Gospel of John 7:40 - 43 ~ "Some of the people therefore, when they heard these words, were saying, “This certainly is the Prophet.” Others were saying, “This is the Christ.” Still others were saying, “Surely the Christ is not going to come from Galilee, is He? Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the descendants of David, and from Bethlehem, the village where David was?” So a division occurred in the crowd because of Him. Some of them wanted to seize Him, but no one laid hands on Him."
I remember reading this a few years ago and thought to myself, "Oh, Yeshua was probably born in Galilee, not Bethlehem".
By reading the above verse in John, you can plainly see that the people were divided over Yeshua being the Christ. Some were saying, "Yes, he is the Christ", and others were saying, "No, he isn't the Christ because he was from Galilee and not Bethlehem, and the prophecies stated that the Christ would be a descendant of David and from Bethlehem (which John implies that Yeshua was not)". There was so much debate about this, that divisions were created - people were hard set on Yeshua not being the Christ. So something HAD to be done.
Along came the authors and editors of Matthew and Luke, and what they wrote concerning "the birth of Jesus". Someone in the Church needed to have the final say because this issue of "where was Jesus born" was causing trouble in the early Church.
The author of Mark (the oldest gospel in the bible) and the authors of John never lead anyone to think that Yeshua was born in Bethlehem, but rather he was born in Galilee, from Nazareth of Galilee to be more specific. But since Matthew's and Luke's authors knew that Yeshua was from Galilee and still needed to fulfill prophecy to appease the masses, they both created their own versions of how Yeshua was born in Bethlehem and ended up in Galilee early in life. (In Matthew, Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem and took Jesus to live in Egypt because Herod was so jealous of being out-kinged by a male baby that he killed them all; when the threat was over, Jesus, Joseph and Mary went to live in Nazareth. In Luke, Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem to take part in the census - Mary had Jesus, and they all returned to Nazareth.) Both "gospels" were written to fulfill a need in the first (and second) century church.
Yeshua being the Christ has nothing to do with where he was born nor whom he descended from. The fact that people think being Christ has anything to do with this is a huge problem. The fact that the editors of Matthew and the author of Luke decided to add a Bethlehem narrative to validate Yeshua being the Christ shows how godless they were (and it shows how early on the salvation of Yeshua had been made into the religion of Jesus). Being the Christ has nothing to do with sacrifice nor hanging up on a cross; it has nothing to do with David nor Bethlehem; it has nothing to do with blood, water, baptism, sacraments, holy ghost tongues, heaven, hell, dancing, shouting, preaching, confessing, fasting, nor prayer. Being the Christ is showing the whole world what God's salvation truly is. You believe that God healed you, but to what end? In a few winters, you will be no more - like a flower in a field. God heals your cancer, but you drop dead from pneumonia; God heals your fractures and wounds, but you drop dead from kidney failure. What's the point? This isn't salvation.
To be Christ like, is to live as simply and as faithfully as Yeshua lived, and then to receive eternal life (in the flesh), just as he did. To be Christ like, is not dependent on your efforts, but rests solely on God's mercy - otherwise it is impossible to be faithful or good. (You trust in the efforts of those who forge weapons and in the weapons themselves far more than you trust God. Only God can reverse this in you. And in the first century, when people witnessed Christ outside the grave, that shock and awe branded the faith of God in them.) Something else has to be done today - because that was 2000 years ago, and there was no video recording or photography back then to capture the event. So God has to come up with some other idea for you.
