I've discussed forty examples of agreements between Matthew and Luke about Jesus' childhood. More examples could be cited. Yet, critics often suggest that Matthew and Luke only agree about a few things, or they list some higher single-digit number of agreements, for example. Even lists that consist of some low double-digit number are way off in the direction of underestimating the amount of agreement.
Though these discussions are often framed in terms of what Matthew and Luke have in common, we don't have to limit ourselves to those two sources (or just the infancy narratives within those two sources). There are many agreements among many early sources, not just Matthew and Luke.
One way to effectively remember and illustrate some of the agreements is to place them in categories, such as chronological issues or geographical issues. Think, for instance, of how many agreements there are between two or more sources on issues related to Jesus' familial circumstances:
- He had a mother named Mary.
- She lived throughout his childhood.
- He had a father named Joseph.
- Joseph lived multiple years into Jesus' childhood.
- Jesus had a brother named James.
- Another was named Jude.
- Another was named Joseph.
- Another was named Simon.
- The brothers were unbelievers at the time of Jesus' public ministry, which probably means they were unbelievers during his childhood.
- Jesus had multiple sisters.
I've stopped at ten examples, but more could be included. I'm illustrating the fact that a double-digit number of examples can be cited even in this one category of agreements.
Even if you limit the agreements to the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, it's easy to provide a list of agreements across all categories that goes well into the double digits. Critics who claim that there are only a few agreements or give some other low number that's highly inaccurate should be asked why they're making a claim that's so obviously so wrong. And the people who are trusting the critics' judgments about Christmas issues more broadly should reconsider their trust. If these critics are so wrong about the amount of agreement among the sources, why trust what they tell you about how the genealogies supposedly can't be reconciled, Josephus would have mentioned the Slaughter of the Innocents if had occurred, Luke's census account is historically indefensible, etc.?
I'm not suggesting that people have no credibility if they get anything wrong. Issues of credibility range across a spectrum. And since there are so many potential and actual areas of agreement among the early sources who comment on Jesus' childhood in one way or another, that large amount of relevant material makes it more reasonable, accordingly, to overlook or misjudge some of the issues involved. Everybody is going to make mistakes to some extent. But the degree to which critics are wrong about this subject, often vastly underestimating the amount of agreement among the sources, is a big problem and should be criticized as such.
And I see no excuse in any alleged insignificance of the agreements involved. Think about how long Mary lived, for example. The mother/son relationship is important, and it's significant whether Jesus had a mother (rather than appearing on earth as an adult, similar to angelophanies, for example) and whether she lived throughout his childhood. Mary's living throughout his childhood is affirmed by all four gospels, Acts, and 1 Timothy (by means of the citation of Luke's gospel as scripture in 1 Timothy 5:18). To an extent, different people will define significance differently, but it would be hard to deny that an issue like how long Mary lived (or how long Joseph lived, whether Jesus had any brothers, etc.) is significant. Not only is it hard to deny the significance conceptually, but there's also the fact that the critics and the sources they most often cite frequently include some of the agreements I've mentioned in their own lists (e.g., Raymond Brown, The Birth Of The Messiah [New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999], 34-35). The critics and their sources often treat such agreements as significant, even though they also underestimate how many agreements there are.
One of the issues that has to be considered when evaluating significance is how easily the sources involved could have disagreed. If Matthew, Luke, and the other relevant sources were independently making up stories, they could easily have disagreed about, and probably would have disagreed to a large extent about, the name of Jesus' mother, how long Joseph lived, whether Jesus had brothers, and other such matters.
The reference to 1 Timothy 5:18 above raises another issue. Sources that are relevant to measuring the amount of agreement are often overlooked. In addition to 1 Timothy 5:18, think of 2 Peter 3:15-16. That passage in 2 Peter refers to Paul's letters as scripture, and Paul makes some comments in his letters about Jesus' familial context (the affirmation that the family was of Davidic ancestry in Romans 1:3, that Jesus had a mother in Galatians 4:4, that he had multiple brothers in 1 Corinthians 9:5, that one of them was named James in Galatians 1:19, etc.).
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