Sunday, December 21, 2025

The Discussion Of Jesus' Birthplace Between Jimmy Akin And Bart Ehrman

I just listened to it live. There's supposed to be a recording available within a few days, but I'll just go by my memory and notes for now.

I wrote a response to Bart on the subject of Jesus' birthplace last year. It addresses some issues that didn't come up in today's discussion. You can read that post for a fuller treatment of the topic.

In today's discussion, Bart kept going back and forth between saying that Matthew is our earliest source affirming the Bethlehem birthplace and acknowledging that there were multiple sources who affirmed that birthplace prior to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, sources the authors of those gospels drew from. Bart objected that we have so few early sources on the Bethlehem birthplace, and I think he suggested at least once that the only sources we have are Matthew and Luke. But if there were multiple pre-gospel sources who affirmed the Bethlehem birthplace, with at least one of them predating the gospel of Matthew, then we have reason to think Matthew isn't the earliest source, and we have more first-century sources than the two gospels in question. See my post on the Bethlehem birthplace outside Matthew and Luke here for more about such pre-gospel sources. Raymond Brown writes about them and proposes multiple such sources in his The Birth Of The Messiah (New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999), a work Bart recommends as the best one available at the end of his discussion with Jimmy. The existence of multiple pre-gospel sources who affirmed the Bethlehem birthplace weakens some of Bart's arguments.

Near the beginning of the discussion, Bart suggested that the Bethlehem birthplace isn't found in Paul's letters even if you accept as genuinely Pauline all thirteen of the canonical letters attributed to Paul. See my post on the Bethlehem birthplace outside Matthew and Luke cited earlier for an argument to the contrary. I argue there that the Bethlehem birthplace is likely implied by Ephesians, which applies Micah 5:5 to Jesus and seems to reiterate multiple themes from Micah's surrounding context, and 1 Timothy 5:18, which cites Luke's gospel as scripture.

Jimmy appealed to the gospel of John on the basis that 7:42 is likely an ironic reference to the ignorance of the crowd, who are unaware that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (as John also ironically cites their ignorance of Jesus' heavenly origins in 7:27). Jimmy is right, but I would add that there's further evidence beyond John's use of irony. See my comments on John's gospel in the post I linked earlier. Both Jesus' application of Isaiah 9:1-7 to himself in John 8:12 and his denial that his opponents know where he's from in 8:14 imply the Bethlehem birthplace. So, there are multiple lines of evidence that the Bethlehem birthplace is implied in the fourth gospel, which makes the later widespread acceptance of the Bethlehem birthplace among Christians in general and Johannine Christians in particular more coherent. Again, see my post linked above for more details.

Jimmy also appealed to the Ascension Of Isaiah, and there was a somewhat lengthy discussion about the dating of the document and its level of independence from the canonical gospels. I haven't studied those issues much, so I don't have much to say there.

Neither of them addressed the earliest non-Christian sources who provide evidence relevant to the subject of Jesus' birthplace, perhaps because those sources are considered too late. But given the motives those sources would have had for denying or being agnostic about a Bethlehem birthplace and given other factors involved, it makes more sense that their views were continuous with what earlier non-Christians sources said rather than discontinuous. If multiple non-Christian sources corroborate the Bethlehem birthplace, corroboration from earlier non-Christian sources makes more sense of that situation than proposing a scenario in which non-Christians initially denied the Bethlehem birthplace or were agnostic about it, then changed their views later and all changed their views in the same way, a way that advances Christianity. Jimmy's view that Jesus was born in Bethlehem makes more sense of what the early non-Christian sources say, and objecting that the non-Christian sources are late isn't an adequate response.

Bart raised a series of objections to the census account in Luke 2. He objected to the alleged ancestral nature of it, for example. He objects to an appeal to Luke 2:3 as evidence that the census was about places of residence rather than places of ancestry, since the reference to ancestry in verse 4 doesn't say that Joseph lived in Bethlehem because of that ancestry, and having ancestry in a particular town doesn't imply that you'll live there. But both objections are insufficient. Just as verse 4 doesn't say that Joseph lived in Bethlehem because of his Davidic ancestry, verse 3 doesn't mention ancestry. So, both Bart's view and Jimmy's involve some things that aren't spelled out by the text. The advantage of Jimmy's position is that it makes more sense of the evidence overall. Luke lived in the Roman empire and knew that censuses weren't ancestral. And if you go here, you'll find my discussion of several lines of evidence, including multiple lines from Luke's gospel itself, that Bethlehem was Joseph's primary place of residence. Bart's view that Luke assigns Joseph's primary residence to Nazareth and assigns him only an ancestral relationship with Bethlehem is inconsistent with several lines of evidence, whereas Jimmy's view involves fewer and less weighty difficulties. It's easier to see the ancestry reference in Luke 2:4 as a reason why Joseph lived in Bethlehem than it is to see Luke advocating the problematic concept of an ancestral census, even though he lived in the Roman empire and knew censuses weren't done that way and how problematic such a way of handling censuses would be, said nothing of ancestry in verse 3 when describing what the census required (even though Luke allegedly thought the census required a return to a place of ancestry), and all of the other problems with Bart's view (as outlined in my post linked above). Again, Jimmy's view makes more sense of the evidence as a whole and faces fewer and less substantial difficulties. Bart and other critics of the infancy narratives need to pay more attention to the difficulties with their own positions and make more of an effort to address those instead of being overly focused on the alleged difficulties of their opponents' positions.

Bart objected to the historicity of the Slaughter of the Innocents, and Jimmy replied with an argument from verisimilitude. I think there's partial corroboration of the Slaughter in some non-Christian sources, the Assumption Of Moses and Macrobius. See here for a discussion of those sources. That post also provides an explanation for why the objection that the Slaughter isn't mentioned outside Matthew's gospel is weak. I've also discussed some evidence for certain aspects of the magi material in Matthew 2. See here.

Eusebius' comment that "all agree that Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem" (Demonstration Of The Gospel 3:2) seems to be true of the sources we know of from the earliest centuries. The idea that so many Christian, heretical, Jewish, and pagan sources would have erred in the same direction, without anybody explicitly preserving Bart's view in the historical record, even though it was correct and allegedly unchallenged until decades after Jesus' birth, is highly unlikely. And the alleged implicit evidence for Bart's view, where Jesus is referred to as "Jesus of Nazareth" and such, is easy to reconcile with a Bethlehem birthplace, is found in multiple sources who explicitly advocated the Bethlehem birthplace, and provides a poor explanation for how widely the Bethlehem birthplace is accepted in both Christian and non-Christian sources.

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