"One of the gospels quotes a prophecy that a virgin will conceive a child," he explained. "Now the original Hebrew doesn't have the word virgin, it's just a young woman, but that's the prophecy that's quoted from the Old Testament in support of the story which is, in any case, about a birth without a human father, so it's not that it rests on mistranslation.
"St Matthew's gone to his Greek version of the bible and said, "Oh, 'virgin'; sounds like the story I know," and put it in."
Moving onto other traditional notions of the Nativity story that traditionally appear on Christmas cards, Dr Williams said that he could "live without the ox and asses" that typically appear on cards peering over the baby Jesus in the manger, and added that it "very unlikely" that there would be snow on the ground.
The Archbishop also rubbished Christmas cards that portray two of the three wise men, known as Magi in the Bible, as black while the third one is white, when the issue was raised later in the interview by Mayo.
The Archbishop answered, "Well Matthew's gospel doesn't tell us that there were three of them, doesn't tell us they were kings, doesn't tell us where they came from, it says they're astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire.
"That's all we're really told so, yes, 'the three kings with the one from Africa' - that's legend; it works quite well as legend."
He admitted he was unsure as to whether it was specifically a star that hung above Bethlehem at the time Jesus was born, but added that he had no problem in believing that the astrologers were following something they had seen that was out of the ordinary.
When Mayo asked him if there was a star above the place where the child is, Dr Williams answered, "Don't know; I mean Matthew talks about the star rising, about the star standing still; we know stars don't behave quite like that.
"That the wise men should have seen something which triggered a recognition of something significant was going on, some constellation, there are various scientific theories about what it might have been at around that time and they followed that trek, that makes sense to me."
