The McGrew/Pearce Debate On Christmas Issues

Lydia McGrew recently debated Jonathan Pearce on issues surrounding Jesus' birth on the Unbelievable? radio program. I've reviewed Pearce's book on Christmas issues. And Steve Hays and I wrote some further responses to his work: here, here, here, and here. Those responses from Steve and I are focused on Jonathan's objections to the magi material in Matthew 2, and he raises those objections in his debate with Lydia. Anybody who's interested can read those exchanges from 2014. I won't be repeating what I said in that context, but will instead focus on other parts of the McGrew/Pearce debate. The large majority of what needs to be said in response to arguments like Jonathan's is covered on the pages linked above and in my recent collection of Christmas resources here.

Since issues related to Luke's historical reliability came up, I want to provide some links relevant to that subject. Here's the presentation on Acts that Lydia referred to. And here's a video by Craig Keener on Luke's historiography. The video also discusses examples of how Luke's accuracy has been demonstrated on various issues. You can go here for some excerpts from Keener's commentary on Acts. One of those posts is about Luke's use of sources, a subject Jonathan brought up in the debate.

On the authorship of Matthew's gospel, see here. As somebody who knew Jesus, lived in or near the same city for a while, and had interacted with members of Jesus' immediate family, Matthew has a substantial amount of credibility, even though he didn't cite sources in the manner Jonathan wants. Jonathan is right to suggest that the lack of source citation diminishes the credibility of Matthew and Luke, but he underestimates how much that objection is countered by other factors, like the ones mentioned above.

And his analogy to Sherlock Holmes is problematic, not only for the reason Lydia mentions during the debate, but also because the evidence for the genres of the relevant works is so different. Sherlock Holmes has been widely recognized as fiction from the start, whereas Luke was writing in a historical genre and was interpreted that way by the earliest sources. See, for example, Keener's comments on the subject here. You can also watch him discuss the subject in more depth in the videos here and here. When a source is as historically accurate as Luke's material is, presents itself as a work of history, and was so interpreted by the earliest sources, we don't begin with a default assumption that it's an equivalent of Sherlock Holmes. Rather, the evidence suggests that Luke's material is different than Sherlock Holmes in the manner Lydia, I, and other Christians have appealed to. So, the large amount of historical corroboration we have for Luke's writings does add credibility to his material on Jesus' childhood.

Jonathan made some comments about the absurdity of a census requiring people to go to their ancestral home. But it's highly unlikely that Luke is referring to an ancestral census. See here.

When addressing the notion of the census account being fabricated in order to get Jesus and his family to Bethlehem, Lydia rightly compared that scenario to using a jackhammer to crack a nut. Jonathan's appeal to Psalm 87:6 to explain the origins of the census account doesn't make sense either. Luke makes no reference to that Psalm, and, as far as I know, none of the earliest Christian sources who discuss the census do so either. Raymond Brown thought the Psalm might be behind the census account, but he doesn't cite any Christian sources using the Psalm in the context of the census until the fourth century (The Birth Of The Messiah [New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999], 417-18). See Darrell Bock's discussion of some problems with Brown's appeal to some Jewish sources (Luke, Volume 1, 1:1-9:50 [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1994], 209). Or go to page 76 here for Bock's discussion of the issue in another book.

Since I just mentioned Raymond Brown, and Jonathan speaks highly of Brown's work both in his (Jonathan's) book and during his debate with Lydia, go here for a collection of my responses to Brown. And here and here are some examples of Brown's more conservative conclusions about the infancy narratives. His views on the subject were largely liberal, and they have some overlap with Jonathan's, but his disagreements with views like Jonathan's are worth noting as well.

One area where Brown disagreed with Jonathan is on the dating of Luke's infancy material. Brown thought the opening chapters of the gospel came from the same author who wrote the rest of the gospel and Acts, even though that author wrote the infancy material later (The Birth Of The Messiah [New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999], 241, 246-53). By contrast, during the debate being reviewed here, Jonathan argues that the infancy material in the gospel of Luke is a "later interpolation", says that Brown agrees with him about that, and cites different theology and an absence of the virgin birth after chapter 2 as evidence. He mentions the possibility that the interpolation of chapters 1-2 into the gospel happened in response to Marcionism in the second century. But that dating puts the infancy material much later than Brown dates it, and Brown argues that Marcion removed chapters 1-2 rather than having an earlier version of Luke that didn't include those chapters (n. 18 on 241). And Brown finds the theology of chapters 1-2 sufficiently consistent with that of the remainder of the gospel and Acts (241-43), so that he assigns chapters 1-2 to the same author. Furthermore, in contrast to Jonathan's position, Brown rightly notes that Luke 3:23 alludes to the virgin birth (301). (For more examples of corroboration of Luke's infancy material beyond chapter 2 in his gospel, see here.)

Jonathan argues that Luke's gospel is portraying Jesus as superior to John the Baptist, so that Jesus "has to have a miraculous birth". I agree that Luke is portraying Jesus as superior. But there are exceptions, and, as far as I recall, those exceptions didn't come up in the debate. Mary's pregnancy is premarital, which was problematic for the early Christians, is highly unlikely to have been fabricated by them, and makes Jesus inferior to John in that context. See Brown's comments on the unlikelihood that the premarital timing of the pregnancy was made up (The Birth Of The Messiah [New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999], 142-43), quoted in my post here. Similarly, John the Baptist is referred to as having had an unusual upbringing in the wilderness (Luke 1:80), reminiscent of Moses' upbringing in the house of Pharaoh and Samuel's upbringing in a sanctuary setting with Eli, for example, whereas Jesus just grows up in a highly ordinary home with his parents (Luke 2:51). Luke gives Jesus a less auspicious upbringing than John and makes no attempt to parallel Jesus with individuals like Moses and Samuel, even though we're so often told that the infancy narratives are unhistorical efforts to parallel Jesus to such Old Testament figures. (For more about the alleged parallels between Jesus and figures like Moses, see here.) Like the premarital timing of Mary's pregnancy, Jesus' upbringing in such an ordinary home in Nazareth is highly unlikely to have been fabricated.

Jonathan says that material like the virgin birth and the Bethlehem birthplace aren't found in places where they should be. He goes as far as to claim that Paul and Mark say "nothing" of relevance, for example. Jonathan makes a good point about how silence is sometimes evidentially significant, and I agree with him that we should find some of the infancy material in these other sources. But, contrary to what Jonathan claims, we do find that material in the sources in question. I wrote an entire series of posts on the subject several years ago. To cite two examples, John 8:12 likely implies Jesus' Davidic ancestry and Bethlehem birthplace, and 1 Timothy 5:18 is likely a reference to Luke's gospel as scripture. See my material just linked for a further discussion of those and other examples.

Luke 2:39 was brought up, and Lydia referred to it as the most plausible candidate for an inconsistency between Matthew and Luke. See here for my discussion of the passage.

There were some major issues that received little or no attention during the debate. The availability of so many sources with relevant information during the earliest decades of Christianity should have gotten more attention (Mary's living past the time of Jesus' death, the prominence of Jesus' brothers in Christian circles for more than a quarter of a century, etc.). A subcategory that deserves more attention of its own is how sources who were hostile to Christianity were so accessible for so long (Jesus' brothers before their conversion, the people of Nazareth, etc.). Therefore, when ancient non-Christian sources corroborated Jesus' Bethlehem birthplace, his residence in Nazareth, and other claims made by the early Christians, that corroboration is more significant accordingly. There's much that modern skeptics, like Jonathan, claim about Jesus' childhood that disagrees with what was said by ancient non-Christian sources, not just ancient Christians. And the material about Jesus' childhood that was difficult for the early Christians in some way, material they would be unlikely to have fabricated, should have gotten more attention. Lydia did well in discussing how the nationalistic nature of Luke's material is unlikely to have been made up by the early Christians. But I don't recall Justin Brierley pursuing the larger category much. I gave some other examples from that category above, such as the premarital timing of Mary's pregnancy and Jesus' upbringing in such an ordinary home in Nazareth. Many other examples could be cited. The large amount of agreement among the early Christian sources, much more than people usually suggest (see here, here, and here, for example), also didn't get much attention. That includes undesigned coincidences, an area Lydia has specialized in. And there's so much else that could have been discussed.

But there's only so much you can get to in about an hour. And this was the most substantive Christmas debate I remember from Unbelievable?. Maybe I'm forgetting something better they had in the past, or maybe I missed it, but this year's program was at least much better than what they've typically had in the past.