Just in time for Christmas, America's two largest news magazines devote this week's cover stories to debunking the story of Jesus' birth.
Among the conclusions in Time and Newsweek: Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem; there is little evidence of three kings following a star, and the story of the virgin birth may have been borrowed.
"The Nativity saga is neither fully fanciful nor fully factual but a layered narrative of early tradition and enduring theology," Newsweek writes in examining the Sunday-school version of the birth of Christ.
This may be unwelcome "news" to most Americans. A Newsweek poll found that 55% of Americans believe every word in the Bible is literally true, 67% believe the entire Christmas story is literally true and 79% believe Jesus was born to the Virgin Mary with no human father.
"In the debates over the literal truth of the Gospels, just about everyone acknowledges that major conclusions about Jesus' life are not based on forensic clues," Time notes. "There is no specific physical evidence for the key points of the story."
Quoting esteemed religious scholars, the mags poke holes in New Testament scribes Matthew and Luke's divergent explanations of how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem, with Time asserting that most scholars now place his birth in Nazareth.
Both mags point out that the star in the East might be a literary embellishment by Matthew, perhaps inspired by accounts of Halley's comet appearing 12 years before Christ's birth.
Even the Virgin Mary's conception, a cornerstone of Christian theology, is fodder for skeptics, who say the story was a possible blend of Jewish theology with Greek and Roman myths.