[Dialogue] 12/06/12, Spong: The Birth of Jesus, Part IV. The Two Versions of the Birth Story

Thu Dec 6 07:40:01 PST 2012

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The Birth of Jesus, Part IV. The Two Versions of the Birth Story
The familiar stories of Jesus’ miraculous birth entered the Christian tradition in two different forms, separated by perhaps a decade.  The original narrative was written by a man we have named Matthew somewhere between 82-85.  The later narrative was written by a man we call Luke somewhere between 89-93.  The second story is by far the more familiar one, primarily, I suspect, because it is dramatized annually in our Christmas pageants.  The typical pageant follows the story line of Luke from the annunciation to Mary, to her visit to Elizabeth, to the journey to Bethlehem, to the inn in which no room was found, to the angels proclaiming the messiah’s birth to a group of hillside shepherds, who then go in search of this promised child.   With this entire cast of pageant characters in place, usually portrayed around a stable, the pageants usually close by tacking on the visit of the wise men, a scene lifted out of Matthew’s gospel. This combination is so deeply rooted in the minds of most people that they are surprised to learn that the two biblical stories of the birth of Jesus are in deep conflict with each other on a variety of details.
In Matthew there is a star in the East and a group of people called magi or wise men, who follow that star in search of its meaning.  In Luke there is no mention of a star or of wise men.  Instead, Luke tells us of a vision of angels appearing to hillside shepherds near the village of Bethlehem to inform them of the birth of the messiah.  Armed with the only two clues that the angels provided, namely that the babe would be wrapped in swaddling clothes and that this child would be found laying in a feeding trough, called a manger, these shepherds went to seek out this child.  Finding him miraculously, they made known abroad what had been told them by the angels.
In Matthew, the magi go first to the palace of King Herod in Jerusalem to inquire of him where the new king of Israel is to be born.  Troubled by this news, King Herod assembled the chief priests and scribes to determine where the messiah is to be born.  They consult the Hebrew Scriptures and fasten on a text found in the prophet Micah, which suggests that Bethlehem, a village less than six miles from Jerusalem, was destined to be the messianic birthplace.  The magi then resume their journey now to Bethlehem, led once again by the mysterious star that when the reach the exact location, appears to stop and to bathe the house in which this birth has occurred with its unearthly, bright light.
Herod, having asked these complete strangers to act as his central intelligence agency and to report back to him when they have located this child, who is presented as a potential threat to his throne, waits, however, in vain for their return.  The magi, having been warned by God in a dream not to return to Herod, leave for their homes by a different route.  Herod, miffed by their disobedience to his command, we are told, fell into a furious rage and dispatched his soldiers to Bethlehem with orders to kill all the boy babies up to two years of age.  The tradition has called those baby boys “The Holy Innocents.”  This presumed threat to the life of Jesus forces Joseph, who was also warned of this peril in a dream, to flee with the child and his mother to Egypt for safety.  Not a single one of these narrative details is mentioned in Luke and no Christmas pageant ever portrays the killing of these babies.  Even though it is in the Bible it is not regarded as a suitable story for the Christmas season!
While Matthew has the holy family fleeing to Egypt, Luke portrays them as having the child circumcised on the eighth day and giving him the name Jesus.  Next on the fortieth day, the day for the “presentation, Mary and Joseph take the infant Jesus to the Temple, presumably in Jerusalem, and in that setting Luke introduces the old priest named Simeon and a prophetess named Anna into the narrative.  Only then do the members of the Holy Family make their way quite leisurely to their home in Nazareth of Galilee.
Comparing the two narratives makes us aware of the differences between Matthew’s birth story and Luke’s. They are mutually contradictory. Matthew portrays Mary and Joseph as residents in the city of Bethlehem.  They live there in a house where the baby is born and over which a star will shine.  When this family flees from Herod, they are said to have fled to Egypt.  When the threat is over, they are able to return to their home in Bethlehem. This location of the Holy Family in Bethlehem, however, presents Matthew with a problem.  Surely, he knew that Jesus was referred to in his lifetime as “Jesus of Nazareth.”  The Galilean origins of this man are deep in the tradition and so Matthew has to develop a story line that will get Jesus out of Bethlehem, the place of his birth, and into Nazareth, the place of his upbringing and identity. Matthew accomplishes this by suggesting that the threat Herod made on the life of the infant Jesus was still present in Herod’s son, Archelaus.  Joseph, always cast in the role of Jesus’ protector, is thus warned to flee to Galilee.  He does so and settles in the town of Nazareth.  Matthew, who portrays every detail of Jesus’ infancy as the fulfillment of scripture’s expectations, asserts that moving to Nazareth fulfilled the prophetic expectation that Jesus would be called “a Nazarene.”  That was a real stretch because no one can locate a text that includes such a designation.  Perhaps it was a play on the word for a Hebrew holy man, known as a “nazirene,” one who did not drink wine or “strong drink” and did not cut his hair, as in the story of Samson.  That designation, however, had nothing to do with living in the town of Nazareth.  Another possibility is that he was referring to the idea that the messiah would be born out of the root of Jesse, who was the father of King David (Isaiah 11:10), since the Hebrew word for root is “nazir.”
On the other hand, Luke assumed that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth.  The annunciation to Mary occurred, according to Luke, in the town of Nazareth.  Like Matthew, however, Luke wanted to honor the tradition that the messiah, as an heir to the throne of David, had to be born in Bethlehem, the place of David’s birth, so Luke had to come up with a story line that would get Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem to make it possible for Jesus to be born there.  His way of accomplishing this was to suggest that “a census” or “an enrollment” had been ordered by Caesar Augustus requiring everyone in the empire to be counted.  Luke goes on to say this “enrollment” occurred “when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”  It also carried the stipulation that everyone had to return for this census to his or her ancestral home, which meant for Joseph and presumably for Mary also, that they had to return to their family’s place of origin.  Since Joseph was “of the house and lineage of David,” he had to return to Bethlehem with his “betrothed” who was, in the lovely language of the King James Bible, “great with child.”
There are a number of problems with this story line.  First, there is no evidence anywhere of a government program that required a return to one’s ancestral home.  No one kept records that went back 1000 years, which was the approximate time between King David and the birth of Jesus.  Second, secular records reveal that King Herod died in 4 BCE and that Quirinius did not become governor of Syria until the winter of 6-7 CE.  So, if Jesus was born when Herod was king, which Luke asserts in chapter 1 (verse 5), he would have been ten or eleven by the time Quirinius became governor.  Third, the Hebrew Scriptures indicate that King David had multiple wives; the exact number is not given but the guesses range up to 300.  If you count a generation as twenty years, it was fifty generations from David to Jesus.  In fifty generations the direct heirs of King David would have numbered more that a billion people.  If all of David’s direct heirs had been required to journey to Bethlehem to be enrolled, there would certainly have been “no room in the inn”!  Fourth, the distance between Nazareth and Bethlehem was approximately 94 miles and to navigate it by foot or on a donkey, which were the only two methods of transportation open to them, was a 7-10 day trip. If Mary had been “great with child,” as Luke suggests, it is safe to assume that she must have been in her eighth or ninth month of pregnancy.  What man in his right mind would take his near term expectant wife on a 94 mile donkey ride, to be enrolled in some sort of census, especially in an age when women had no rights of citizenship and could note vote? One woman biblical scholar upon reading this account said that “only a man who had never had a baby could have written this story!”
The literal accuracy of both narratives falls apart on close examination of the two radically inconsistent and contradictory texts.  They cannot both be true.  The probability is that neither is true.  They are interpretive narratives designed to say that Jesus was the designated messiah from the moment of his birth.  We will start there.
When this series continues, we will examine in detail first the original birth story according to Matthew and then the second birth story, the familiar one, written by Luke.  The deeper we go into these texts, the more fascinating they become.
~John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online here.

	Question & Answer
	Catherine Berry Stidsen, PhD
	Question:
	I wonder if you have ever thought abut producing a monthly homily for those of us weary to death of two hundred years of scripture scholarship being ignored in what we hear. Last week it was, “You are Peter...” and not one word about whether or not Jesus actually said it or even that the original building was to be of a polis. Some years ago I did this for some of my friends and posted them to me website at www.chartherineberrystidsen.org, but I do not have your expertise or pastoral experience. I’m a Catholic laywoman, now widowed, who took seriously the documents of Vatican II and trained to the PhD level to be one of those lay leaders who were to balance the clerical mind-set in decisions in my church. Of course, I have no forum to do so. Anyway, just a thought from a weary traveler in Christian country.

	Answer:
	Dear Catherine,
	No, I haven’t thought about producing a monthly homily. I write this column once a week and that is all I can manage.
	I also think a homily or a sermon is part of the life of a worshiping community and draws its strength and power from the common life of the worshipers. A sermon delivered by e-mail and read individually is not in my opinion an effective tool of communication.
	I certainly share with you a despair over much that passes as preaching. I will never forget listening to two dreadful sermons in a row from two different preachers during the Christmas season on the innkeeper from Luke’s gospel. One suggested that the innkeeper was sensitive to Mary’s need for privacy given her near term condition. The other said the innkeeper was like his mother for whom there was always room for one more around the dinner table. The thing of interest to me was that there is no innkeeper in Luke’s Christmas narrative or anywhere else in the Bible. The innkeeper is the creation of pageant directors and myth makers.
	I see this column largely in terms of being an online class in Bible study. My hope is that as biblical scholarship is improved, it will carry preaching with it.
	Thanks for writing. For what it is worth, I personally I love listening to sermons as a worshiper in my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey. We have a great rector, a great associate and a great congregation.
	~John Shelby Spong

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