There are other myths about Christmas, this time Biblical ones. We read in the New Testament that Mary and Joseph had to leave their native town of Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem, which is where Jesus was born. They did so because a Roman census of the population required that all citizens should return to their birthplaces in order to be counted. Since Joseph, Jesus’s father came from Bethlehem, this was where the couple ended up, with Mary on the verge of giving birth to her baby.

Having everyone return to their birthplaces seems a mighty odd way of holding a census. Why not just count them on the spot? Such a project would have gridlocked the Roman Empire from end to end, since the census is said to have involved the imperial world as a whole. The upheaval would have been spectacular — so much so that we would almost certainly know about it from non-religious sources. But we don’t; no ancient historian records it. And this is almost certainly because it didn’t happen. The census is probably a narrative device for getting Jesus born in Bethlehem. Bethlehem was King David’s city, and prophecy foretold that the Messiah would come from there. It would be embarrassing for him to hail from a scruffy little place called Nazareth in the benighted rural region of Galilee. It would be like nominating someone from Barnsley as President of the Universe. (To avoid a deluge of threatening letters, I should add that Barnsley is a brilliant place to live.)

There is another anomaly here, however, since Jesus wasn’t really the Messiah at all, even if you believe that he was the Son of God. In Jewish tradition, the Messiah is a secular figure rather than a sacred one — a mighty warrior who would lead the Jewish people to victory over their enemies. The job description doesn’t fit Jesus at all, and on no occasion in the gospels does he unambiguously acknowledge the title (or, for that matter, the title of Son of God). His entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey looks like a satirical parody of a triumphal royal procession. He spurns what St John calls “the powers of this world”, meaning among other things the dominant political set-up, and is brought to his death by them. Politically speaking, he is a failure, executed by the imperial state and deserted by his comrades. So maybe Mary and Joseph’s winter journey to Bethlehem wasn’t necessary after all.

As even Richard Dawkins is aware, Jesus was born in a stable because the Bethlehem lodging places were full. Perhaps in honour of this occasion, hotel accommodation at Christmas continues to be scarce. Not long after his birth the child is visited by three kings, or so popular belief has it. In fact, the New Testament doesn’t mention how many of them there were, and in any case they weren’t kings at all. They were Magi: magicians, sorcerers, fortune tellers, the kind of charlatans whom rulers used to hire to bedazzle the common people with their conjuring tricks. They were also astrologers, enemies of human freedom who maintained that everything was predestined by cosmic forces, and who peered into the future in order to reassure their sovereign that his power would continue to flourish for years to come.

Why should such unsavoury characters come to visit a new-born child, the offspring of a couple of nobodies? The clue may lie in the gifts they brought with them, which were probably not gifts at all but tools of their esoteric trade. What they are probably doing is not laying down presents at the baby’s feet but surrendering the tokens of their power. The scene, in the words, may be allegorical, as the old regime of fear, awe and superstition gives way to a new world of freedom and friendship. This is how T.S. Eliot sees the matter in his poem, “Journey of the Magi”:

…this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Also present at the birth are a group of shepherds and a choir of angels. The angels signify infinity, while the humble shepherds are of the earth. The angels are countless, the people are counted and the shepherds don’t count.

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To be humble, however, counts for a lot, at least for the New Testament. During her pregnancy, Mary pays a visit to her cousin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant. Neither woman is an image of conventional domesticity: Mary and the child she is carrying aren’t dependent on what the gospels call “the will of man”, which is to say that this mother-to-be is a virgin, and Elizabeth is beyond conventional child-bearing age. When she sees Mary, we are told that the child in her womb leaps for joy. He won’t, however, be joyful all that long.

The man he grows up to become is known to history as John the Baptist, who will be beheaded by King Herod, while Mary’s child will be executed by the occupying imperial power. Neither man has much time for the family, a set-up of which Jesus is consistently critical. When informed that his family wish to see him while he is preaching, he tells them brusquely to wait. His mission takes precedence over domestic ties. He has come not to unite families, he announces, but to divide them. John seems to have no kinsfolk at all, hanging out in the desert on a diet of locusts and honey like a refugee from Woodstock. Both men are vagrant, celibate, without home, property, profession or — as it turns out — much of a future.

Mary’s encounter with Elizabeth is staged by St. Luke (we have no idea whether it actually took place), and is one of the most astonishing scenes in the New Testament. In a sisterly dialogue, Mary bursts out in response to Elizabeth’s greeting with a passage from the Hebrew Scriptures. Perhaps she sings and dances as she does so; God, she declares, “has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away”.

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As an obscure young woman from nowhere in particular, Mary is comparing her own elevation to the status of mother of Jesus to the raising up of the poor. She is making a political point out of her pregnancy. Some scholars even claim that the words which Luke puts in her mouth are part of a Zealot chant, the Zealots being underground revolutionaries who were eventually to strike against Rome with calamitous results. Whether or not Mary’s cry is Zealot-inspired, it is almost a platitude of the Hebrew Scriptures: you will know Yahweh for who he is when you see the downtrodden coming to power. The only authentic power is one which is born of weakness.

The poor in the Bible are sometimes called the anawim, the scraps and leavings of the earth; and in an extraordinary gesture, Luke is here turning Mary into a sign of them. As a symbol of the powerless, no woman could be more powerful. Women as a whole belonged to the dumped and discarded in first-century Israel, and Mary becomes a representative of them by being raised up to freedom and dignity. The other prominent Mary in the gospels is Mary Magdalen, who despite the fact that she may well have been a prostitute is allotted the privilege of being among the first to discover that Jesus’s tomb is empty. Her testimony to the fact is officially worthless, since women were not recognised at the time as valid witnesses.

It’s all a long way from mince pies and paper hats. Still, there’s something to be said for the turkey and the trimmings. What we have retained from Mary’s jubilant chant, however dimly and distortedly, is the fact that Christmas is about rejoicing. In the depths of the dead season, new life begins to stir, and from the most unexpected of quarters. If the best we can do to recall that spirit is the gift of a new pair of socks, well, that’s the modern world for you.

But first back to that church in Istanbul. Unless you’ve been to Istanbul you may not have heard of the Kariye Museum. But it is glorious. This ancient church – converted into a museum decades ago – looks a bit unprepossessing at first. Outside it looks like a bunker. But inside it takes your breath away. For here you will find heaven held in beaten gold and ancient ages stilled on its ceiling. The blue and red and gold mosaics that cover this church from top to toe are some of the oldest still surviving from Byzantium – and arguably the most beautiful.

They are also now no longer in the “Kariye Museum”. Because last month an edict signed by President Erdogan announced to the world that this building was instead to be called the “Kariye Mosque”. Evidently Erdogan has a taste for this, having also just turned the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. It seems that some of the local Istanbul citizens are also pleased. Hundreds hurried to the Hagia Sophia to pray after it was changed. It is said that locals rushed to the new Kariye mosque hoping to pray there too.

Others were less pleased; indeed they are horrified. Byzantinist specialists the world over are holding their breath. In Hagia Sophia, mosaics of the Virgin holding Christ have been covered over with a curtain. That’s not so easy to do in Kariye. This isn’t just about one picture, or two. They’re on every wall. The great fear is that something more dramatic will happen. It happened before: when the Ottomans invaded in 1453, the frescoes were plastered over.

This debate is, on the face of it, about religion. But it is also about history, and how history is written — and above all how it is covered up. Istanbul — part place, part palimpsest — is long familiar with such debates. Any city that has had three names can’t help but know that history is as much about writing over the past as the writing about it.

The Kariye Mosque, that was the Kariye Museum, and that long before that was the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, is as good a place as any to consider this writing and rewriting. This ancient building, first built in the fourth century and decorated in the fourteenth is as much Etch-a-sketch as edifice: it has been written and rewritten so many times that it is hard to know what it “should” be at all.

And even when its frescoes were fresh, back in the fourteenth century, they were themselves based on a rewriting of the Gospel. And a relatively radical one too. For the frescoes that those Istanbul residents are hurrying to pray beneath, refer to a Christian gospel that contained a version of the Virgin Mary’s vagina that could burn human flesh.

The gospel, called the Gospel of James, on which this church’s frescoes are based is enormously important to church history.  It dates back to the second century, and was, for a time, one of the most popular — and one of the most influential of all. If you have ever seen a nativity image that contains an ox and an ass you are seeing its influence. Yet even if you’re from a devout family you’re unlikely to ever have heard of this gospel.

Because starting in the second century this book, and others like it, started to be first denigrated, then denied by church authorities, especially in the west (it survived much better in the east, hence its presence in the Kariye). I hadn’t heard of it – and my parents had been a monk and a nun. My father, despite spending almost 14 years dressed in a cowl, had no idea it existed. The fact that we have all but forgotten this book tells us a bit about Mary — and a lot about history, and about religion, and what they are used for.

This Gospel of James may be ancient but even in the beginning it was itself a rewrite of history (or at any rate of the Gospels, which in Christianity pass for history). This Gospel appeared in a time when Christians were very, very concerned about proving the virginity of Mary. Chiefly, it seems, because their neighbours thought the idea was laughable nonsense. Mary was no virgin, they said. She’d been knocked up by a Roman soldier.

The other four Gospels, somewhat problematically, are not that helpful on this point. Most biblical accounts of Jesus’s birth are brisk to the point of perfunctory: after Jesus is born, they largely fade to black. They offer precious little in the way of proof that Mary was, indeed, a virgin.

Which is where the Gospel of James comes in. In it, after Jesus’s birth, a woman walks past, hears that a virgin has given birth and says: what nonsense, I don’t believe it. Mary’s midwife (this story has a midwife) says: test her yourself. In other words: check she has a hymen. So, strange as it may sound to a twenty-first century listener, this is what the woman does. She comes over to Mary, inserts her hand into Mary’s vagina – and it is promptly roasted off. “Woe,” she says, which is fair enough.

This gospel was immensely popular — though not among church authorities. When in the fourth century, the final form of the Bible was decided on, the Gospel of James didn’t make the cut. Then, Church authorities started to get stern about the offcut gospels. They were, declared a later decree, “not merely rejected but eliminated” from the Church, while their authors followers should, it added, “be damned in the inextricable shackles of anathema forever.”

The coming of Christianity ushered in an era that was distinguished by almost hysterical desire for purity against all wrong thought. Bishops encouraged the faithful not to read all parts of all “heathen” books lest  they “receive some contamination unawares”. To be not Christian, or worse, the wrong kind of Christian, became a crime. “Pagan” statues were torn down or defaced lest they pollute the eyes of those who saw them. Public show trials forced heretics to recant, grovellingly and humiliatingly, to their former wrong-belief. The most influential history book of the era explicitly stated that it would, in general, record only the Christian behaviour that set a good example — and not mention the rest.

This, the Christians said, was “liberation” not oppression. But being liberated is not always that much fun. The dialogue that this earnest, pure Christian world created was characterised, as the academic Brent D Shaw has put it, by a “hectoring moralizing of the individual, and a ceaseless management of the minutiae of everyday life. Above all, it was a form of speech marked by an absence of humour. It was a morose and a deadly serious world.”

The results on what we know about the church, and history, can still be felt. Even today, the Gospel of James has barely been studied by theologians. Discreet intellectual curtains covered it over. Our minds were protected. What a pity.

Our smiles have faded again. In 2020, an earnest desire for purity is once again in the air.  Make a joke about gender, or women, or the wrong bit of history and Twitter — as JK Rowling knows well – will have you. Books that might cause offence are getting “trigger warnings” or being removed from syllabuses. To Kill A Mockingbird was removed from classrooms in Canada and taken off the syllabus in a city in Mississippi because “there is some language in the book that makes people uncomfortable.” Statues are, once again, under threat. Edward Colston has gone. Rhodes is going to go. The souls of other statues are started to be weighed in the balance – and found wanting. And in Istanbul, the fate of the Church of the Chora hangs in the balance.

Let’s be clear: those who are banning books and toppling statues and no-platforming speakers are not doing this because they are unkind. On the contrary: they are doing it because they care. Either because they care about an ideal; or a god; or a religious law. They are all, every single one of them — Erdogan, the anti-Rowling Twitter mob, topplers of statues — acting — or so they say — to protect vulnerable hearts and minds; to liberate people from oppression. Erdogan, when opening Hagia Sophia to worship, said that that the building “is breaking away from its chains of captivity”.

Maybe. But it’s worth remembering that history is unlikely to see any of this as “liberation”. History, as much as anything else, is on a side: its own. And history dislikes those who destroy its evidence; those who ban books or silence speakers or pull down statues. Yes, people who do these things have their reasons. Arguably, they may be very good reasons. That doesn’t matter to history. When it says in a history book “they burnt books” no reader ever pauses to ask: which books? It is enough that they burnt them.

And now, history may well be about to rewritten again. So the world watches the frescoes in Istanbul, and waits.