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(CNN) -- It's Christmas, but not as you know it: a new book released this week by Pope Benedict XVI looks at the early life of Jesus -- and debunks several myths about how the Nativity unfolded.

In "Jesus of Nazareth -- The Infancy Narratives," the pope says the Christian calendar is actually based on a blunder by a sixth century monk, who Benedict says was several years off in his calculation of Jesus' birth date.
Read more: Egypt's Coptic Christians pick new pope
According to the pope's research, there is also no evidence in the Gospels that the cattle and other animals traditionally pictured gathered around the manger were actually present.

Pope debunks Christmas myths
He also debunks the claim that angels sang at the birth, a staple theme of Christmas carols.

(Lamebeaver @ Nov. 28 2012, 10:11 am)

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Josephus mentions the census.  I think there are a few others as well.

(Marmotstew @ Nov. 28 2012, 6:16 am)

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Then why do some religions take things so literally? Like the JWs who don't accepts blood transfusions or the Christians who don't think gays are human?

(Marmotstew @ Nov. 28 2012, 9:38 am)

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Well some Christians don't want to give gays the same rights(marriage) as non gays. So thats why I came to the conclusion they don't view them as human.

It's difficult for me to comprehend beleiving all that mumbo jumbo in he bibles knowing its not really accurate and all that jazz.

(Marmotstew @ Nov. 28 2012, 9:47 am)

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No equal rights=not human. That's why we call foreigners Aliens. They go around infecting our children with their voodo and popping out of people's stomach. Ok that's not entirely accurate but neither is the bible.

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TOMS: I want to get back to the interpretation of myth, and especially relative to Christianity. What is your experience with people from the established religions? How do you convey to them that it is possible to look at the Bible from a symbolic point of view?

CAMPBELL: I taught a course at Sarah Lawrence College on comparative mythology for thirty-eight years. I taught young people of every available creed. More than fifty percent of my students from the New York area were Jewish; many were Christians – Protestant, Catholic; there were Mormons and Zoroastrians and Buddhists. There wasn’t much of a problem with the Buddhists, but all the others were somewhat stuck in their provincial traditions.

It was the simplest thing; all I did was to point out the parallels and identities all over the place. You see, when there is a motif – such as that of the virgin birth – which occurs in American Indian mythologies, in Greek mythology, and so on, it becomes obvious that the virgin birth could not have referred to a historical event. It’s a spiritual event that’s referred to – even in the Christian tradition. One after another, these motifs became spiritualized instead of historicized. And the interesting thing is that instead of the person losing her religion, she gained it. It became a religion instead of a misleading theory.

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TOMS: You mentioned the Flood. Like the Virgin Birth, it also is a motif that runs through all cultures.

CAMPBELL: Yes. There are very few cultures that don’t have a Flood motif. That’s a basic idea: the dissolution of the world which takes place every night when we go into the flood of our own unconscious. It’s the analogue of the mythological Flood: at the end of the cycle, there’s a flood. The American Indians have lots of Flood stories.

It was thought when the diggings in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley were proceeding that evidence of the Biblical flood could be located – at least a flood universal to that area. And there were flood levels found in several cities. But they were not the same flood level; they were local floods. There’s no cosmic flood; the Flood motif is a mythological idea. The whole notion that all originates from water, and all is going back to water, gives you a cycle: out of water, back to water, out of water, back to water; and each new cosmic aeon, each new world-age, is, as it were, a creation out of water and a dissolution into water. So it’s a mythological motif. This is exactly the point that Thomas Mann makes very well in the first part of Joseph and His Brothers: the archetypal Flood is a mythological, a psychological flood, and when local floods occur they become identified with it. Do you understand? We have experienced The Flood. The Flood is a mythological principle, and when a flood occurred, we understood the sense of the image.