Annette Merz's Claims About The Infancy Narratives

Part 1: Introduction, Historical Methodology
Part 2: Sources On Jesus' Childhood
Part 3: Typology
Part 4: The Unbelief Of Jesus' Family
Part 5: The Unbelief Of Nazareth
Part 6: Davidic Ancestry
Part 7: The Bethlehem Birthplace
Part 8: The Date Of Jesus' Birth, Luke's Census
Part 9: How Much Matthew And Luke Agree

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 9)

(Previous parts in the series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8.)

I want to conclude this series of responses to Merz by discussing how much Matthew and Luke agree about the childhood of Jesus. One of the most common criticisms of the infancy narratives is that they're too different. And critics often cite that objection as one of the most foundational reasons for rejecting the historicity of the accounts.

Merz cites a couple of resources on the agreements between Matthew and Luke:

Instructive lists of the agreements can be found in J.A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX (AB 28; New York: Doubleday, 1981), 307; and P.M. McDonald, S. H. C. J., "Resemblances between Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2," in New Perspectives on the Nativity, 200-01. (n. 34 on 475)

And here are some of her comments on the differences between the two gospels:

Whereas Joseph is a resident of Bethlehem according to Matthew, and the birth seems to have taken place at his house, Mary is forced to give birth in a stable in Luke's account…

The contradictions between Matthew and Luke on the question of how the family happened to be present in Bethlehem and how the course of events developed after the baby's birth count heavily against historicity. Matthew presupposes Bethlehem as the hometown of Joseph, the son of David, and has the family move to Nazareth only much later, after the magi's visit and clandestine return had provoked Herod's slaughter of the innocents, which in turn caused the family's flight to Egypt, which allowed Matthew to cite another biblical proof text from Hos 11…In Luke, the family lives in Nazareth and comes to Bethlehem, the city of David, in obedience to the decree from Caesar Augustus that they should be enrolled in a world-wide census, and they return to Nazareth very quickly, stopping only to perform the necessary rituals in Jerusalem - the presentation of the child in the temple and the purification of the mother (40 days after birth, according to Lev 12). Within approximately seven weeks, the family was back in their hometown, Nazareth, and on the way back had stayed for several days in Jerusalem, undisturbed by any persecution or threat present there. Of course they never saw a glimpse of Matthew's magi but enjoyed the visit of some shepherds, who had been informed of the birth by many angels instead. Thus we are dealing with two totally different stories, each with a consistent chronology, which are impossible to harmonize. (476-8)

Correction Of My Response To Annette Merz

I want to correct something I was wrong about in my latest response to Merz. I've come to the conclusion that I misunderstood her argument about which Herod Jesus was born under. Instead of questioning which Herod Matthew is referring to, Merz seems to be questioning which Herod a possible pre-Matthean source was referring to, a source she thinks may have been behind both Matthew and Luke. I apologize for the error. I've revised the post. The section on Luke's census remains the same, but I've rewritten the section on which Herod Jesus was born under. If anybody wants to see my original text, which is now removed from the post, I've added it to the comments section of the thread.

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 8)

(Previous parts in the series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7.)

There's a section in Merz's chapter about the date of Jesus' birth. She suggests that an early tradition may have placed his birth under a Herod other than Herod the Great. And she argues against the historicity of Luke's census account. I'll begin with her claims about which Herod Jesus was born under.

After saying that there are "serious doubts" about placing Jesus' birth at the time of Herod the Great (478), Merz tells us that Matthew wanted to parallel Jesus to Moses by having a figure like the Pharaoh of Exodus 1-2 in Jesus' childhood. Therefore, Matthew may have had unhistorical, typological motives for placing Jesus' birth at the time of Herod the Great. I've addressed that argument in a previous response to Merz. See my quotation of Mark Smith and my response to that quotation about halfway through the post here.

Merz then writes:

From a historical point of view, the slaughter of the innocents most certainly must be regarded as a legend mirroring Pharaoh's order to kill the sons of Israel (Ex 1-2) and echoing Herod's infamous cruelty towards his own family and subjects. (479)

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 7)

(Previous parts in the series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.)

Though Merz doubts that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, she writes:

All of the canonical and extracanonical reports on Jesus' birth transmit Bethlehem as his place of nativity. (476)

She thinks some sources in the New Testament imply that Jesus was born somewhere other than Bethlehem. But she doesn't cite any extrabiblical sources in support of a non-Bethlehem birthplace. Eusebius, who had access to many sources no longer extant, wrote, "all agree that Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem" (Demonstration Of The Gospel, 3:2). Jesus' birthplace isn't an issue of dispute in the earliest extrabiblical exchanges between Christians and their Jewish and pagan opponents, and the Bethlehem birthplace seems to have been widely accepted among the earliest opponents of Christianity. That support for a Bethlehem birthplace in the extrabiblical sources is highly significant.

Merz writes:

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 6)

(Previous parts in the series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.)

Regarding whether Jesus was a descendant of David, Merz writes:

The evidence is complicated and inconclusive. On the one hand, there is early [post-Easter] evidence for the attribution of Davidic origin to Jesus in the formulaic tradition (Rom 1:3; 2 Tim 2:8), and the title "son of David" is present in Mark (10:47-48). On the other hand, there are once again strong indications that we are dealing with a concept which was absent from or debated in the earliest sources. In the Saying Source Q (which predates Mark), no traces of a Davidic ancestry are to be found. (489)

Merz refers to the evidence as "inconclusive", but elsewhere she tells us that Jesus' Davidic ancestry is "doubtful" (491).

She provides no argument for her reconstruction of the alleged Q source, and she provides no example of a place in Q where we'd expect Davidic ancestry to be mentioned if the author of Q believed in it. Paul doesn't mention Jesus' Davidic ancestry in Philemon. That doesn't prevent Merz from concluding that Paul refers to it in Romans. Authors frequently don't mention things they believe in, often because it's irrelevant to their present context. The vast majority of scholars, including Merz, accept conclusions related to Jesus that aren't found in Q. I've given some examples in previous posts in this series, such as Merz's apparent view that Jesus' brother James was an unbeliever until he thought he saw Jesus risen from the dead. I'm not aware of any reconstruction of Q that would include that material.

Merz continues:

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 5)

(Previous parts in the series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.)

Merz raises the unbelief of the people of Nazareth as an objection to the historicity of the infancy narratives. What should we make of the passage she cites, Mark 6:1-6?

Mark refers to the general unbelief of the people of Nazareth, but adds the qualifier that some were healed (6:5). Given the association between faith and healing in this context (Mark 6:6, Matthew 13:58), the implication is that some people in Nazareth did believe in Jesus. Since Mark's references to the unbelief of the Nazarenes are generalities that allow for exceptions, there's no reason to conclude that only the people healed in verse 5 were believers. There could have been more. The majority of the Nazarenes were unbelievers, but a minority of unknown size responded positively to Jesus.

What about those who didn't believe? Merz seems to think the people of Nazareth would have known about at least some of the events in the infancy narratives if those events had occurred. And they wouldn't have reacted to Jesus as they did if they knew of events like those in the infancy narratives. Therefore, their reaction to Jesus is evidence that the infancy narratives are unhistorical.

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 4)

(Previous parts in the series: part 1, part 2, part 3.)

One of the most foundational criticisms of the infancy narratives is that they're inconsistent with the accounts we have of Jesus' adulthood. Merz appeals to that objection:

The huge discrepancies between the Matthean and Lucan accounts notwithstanding, both nativity stories agree that after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, he was recognized as the future king and Messiah/Christ (Matthew 2:2,4,11) and as savior, Messiah/Christ, and bringer of peace (Luke 2:11,14), respectively. Both agree that in addition to heavenly agents (the Matthean star, the Lucan angel and multitude of the heavenly host), human witnesses (the magi and the shepherds) were involved, interacting with the newborn's parents and making known to them the greatness of the moment and the predicted future significance of their son. As historians, we have to ask whether this picture is best explained as a retrospect projection of messianic beliefs into the youth of the hero or as a refraction of memory. If the latter is the case, the rest of the Jesus traditions should concur with this picture to a certain extent. Thus, the last part of this chapter is dedicated to the question of whether the Jesus tradition as a whole allows for an early anticipation, acceptance, or celebration of the king-/messiahship of the newborn Jesus, as it is depicted in the birth stories of Matthew and Luke....

In this light, it is noteworthy that we have several traditions that leave no doubt about the fact that the family of Jesus and his fellow villagers in Nazareth were not among the first followers of Jesus; indeed, on the contrary, we know that they resisted him and tried to bring his mission to an end....

Luke and Matthew have considerably mitigated this tradition [found in Mark 3:20-34], especially leaving out the family's comment declaring Jesus mentally ill. But a comparable picture emerges from other texts: John 7:5 states that "even his brothers did not believe in him," and we have indications that it was only after an appearance of the risen Jesus that James came to believe that Jesus indeed had a divine mandate. The villagers of Nazareth did not even believe that Jesus was a prophet, let alone the Messiah, as we see in Mark 6:1-6....All of those traditions are very hard to explain had there been some early ascertainment of Jesus' significance in the plan of God. To his fellow villagers, Jesus was, according to Mark 6:3, "the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon," as well as several unnamed sisters, not some famous child who had been predestined for future greatness by a perceived heavenly sign. (487-8)

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 3)

(Part 1 is here, and part 2 can be found here.)

Merz raises a common objection to the infancy narratives, one that's frequently cited against other parts of the Bible as well. Supposedly, the accounts are too similar to what we find in other sources:

The whole infancy story bears numerous traces of legendary retelling of scripture, especially using elements of the Moses haggadah and texts dealing with messianic expectations of a renewed Davidic kingship….

Mark D. Smith has rightly emphasized that Herod the Great is an indispensable asset to the typological parallel between Jesus and Moses, which is the central theological theme of Matthew's infancy narrative. (470, 479)

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 2)

(Part 1 can be read here.)

She writes:

As a general rule, we encounter more legendary material in ancient biographical texts in those parts of the narrative that are devoted to the hero's nativity and youth….

When Jesus was born - far more probably in Nazareth than in Bethlehem, though his place of birth ultimately remains uncertain - no one among his family or fellow villagers expected anything special from him, and thus nobody paid any special attention to him. No historically reliable traditions of Jesus' childhood have survived, nor would one expect that an ordinary craftsman's family in a collectivist society (even if it claimed Davidic provenance, which is doubtful) would engage in collecting memories of a family member's individual development….We must not confuse the world of high-ranking persons who documented their important lives with the world of nobodies from which Jesus originated. Of course, things changed when Jesus' career as a prophet of the kingdom of God and a successful healer unfolded….In the first decades after the resurrection, several concepts coexisted in the Christ-believing communities. Memories were refracted, and where no memory was extant - as was probably the case with the birth of the one who was now believed to be the Messiah and thus the Son of David - traditions were invented to meet the requirements of the beliefs that had developed. (466, 491-2)

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 1)

As I mentioned in my Amazon review of The Star Of Bethlehem And The Magi (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015), I want to respond to one of the chapters here at Triablogue. The second-to-last chapter in the book was written by Annette Merz, a prominent New Testament scholar. Some of you may recognize her as the co-author, with Gerd Theissen, of an influential book, The Historical Jesus (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1998). Merz's chapter in the star of Bethlehem book provides an overview of the historicity of the infancy narratives. Her conclusions aren't just skeptical. They're radically skeptical, to the point of claiming that the infancy narratives have "totally different stories" that are "impossible" to reconcile (478), with "huge discrepancies" (487), that Nazareth is "far more" probable than Bethlehem as Jesus' birthplace, that "no one among his family or fellow villagers expected anything special from him", that we have "no historically reliable traditions of Jesus' childhood" (491), etc.

I don't know how many posts I'll be writing in response to Merz or when I'll finish them. But once they're completed, I'll put up a post linking all of them in one place.

Highlights From The Barthel/Van Kooten Book On The Star Of Bethlehem (Part 2)

You can read part one here. You can read my review of the book at Amazon here.

- As far as I recall, none of the authors who places a date on Matthew's gospel puts it before the year 70. Instead, we get many comments like Beck's assertion that it was written "about 90 CE" (287). There's no interaction with the many good arguments for dating the gospel earlier. Matthew's similarities with the other Synoptics and differences from John make more sense if all of the Synoptics were written close together, followed by a larger timeframe before John was written. The imprecision of the prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple make more sense if Matthew was written before those events in 70 rather than a scenario in which the prophecies were fabricated in 70 or later. The prominence of Matthew's gospel in the earliest centuries of Christianity makes more sense if the gospel was circulating under Matthew's name well before John's gospel was published. Extrabiblical sources suggest a date around the middle of the century for Matthew rather than a date at the close of the century. Etc. You can read more about these and other arguments in my collection of articles on Matthew here. It's striking how so many scholars accept and assert the later dating of Matthew without making any effort to interact with counterarguments that are so substantial.

Highlights From The Barthel/Van Kooten Book On The Star Of Bethlehem (Part 1)

In October of 2014, a conference on the star of Bethlehem was held at the University of Groningen. A book came out of the conference, nearly 700 pages long and with contributions from twenty scholars in astronomy, New Testament studies, and other relevant fields. It's edited by Peter Barthel and George van Kooten, and it's titled The Star Of Bethlehem And The Magi (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015).

I've just posted a review of the book at Amazon. What I want to do here and in another post tomorrow is provide some highlights from the book.