Talked to a priest yesterday night

I had a post a few days ago (April 9th) in which I wondered if I could call myself a Christian/Catholic because I have my issues with the Gospels.

Last night I talked to a catholic priest about some of them. Really casual atmosphere because we where playing cards at the time.
I asked about Jesus' birthplace, why he was called of Nazareth and not of Bethlehem. Related to that I wanted to know why Jesus is from David's kin if only Josef was from his kin and Josef wasn't the father of Jesus.

He pointed out that the jewish society of the time didn't really care about biological fatherhood. Instead, it was important if a man accepted a born child as his own. (I think that this was quite common in many societies of the ancient world)
Therefore it didn't matter if Josef biologically was the father of Jesus. Jesus is from Josef's (and David's) kin because Josef accepted him as a son. Along the same line Josef didn't need to have a biological connection to David. Being from the same town is being from the same tribe/family.

But in general he said the whole childhood of Jesus is rather unclear. He says that the Gospel writers probably didn't have clear accounts of his childhood but wrote them down because "it must have been this way". Since they believed that Jesus was the messiah they found it obvious that his childhood had to have included all the elements that had been prophecied.
The priest summarized it like this: the childhood stories are not to be taken literally, they are not historical facts in todays sense of the word. But they are no forgery either. At the time of writing they were just the most plausible explanation.

A third point came up but we couldn't go into detail on it because we got distracted by our cards. That was whether Jesus could be called a pacifist or Christian religion could be called pacifist in general. He said that Jesus wasn't a pacifist in our sense of the word.
That reminded me of a discussion i have had with Miguel last year. You can find it in my archives under March 27th 2003: "Is God blessing America?" in the comments. ( I don't know how to link to specific articles in my archives, sorry)

Unfortunately the priest couldn't explain his thoughts any further last night but I will ask for his detailed opinion when we meet again next week.