London, Dec 8: If you want to know where Jesus was born, you would be better off not asking a Brit, for a new survey has revealed that more than one in four adults in the UK are just as clueless as you.

The survey found that 27 percent were unable to give the correct location of Bethlehem, and the proportion rose to 36 percent among young people aged between 18 and 24.

One in ten of those questioned thought the answer was Nazareth and a similar number said Jerusalem.

A further 27 percent were not able to answer who told Mary that she would give birth to a son, the Angel Gabriel, while the majority, 52 percent were unable to name John the Baptist as Jesus’ cousin.

More than three quarters of people, at 78 percent, gave the wrong answer when asked where Joseph, Mary and Jesus went to escape from King Herod - Egypt. Most thought they escaped to Nazareth.

Only 12 percent of adults could answer all four questions about the Christmas story correctly.

The telephone survey, which polled 1,015 adults, was commissioned by the public theology think tank Theos.

Paul Woolley, director of Theos, said the findings showed the Christmas story, in its classic formulation, was still "very much" in the "cultural blood stream" of the nation, alongside the Christian story as a whole.

But he said when probed in depth, this knowledge and understanding was "rather more shaky. "

"The fact that younger people are the least knowledgeable about the Christmas story may reflect a decline in the telling of Bible stories in schools and the popularity of Nativity plays, " the Telegraph quoted him, as saying.

"No one seriously thinks that being a Christian or a member of the established Church is the same thing as being British today.

"But, at the same time, if we are serious about social cohesion we can't afford to ignore the stories that have bound us together as a culture for a thousand years.

"Any attempts to down-play the Christmas story in order to help social cohesion are likely to be counterproductive, ” he added.

The region with the highest percentage of people getting all four answers right was the South East, at 19 percent, followed by the South West which scored 17 percent.

Yorkshire and Humberside and London had the highest percentage of people who answered all four questions incorrectly, at 15 percent.

Christian churchgoers knew the story best with 36 percent answering all questions correctly, compared with only 5 percent of those describing themselves as atheists. (ANI)