A few weeks ago, I noted the upcoming movie on Jesus' birth and the attention it would bring to issues surrounding the infancy narratives. For some people, it provides an opportunity to criticize the infancy narratives and Christianity in general. The film critic Emanuel Levy recently wrote the following in an article about the movie:
"There are two stories of Jesus’ birth in the New Testament, one in the Gospel of Matthew and one in the Gospel of Luke. Most scholars agree that both Gospels were written shortly after 70 AD, about 40 years after Jesus’ death. The two versions are not completely compatible. Although interest in the early life of Jesus was probably intense in the early Christian church, it is clear that very little was known about the events of those first years, so the stories were developed using what is called Midrash, a sometimes creative reconstruction of events based on what is actually known elaborated from clues taken from the prophets or other sacred writings....The Gospels of Mark and John do not have infancy narratives, both beginning with Jesus’ public life. Aside from the stories in Matthew and Luke, Jesus’ infancy is nowhere else alluded to in the New Testament, although it is a favorite topic in the so-called apocryphal or non-canonical gospels."
He does acknowledge that "interest in the early life of Jesus was probably intense in the early Christian church", which is a step in the right direction. Many critics of the infancy narratives act as if the gospel authors or their sources would have been fabricating accounts decades after Jesus' death, without much interest in Jesus' background prior to that time. As I've mentioned in some previous posts, issues such as whether Jesus was a descendant of David and where He was born surely would have been of widespread interest to both the earliest Christians and their earliest enemies, as we see reflected in the writings of Paul and in the gospels (Matthew 2:4-6, Mark 10:47-48, Luke 20:41-44, John 7:41-42, Romans 1:3, Galatians 4:4). Such issues surely would have been discussed even before Jesus died, as all of the gospels indicate. And given Luke's close ties with Paul, Matthew's close ties with the entire church as an apostle, and the widespread acceptance of both gospels early on, it's unlikely that either gospel is presenting a view of Jesus' background that was initially only narrowly accepted. Luke gives his infancy account just after referring to his dependence on prior sources (Luke 1:1-4).
After referring to "intense" interest in Jesus' infancy among the early Christians, Levy comments, in the same sentence, that "it is clear that very little was known about the events of those first years, so the stories were developed using what is called Midrash". How do "intense interest" and "very little was known" go together during a timeframe when eyewitnesses and contemporaries of Jesus, the apostles, and close relatives of Jesus were still alive? They don't. As I've argued in my earlier posts on the infancy narratives, the evidence suggests that the gospels and the infancy narratives in particular are of a historical genre, not the sort of "creative midrash" that Levy suggests.
From what Levy and others are saying about the movie, it seems that it has some good elements, but also has some problems (historical and otherwise). Apparently, the movie is sometimes inconsistent with the Biblical accounts, and some of the details, such as the names of the magi, are based on unreliable late sources.
As could be expected, reviewers have already referred to the conception of Jesus with the phrase "immaculate conception", even though the Roman Catholic doctrine known by that title is about Mary's conception, not Jesus' conception. Todd McCarthy of Variety writes:
"Inspired by Matthew, screenplay foreshadows Mary's immaculate conception with the surprise pregnancy of her cousin Elizabeth (Shohreh Aghdashloo), a woman past childbearing years."
Maybe he knows that the Roman Catholic doctrine is about Mary's conception, not the conception of Jesus. Maybe he's just applying the phrase to a different context, without intending to suggest that the Catholic doctrine in question is about Jesus' conception. But I think that a lot of the people who watch and review the movie will be ignorant enough of the subject matter to confuse the two.
Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter, despite giving the movie a generally positive review, writes:
"When a diaphanous Archangel Gabriel puts in appearances, we're clearly in the realm of mythology. But the movie, written by Mike Rich and directed by Catherine Hardwicke, sticks as close as possible to a realistic account of the Christ child's birth....Mary convinces her parents to allow her to visit the pious couple to sort out her life. It is here she experiences the Immaculate Conception."
Notice the capitalization in "Immaculate Conception". He does seem to think that the Roman Catholic doctrine is about Jesus' conception.
We'll probably be seeing a lot of Biblical criticism in the reviews of this movie, including from people who don't know much about Christianity. To read a review written from an Evangelical perspective, one that includes a discussion of issues of Marian doctrine, see here. For a more detailed argument against the sinlessness of Mary than the argument presented by that reviewer, see here. For some Catholic reviews, see here and here, for example.
Any presentation of the nativity that tries to "weave together," or harmonize, Matthew and Luke will be unfaithful to the biblical story contained in either Luke or Matthew. The two stories are altogether different. To harmonize them is to misinterpret them.
ReplyDeleteIn Matthew, Jesus' home is in Bethlehem, and the Holy Family later move house to Nazareth in Galilee. In Luke, Jesus' home is in Nazareth, and the Holy Family are only temporarily in Bethlehem for a census, before returning to Nazareth.
New Testament scholar Raymond Brown summarises the issues well:
"The two narratives are not only different - they are contrary to each other in a number of details. According to Luke 1:26 and 2:39 Mary lives in Nazareth, and so that the census of Augustus is invoked to explain how the child was born in Bethlehem, away from home. In Matthew there is no hint of a coming to Bethlehem, for Joseph and Mary are in a house at Bethlehem where seemingly Jesus was born (2:11). The only journey that Matthew has to explain is why the family went to Nazareth when they came from Egypt instead of returning to their native Bethlehem (2:22-23). A second difficulty is that Luke tells us that the family returned peaceably to Nazareth after the birth at Bethlehem (2:22, 39); this is irreconcilable with Matthew's implication (2:16) that the child was almost two years old when the family fled from Bethlehem to Egypt and even older when the family came back from Egypt and moved to Nazareth."
- Raymond E. Brown The birth of the Messiah -- a commentary on the infancy narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (New York: Doubleday, 1993, updated edition), p. 36.
But let us examine these points in more detail, by first interpreting Luke, and then Matthew.
Luke's Account
Luke has Joseph and Mary move from their hometown in Nazareth in Galilee, to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus, and back to Nazareth in Galilee.
Luke puts Joseph and Mary's home in Nazareth
Nazareth in Galilee is shown to be Joseph and Mary's hometown before the birth of Jesus in Luke 2:3-4. Joseph, Jesus' legal father, has to travel from his "own town" (2:39) of Nazareth in Galilee, to his "own [ancestral] town" (2:3-4) Bethlehem in Judea, only because of the census of Quirinius:
Luke 2:1-4: "In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2 This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 All went to their own towns to be registered. 4 Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David."
Also, in Luke 1.26, Nazareth was declared to be Mary's hometown nine months earlier, at the time of her conception:
Luke 1.26-27: "Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, 27 to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary."
Some inerrantists have attempted to argue that, while Luke explicitly calls Nazareth Mary's hometown, he does not do so for Joseph. They then speculate, for the sake of harmonization, that Joseph lived in Bethlehem, while only Mary lived in Nazareth! Because such a situation is highly speculative, and an unlikely interpretation of Luke's narrative, this is unable to be defended as a proper interpretation of the text. But there is also a further problem for the inerrantist who tries to separate Joseph from Mary for the purposes of his harmonization. For, according to Matthew, Joseph had already taken Mary as his wife before Jesus was born, although Joseph was not yet having sex with Mary (Matthew 1:24-25). The Jewish institution of marriage in the first century, although differing from the modern institution, at least included the man taking his wife into his house. So, according to Matthew, Joseph was living in the same house, in the same town, with Mary. And this is corroborated by Matthew's need to say that Joseph wasn't having sex with Mary before Jesus was born - as the common matrimonial home would have provided the opportunity for Joseph to have regular access to Mary for sexual intercourse. So what of Luke's account of Joseph going between Nazareth and Bethlehem in Luke 2:2-3 & 39? If Joseph and Mary were already married, and one wishes to harmonize the accounts of Matthew and Luke, this must also have been Joseph's town.
Then, according to Luke, after Joseph and Mary had travelled to Bethlehem, Jesus was born in Bethlehem:
Luke 2:6-7: "While they were there [in Bethlehem], the time came for her to deliver her child. 7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son … "
Luke then describes the circumcision of Jesus, and the purification (from the 'impurities' of childbirth) of Mary. Circumcision was carried out on the eighth day after birth (Lev 12:3), and the mother was considered ceremonially unclean for the 7 days following childbirth, and 33 days following the circumcision (Lev 12:2, 4). After this 40-day period, the mother had to provide a sheep as a sacrifice to restore her purity. This sacrifice could be changed to two turtledoves or pigeons if she were too poor to afford a sheep (Lev 12:6-8). As Luke 2:24 shows, Mary offered two turtledoves or pigeons:
Luke 2:21-24: "After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. 22 When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord 23 (as it is written in the law of the Lord, "Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord"), 24 and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.""
Leviticus 12 sets out the relevant "law of Moses", the requirements of which took a period of 40 days following childbirth. Luke is then quite clear that Joseph and Mary returned to their "own town" of Nazareth "when they had finished" these 40 days of legal requirements:
Luke 2:39: "When they [Joseph and Mary] had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.
The phrase "when they had finished ... they returned to Galilee" translates the Greek kai hos etelsan ... epestreupsan eis ten Galilaian, literally: "as they completed [all the requirements of the Law], they returned to Galilee." Such a phrasing makes the inerrantist's presumption of any trip to Egypt at this stage highly unlikely. Luke is clearly narrating the return to Nazareth as something that occurred just when Mary had completed the 40 days of legal obligations. And the presumption of a long trip to Egypt awaiting Herod's death, omitted by Luke, would be quite contrary to the meaning being conveyed by Luke in 2:39.
Matthew's Account
Matthew has Joseph and Mary take an entirely different route, from an entirely different hometown!
Matthew puts Joseph and Mary's home in Bethlehem
At some point following the birth of Jesus, Joseph is commanded to go to Egypt, from their house in Bethlehem. If this "house" (Matthew 2:11) is Joseph and Mary's own house, this is complete contradiction to Luke's account, which places the Holy Family's hometown in Nazareth, Galilee. This is the most likely meaning of oikia ("house"), which most naturally refers to a family's abode. In its unqualified sense, as it appears in Matthew 2:11, oikia most probably refers to Joseph and Mary's own household. Therefore, Matthew should be interpreted as understanding that Joseph and Mary were living in Bethlehem immediately before the birth of Jesus! As Raymond Brown explains:
"Presumably this was the house which served as the home of Joseph and Mary who were inhabitants of Bethlehem. The view is quite different from that of Luke 2:1-7. There have been many attempts, often quite forced, to harmonize the information." (p. 176)
Many Inerrantists, faced with the natural and probable translation of oikia as Joseph and Mary's home, will reach for their concordances and try to translate oikia as the stable of Luke's story, or some other harmonizing option. This tactic, searching for any unlikely alternative meaning of a word in order to support a harmonization, is commonplace amongst Inerrantists. But the tactic is denounced in mainstream biblical scholarship, where it is labelled "illegitimate totality transfer." However, there is a further problem for the Inerrantist in the case of Matthew's nativity story. For, even if this natural interpretation of oikia is rejected by the Inerrantist, there is conclusive proof later on in chapter 2 of Matthew that Bethlehem was Joseph and Mary's hometown. For, when Joseph is told to return to Israel:
1. Joseph's first thought is to return to Judea (the province in which Bethlehem is), not Nazareth (Matthew 2:22). Naturally, Joseph and Mary wished to return to their hometown, which Matthew 2:22 reveals was in Judea. But Nazareth is in Galilee, not Judea!
2. Only after being warned in a dream not to return to Judea, Joseph goes instead to Galilee (Matthew 2:22).
3. On coming to Nazareth, Joseph is not described as returning to the home that Luke believes he has there. To the contrary, Joseph is described as "making his home" there. The phrase "made his home in a town called Nazareth" (Matthew 2:23) reveals that Joseph is settling in a new place, which Matthew now introduces for the first time! Far from returning to his hometown, Joseph has arrived in a town that is altogether new to him.
4. What is more, it is only because of Joseph's arrival in Nazareth at this time that Matthew sees fit to claim that Jesus will now fulfill the prophecy, "He will be called a Nazorean" (Matthew 2:23).
So when we actually come to consider the logic of Matthew's narrative itself, rather than leap to a forced harmonization with Luke, it is beyond reasonable doubt that Matthew must be interpreted as presenting Bethlehem, not Nazareth, as Joseph and Mary's original hometown. As Raymond Brown summarises:
"Joseph's first thought was to return to Judea, i.e., to "Bethlehem of Judea" (2:1), because he and Mary lived in a house there (2:11). Since Joseph and Mary were citizens of Bethlehem, Matthew takes pains to explain why they went to Nazareth. In Luke's account, where they are citizens of Nazareth, the painstaking explanation is centered on why they went to Bethlehem (2:1-5)."
So, in contrast to Luke, Matthew has Joseph and Mary move from their house in Bethlehem, to Egypt, and then settle for the first time in Nazareth!
The time-scale in Matthew
Moreover, this occurs over a period of some years following Jesus' birth. Remember that Luke has Jesus leave Bethlehem for Jerusalem after 40 days, the term of Mary's purification (Luke 2:21-24, 39). So, in Luke, Jesus is still little more than a newborn baby when he leaves Bethlehem. But the wise men who visited Jesus in Matthew's account provide information to Herod about Jesus' age that leads to him killing all boys up to two years old. The clear implication of the narrative is that the wise men had given Herod information about the date of Jesus' birth that led Herod to kill all boys who lived in Bethlehem up to 2 years old:
Matthew 2:16: "When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men."
And in Matthew's account, Joseph and Mary remain in Egypt for some time after this, awaiting the death of Herod. Yet, according to Luke, Jesus travelled to Nazareth with his family only after 40 days:
Matthew 2:15, 19-21: "and [Joseph, the child and his mother] remained there [in Egypt] until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, "Out of Egypt I have called my son." … 19 When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, 20 "Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child's life are dead." "
Many inerrantists who try to harmonize Luke with Matthew posit a trip to Egypt between the visit to Jerusalem and the return to Nazareth. But:
1. Such a harmonization abuses the straightforward statement in Luke that shows Joseph and Mary return home on completing the legal requirements of Leviticus 12. According to Luke, Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth "as they finished everything required by the law;"
2. Such a harmonization takes no account of the presentation of Nazareth as the hometown of Joseph and Mary in Luke, versus Bethlehem in Matthew; and
3. Such a harmonization fails to adequately explain why, on being warned to flee straightaway to Egypt by an angel of Yahweh (once the wise men who had visited them, in Bethlehem, had left the place: 2:1-15), Joseph first travelled to Jerusalem (Luke 2:22) the very place where Herod himself reigned!
Summary: The contradiction
Luke places Joseph and Mary at home in Nazareth, Galilee, from before the birth of Jesus (Luke 1:26-27; 2:4). After a trip to Bethlehem, Judea (Luke 2:5), during which Mary gives birth to Jesus and has him circumcised (Luke 2:6-7, 21), they return home to Nazareth, Galilee. If he is presented to the temple in Jerusalem after 40 days as was the custom (Matthew 2:21-38) - the return would be 40 days after Jesus' birth (Luke 2:39).
But:
Matthew places Joseph and Mary's original home in Bethlehem, Judea. Matthew does not believe that their original home was in Nazareth, Galilee. This is clear from the fact that they begin in Bethlehem, as shown by the visit to their home in Bethlehem, Judea by the wise men in Matthew 2:1-12, and Herod seeking to destroy all Bethlehem infants in Matthew 2:16-18; and especially as shown by the angel of the Lord telling them to return home to Judea, Israel in Matthew 2:19-21, and the decision not to do so but to settle in a new town, Nazareth, Galilee.
So for Luke: Joseph and Mary begin in Nazareth, Galilee. (1) They travel to Bethlehem, Judea for a temporary census, and remain approximately 40 days after Jesus's birth there, before (2) making sacrifice at Jerusalem. (3) They then return to their home in Nazareth, Galilee.
But for Matthew: Joseph and Mary begin in Bethlehem, Judea. (1) After a period of up to 2 years, they then travel to Egypt, to wait out the death of Herod, for a further period of months or years. They are then told to return to Israel - but (2) later travel to Galilee to "settle" in the town of Nazareth.
The contradiction is demonstrated by a proper examination of each of the two infancy narratives.
Brian,
ReplyDeleteI've addressed some of these issues in other posts. You're making a lot of assumptions that you can't justify.
Nothing in Luke 2:39 tells us whether Joseph and Mary returned a day, a month, a year, or some other period of time after the completing of the requirements of the law. Luke is concerned about their submission to the law, and he focuses on that issue, but there would have been more involved in moving a family to another location, regardless of whether the move occurred a day, a month, or more later. It's not as if they would have been moving at the same time at which they fulfilled the last requirement of the law. Similarly, Acts 13:29 doesn't require that Jesus was removed from the cross at the same moment at which those who crucified Him had fulfilled all of the relevant prophecies. Rather, Jesus remained on the cross for some time (Luke 23:52). The timespan between the completion of "all that was written concerning Him" (Acts 13:29) and His being removed from the cross was short, but there was some time between the two. Luke's (and Paul's) point in Acts 13:29 is that the removal from the cross occurred only after the fulfillment of all that was prophesied about Jesus. His point isn't that the removal occurred at the same time as the fulfillment of the last prophecy, as if no time could pass between the two. Some time could pass, and the same is likely true of Luke 2:39.
The fact that Joseph and Mary were in a house for a while in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:11) doesn't logically lead us to the conclusion that they must have lived in Bethlehem during all of the events of Matthew 1. Despite all of his emphasis on locations in chapter 2, Matthew refrains from identifying locations in chapter 1. He probably had less information about those earlier events than he had about the later events.
Matthew 2:22 tells us that Joseph was afraid of going to Judea, but it also tells us that he first had to be warned by God before he went to Galilee. Apparently, he was initially willing to go to Judea, despite his fears. Whether he would be willing to occasionally return to Judea later is an issue that isn't addressed in Matthew's gospel. Since he surely would eventually want to return to Judea for religious observances, it seems unlikely that he was intending to never return. Rather, Matthew 2:22 is about where Joseph was to live. Luke's gospel agrees with Matthew's in having the family live in Nazareth. The fact that they sometimes returned to Judea (Luke 2:41) doesn't contradict Matthew 2:22. Matthew is addressing where they lived, not where they visited.
You're overestimating the differences between the infancy narratives and underestimating the similarities. You're also ignoring some of the relevant historical factors that give us reason to trust both accounts (the availability of relevant sources when both gospels were written, evidence for the Divine inspiration of scripture, etc.).