As I mentioned in a previous post CTS will be showing a documentary titled ‘The Journey to Christmas’ today and tomorrow (for details go here). Craig A. Evans is one of the scholars (“experts”) that is consulted throughout the shiow. He discusses the historical setting of Christmas, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Herod the Great, and the “meaning” of Christmas in these sample videos from the documentary. They are short, but worthwhile:
the archives near Emmaus 
If you are at all honest you must confess that you cannot even account for your own seeming appearance here. Because to do so you would have to take into account how the entire cosmos with all of its incomprehensible space-time paradoxes somehow coalesced into creating the body-mind complex that you now identify as “you” ( where do “you” begin and end?) And thus indeed how//why , beginning at presumed day one, the entire world process with all of its space-time paradoxes arises and appears in each and every moment (because you are not in any sense separate from that unfathomable/unexplainable process)
And yet you presume to “know” so much about what may or may not have occurred in Palestine approximately 2000 years ago.
When and where was Palestine 2000 years ago!
Herod the “Great”????????????
@John: How do you “know” this?