From Frank Kermode’s review, LRB 4 January 2007
To make a story more relevant, or to explain its hidden meaning, by inventing new bits for it, was a regular Jewish practice. The Infancy narratives are, as Vermes mildly remarks, not the stuff of which history is made. Under critical eyes the detail fades: the manger, the shepherds, the star, the heavenly choir. What else do we expect? Some of these things may have happened – it seems to be true, for example, that Herod was a sadistic killer. But sorting out fact from fiction is here a futile occupation. Vermes closes his account with the just observation that if we looked at the Nativity narratives carefully we’d find it a little harder to talk about a happy Christmas. We take the singing angels, the gift-bearing kings, the star, but forget ‘Joseph's psychological torture’ and the fear and panic caused by Herod’s massacre of the Bethlehem children. One or both may be fictive, but they belong to the story as much as the happy shepherds and the gift-laden tree. A moment spent on thought about them might even enhance our Saturnalian delights.

Penguin Books Ltd | Paperback 192 pp. |ISBN: 9780141024462