it and even then can never be understood by a lay person. It has to be somebody with a direct line to god.how can you tell who has a direct line to god? well obviously, those people who DO will be able to tell you they do.you just have to watch out for the false prophets, liars, deceivers, witches and others who would lie to you....easy peasy.far be it for a layman to understand the beauty and truth behind these facts (from KJV):Luke 3:1,23 indicates that when Jesus turned 30 years old, it was the 15th year of Tiberius' reign in Rome, so Jesus was born around 1 BCE (handy, huh?)However, Luke 1:5 places Jesus’ birth in the days of Herod ("the king of Judea", NOT "the tetrarch" who was named in Luke 3), so he was born at the latest in 4 BCE, since that's when Herod died.If you're a True Believer, there is no inconsistency in these two dates, and there's even less problems with not having an actual date for the crucifiction (must be after 32 CE but before 37 CE when Tiberius died, iirc) and no records from the named personas themselves.and let's not get into that whole "christmas isn't christ's birthday" thing - the whole saturnalia story is a lie, and the whole pagan tree-worship thing never happened. and "santa claus" isn't a turkish monk relocated to Italy where he supplanted a fertility goddess who rode a flying horse before being rewritten by a man making a poem into using a sleigh and reindeer before being filled out and bedecked in red by coca cola.bah humbug.

One thing you have to understand - not necessarily agree with mind - is that many "True Christians" are very, very big on the whole "Jewish Roots" deal. If you don't study the torah, they say, you cannot understand the revealed word of god. they usually are the type to call god "yahweh" or "jehovah".mormons and JW's are similar, but supplant the torah with their own revealed truths.strangely enough, I think that the catholics are very anti-jewish-roots in some places and more jewish-roots-with-caution in others (mostly so that you don't think so much of the torah that you convert).similarly, the jews and muslims are also part of the same abrahamic religious sect - in broader terms of course - and have many of the same myths, legends and writings. It's just that the muslims have supplanted the torah once again with the koran and the surahs as the ultimate source of enlightenment.If you take that far enough you get into kaballah and mysticism and numerology and all that.somebody was once telling me that the torah is so perfect a mathematical equation that you can create from it all the other books and things by plotting it out into a grid and...stuff. it got a bit head-scratchy and tin-foil-hatty - maybe somebody else can enlighten?