Therefore the two Evangelists who decided to include a Nativity tale in their biographies of Jesus, chose those tales that had Jesus being born in Bethlehem. As a matter of interest, they chose completely different and inconsistent tales: In Matthew, Joseph and Mary live somewhere, probably Bethlehem. Mary falls pregnant, and Joseph is ready to cancel the betrothal The Angel comes to Joseph and tells him that the baby was conceived through the Holy Spirit and to "take Mary home", ie go through with the betrothal. After Jesus was born "in Bethlehem", the Magi come from the East and visit Herod in Jerusalem, asking where the new King is. Herod is concerned and wants to know about the new King (so he can have him killed) and sends them in the direction of Bethlehem (where scripture tells him any Messiah will be born). They visit Mary in a house, please note, and pay homage. An angel comes again and advises Joseph to get out of Bethlehem, and to flee to Egypt. From Egypt Joseph is scared to return to Bethlehem because he trusts Herod's successor there, Archelaus, no more than he did Herod himself, so he takes himself and his family to Nazareth in Galilee.
In the book of Luke, Mary is kinswoman of Elisabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. Mary lives in Nazareth in Galilee, and it is there that she is visited by the angel Gabriel, who tells her about her conception by the Holy Spirit. Later Augustus Caesar announced the census which caused Joseph to take Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem (it's quite specific), where Jesus is born. It does not say whereabouts he was born, but there is no mention of a stable, of ox and ass or anything more barnyard-specific than the one mention of a manger.
So what can we deduce from this? What do these stories have in common? Why, only that Jesus was a Galilean from the town of Nazareth - a factor common to all the Gospels. It was necessary to the Evangelists, to the early Christian community as a whole, to believe that Jesus was the promised Davidic Messiah, and that therefore he had to have been born in Bethlehem. It certainly wasn't part of any substantial prophecy that the Messiah be a native of Galilee (quite the opposite, in fact - the Davidic Messiah was predicted to be born in Bethlehem in order to ensure that at the very least He would be a Judahite. But Galilee is in Samaria (formerly Israel).
If the early Christians were making up a Davidic Messiah out of whole cloth, surely He would be Bethlehem born and raised, a Judahite who was perfectly at home in Jerusalem. But it seems that Jesus being a Galilean was simply too well known by people who would remember having seen Him - and of course, the Apostles carrying the new Church forward were themselves Galilean.
It is quite clear, then, that a fictional Jesus would never have been depicted as having come from a Northern backwater fishing port, with the retroactive fitting of one or other Bethlehemite birth story. He would have been depicted as coming from Bethlehem in Judah, and no-one would ever have heard of Nazareth. Clearly Jesus was a Nazarene, a Galilean, then, and just as clearly He must have existed in real life.
