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"People brought up in a Christian or nominally Christian tradition are usually completely convinced that there is a Christmas story, with three wise men following a star, and shepherds, and no room at the inn and the baby Jesus laid in a manger, and a dramatic flight to Egypt, escaping from a massacre of children by King Herod. They are often astounded to be told that there are actually two completely different Christmas stories.
Matthew has the wise men and the gifts and the star and the massacre - but no shepherds, no inn, no manger.
Luke has the angel who appears to the shepherds watching their flocks, and (apparently, as we shall see) no room at the inn and the manger - but no wise men, no star, no gold and frankincense and myrrh, and no massacre of the innocents. Our Christmas story is a cocktail of the two embarrassingly diverse accounts, written without knowledge of each other.
There are three aspects of the accounts of Matthew and Luke that they share: the virgin birth; the Messiah being descended from David; and birth in Bethlehem. These three concepts must therefore have been inherited by both of them; they pre-date the use that Matthew and Luke made of them in their own compositions.
We have already seen that the Messiah was expected to come from Bethlehem, which had been the home of David's father. Once it had been decided that Jesus was the Messiah, a way of defending this would be to insist that he had been born in Bethlehem, in accordance with the prophecy:
"But you, Bethlehem... out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel." (Micah 5.2)
Matthew refers to that prophecy at 2.6. He seems to take it for granted that Joseph and Mary had always lived at Bethlehem, and moved to Nazareth only after the birth of Jesus and the flight to Egypt. (Luke has Joseph and Mary living at Nazareth already, so he has to find an excuse to get them to Bethlehem.) Matthew calls it "Bethlehem in Judaea" at 2.1 because there was another Bethlehem in Zebulun (referred to at Joshua 19.15).
There is a brief passage in John's Gospel apparently indicating a time when claims about being born in Bethlehem had not been made:
"Some said, 'He is the Christ', but others said, 'Would the Christ be from Galilee? Does not scripture say that the Christ must be descended from David and come from the town of Bethlehem?'" (John 7.41-42)
There is more than one way of looking at this. It could indeed have come from a time before the claims had been made. It could be that John knew that Jesus came from Nazareth and had not been born in Bethlehem, but was saying that it was irrelevant, the people were mistaken. However, John is rather fond of irony, as we shall see again, and this could have been an in-joke for the readership, who "knew" (as John did) something that these bystanders did not realise, that of course Jesus had been born in Bethlehem.
Mark's Gospel, which in common with John's has no nativity story, has words put into the mouth of Jesus himself denying that the Christ had to be descended from David (12.35-37). Perhaps the early Church tried this but became fed up with trying to argue with people who insisted that a Galilean could not be the Messiah, and decided it was easier to claim that Jesus was descended from David and he had been born in Bethlehem.
Luke likes to give the impression of someone who should be taken seriously as a historian, right from his introduction ("have decided to write an ordered account" ,1.3). In order to get Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, so that the birth of Jesus can happen in the right place, he gives us what seems like good reason as well as historical context:
"In the days of King Herod of Judaea... Now at this time Caesar Augustus issued a decree for a census of the whole world to be taken... while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to his own town to be registered. So Joseph set out from the town of Nazareth in Galilee and travelled up to Judaea, to the town of David called Bethlehem, since he was of David's House and line, in order to be registered together with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child..." (Luke 1.5, 2.1-5)
Let us examine first the chronology, and second the logic, of this.
King Herod the Great died in 4 BCE, years before Publius Sulpicius Quirinius became governor of Syria. There was no universal census of the whole Empire under Caesar Augustus, only a local census in Judaea. This local census was indeed under the governorship of Quirinius, but it took place in 6 CE - ten years after Herod had died. If, as Luke tells us, Jesus was about 30 years old when he was baptised by John the Baptist, then he would have been about 8 at the time of the census, not a new-born baby.
As for the logic of the situation, why do government bureaucracies require information about the population? Josephus tells us (in "Antiquities") that the purpose of this census was to count people before imposing a tax. We know from census and taxation decrees from the time of the Roman Empire that the idea was to register people where they lived and worked, i.e. where they could be taxed. They might have to return to where they lived if they were away for some reason; not to where their ancestors came from. King David lived a thousand years before Jesus. A thousand years. Imagine trying to get all the people who were supposed to be descendants of Ethelred the Unready to register for a census in London next month. Even if the Romans had had computers it would have been the ultimate bureaucratic nightmare.
Matthew and Luke each provide a genealogy (Matt. 1.1-17; Luke 3.23-38). Both of them trace the ancestry of Joseph (not Jesus), back through King David to Abraham, the original father of the Jews. Luke, whose interest is Gentile and universal in comparison with the Jewishness of Matthew, traces it back even further, through Noah and Methuselah to "Seth, son of Adam, son of God". These lists of ancestors are largely in agreement on the line from Abraham to David, in accordance with Old Testament names. Apart from that, they are all over the place. Luke's line continues down through David's son Nathan, whereas Matthew's line continues down through David's son Solomon. Most of the names are then different, right down to Joseph's father, whom Matthew calls Jacob but whom Luke calls Heli.
Not only are these embarrassingly inconsistent, but it seems rather futile to trace the descent of Jesus through Joseph if at the same time you are going to insist that the Virgin Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit, and therefore Joseph was not his father at all. The solution to this is that the idea came from the Messianists, the Jews, of tracing the descent of Jesus from David through the male line. They were quite happy to regard Jesus as "son of God" in their sense. They would have been quite happy with a miraculous intervention in the birth process too, but they would have expected this to be in line with other miraculous Old Testament births: these always involved the action of God in, for example, enabling a previously barren woman to conceive - but without exception the process always involved a human father. It was the Gentile world, with its pagan demigods, that came up with the Virgin Birth, with "The Son" rather than "a son" of God.
Luke actually uses both ideas in his double infancy story, drawing both parallels and contrasts between the birth of John the Baptist (with divinely assisted but human parents) and the birth of Jesus. John's parents are ageing and childless, until an angel tells them that they will have a child who will be "great in the sight of the Lord" (1.15). The angel who appears to Mary, however, tells her that she will have a child by the Holy Spirit, and that he "will be great and will be called Son of the Most High" (1.32). When John is born, the joy of his mother Elizabeth is shared by "her neighbours and relations" (1.58). When Jesus is born, the angel of the Lord appears to the shepherds with news of "a joy to be shared by the whole people", and then there is "a great throng of the heavenly host, praising God and singing" (2.10-13). It is clear at each stage that Jesus is greater than John.
The Christian world has such a powerful image of the birth of Jesus, surrounded by farm animals in the stable behind the inn, that people are often staggered to discover that this image does not come from the Gospels. This, although not in the original Greek, is what Luke actually says:
"While they were there" (i.e. in Bethlehem) "the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a son, her first-born. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them at the inn." (Luke 2.6-7)
There are certain possible ambiguities in translation. Luke actually says that there is no topos, which means "place", in the katalumna - which usually means a temporary travellers' shelter. The word translated as "manger" is the Greek word thaten, which could indeed be a feeding-box when used in conjunction with animals, but just meant "crib" when talking about a baby: and no animals are mentioned here. Perhaps Luke was just saying that there was no place in the shelter to put a baby, so someone improvised by bringing them an animals' feeding-trough to use as a cradle. He does not say that they had to sleep in a stable, and he does not say that they tried to stay at an inn that had no room for them.
In Luke, the first people to be told the news (by an angel) are nearby shepherds. This is important as an indication of the tone of Luke, who has a great feeling for the poor and the humble. The shepherds were looked down upon by orthodox Jews as the demands of their life were inconsistent with fussiness about religious observance. In Luke, they are the forerunners of the ordinary and poor people who would flock around Jesus.
Matthew gives us a different drama altogether. Some wise men, Magi, come to Jerusalem from the east (2.1).
Here is another surprise, as we are not told there are three of them. This is presumably an assumption from the number of gifts they bring, gold, frankincense and myrrh. Such precious gifts are all suitable for presentation to a king, which the Messiah was of course supposed to be. There are, as by now we should expect, a number of appropriate Old Testament references to these substances, e.g. gold at Psalm 72.15, myrrh at Psalm 45.8, gold and frankincense at Isaiah 60.6, frankincense and myrrh at Song of Songs 3.6.
The wise men ask Herod where they can find the infant king of the Jews as they saw his star and have come to pay him homage. The ruthless Herod is supposedly thrown into a panic by the possibility of having his throne usurped by a babe in arms, and he tells them to report back to him after they have found the baby in Bethlehem. They follow the star, and "going into the house" - no inns or stables here - present their gifts. Having been "warned in a dream" about Herod, they go straight back to their own country (Matt. 2.2-12).
Astrology, like demons and prophecies, was part of the accepted mental furniture of the ancient world. There have been pathetic attempts to "identify" the star over Bethlehem, with supernovas, with alignments of the planets, with eclipses, with UFO's, in desperate attempts to cram this myth into the real physical and historical universe. Consider instead what was really going on. As subsequent followers had decided that Jesus was such a great figure, one of the ways of expressing this would be to say that his birth had been accompanied by heavenly signs.
These events around the birth would have made his later treatment by his family quite ridiculous. Why did they try to restrain him? Why did they think he was mad? Why did the locals think he was "only" the son of the carpenter, getting airs and graces by putting himself forward as a teacher? Because Mary and Joseph had by then conveniently forgotten about messages from angels and visitors from the east? The locals had forgotten about Herod having all those boy children murdered?
What are the real roots of this story, apart from the psychological ones? There are two important influences to be aware of, one being religious or mythological traditions from Persia, and the other being historical.
A "magus" was a priest of the old Persian religion Zoroastrianism, founded in the 6th century BCE by Zoroaster (or Zarathustra). Magi were combinations of priests (in the sense of guardians of spiritual knowledge and priestly rituals), sorcerors and astrologers. Sufficiently impressed by the reputations of the magi for astrological knowledge, some of the Greek philosophers, such as Pythagoras and Democritus, made pilgrimages to go and study with them.
It was the Persians who had given the Jews, during the Babylonian exile, exposure to their beliefs that the forces of good were at war with the forces of evil but would eventually triumph, and that then the dead would be resurrected and an earthly paradise established. They were even expecting a Second Coming of Zoroaster. Births of significant people, Persian kings and Zoroaster himself, were said to have been accompanied by a falling star or a flash of lightning.
They also developed traditions and prophecies claiming that as the last days approached, a saviour-prince would descend from heaven in the form of a star, and would be born as a royal child in a cave on their sacred mountain.
If the reader does not find this cross-cultural connection sufficiently convincing, then consider a real historical influence on Matthew's story. Tiridates of Parthia was accompanied by magi when he went to Rome to pay homage at the birth to Agrippina the Younger of the future emperor Nero, to worship him as the Lord God Mithra. Wise men taking gifts to attend the birth of a future king and god. This was in the year 37 CE; after Jesus had lived, but many years before Matthew wrote his Gospel. The Eucharist ritual is not the only thing that Christianity owed to Mithraism.
Remember that the idea of the Virgin Birth did not occur to the earliest Messianist or Christian groups. It is not mentioned in the Gospel of Mark. It is not mentioned in the Letters of Paul, which is hardly surprising as he gave no significance to Jesus's life, only to his death and resurrection. This is quite ironic as I imagine the very idea of the Virgin Birth grew out of Paul's own insistence that Jesus was the Son of God.
I have already mentioned the process of divine selection being pushed backwards in time. Paul said that Jesus became Son of God by being raised from the dead. The Messianists said his life and teaching were important as well, and he became Son of God at his baptism. The virgin birth, the result of the union of god and human woman familiar in the pagan world, was the next step. By the time of John's Gospel, the process had gone even further and Jesus had become pre-existent. John would not have wanted to use any stories about babies as this would not have been in keeping with the massive dignity of his celestial Jesus. Asserting that he was pre-existent was enough. John had moved away from Paul and towards gnosticism, absorbing the historical Jesus on the way, but still circled back round towards Paul by producing another cosmic and unhuman divine figure to worship.
The claims that Jesus was Son of God had gained strength, and moved from the more subtle idea of personal commitment and spiritual adoption towards a literal Father-Son relationship, with no human father at all. The next step, in line with so many other claims about Jesus, was to find prophetic support among the Old Testament scriptures. Matthew tells us the following:
"Now all this took place to fulfil the words spoken by the Lord through the prophet: 'The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Immanuel', a name which means 'God-is-with-us'." (Matt. 1.22-23)
The prophecy, torn out of context as usual, is from Isaiah 7.14. It was written in the mid-8th century BCE, when Judah (the southern Jewish kingdom) was under attack from the combined forces of Israel (the northern kingdom) and the Syrians. It was a prophecy of doom to King Ahaz of Judah, for refusing to trust in God rather than appeal to the Assyrian emperor for assistance. Isaiah therefore said that a young woman would give birth to a child, and before that child grew to maturity, both his kingdom and the kingdoms that threatened him would be laid waste. This was nothing to do with Jesus or Messiahs.
It was also nothing to do with virgins. The scriptural justification of the virgin birth relies on a translation error. The prophecy is taken from the Septuagint, the Bible used by Jews in Greek-speaking communities. The Greek word translated "virgin" is parthenos. This meant a young woman of marriageable age. That carried an implication of virginity. It has only been since the development of Christian doctrine that it has been decided, retrospectively, that parthenos actually meant "virgin".
Furthermore, to show just how great a misunderstanding this is, the original Hebrew word is almah, usually meaning "young woman". The Hebrews actually had a different word for "virgin". The word almah is used elsewhere in the Old Testament, including at Genesis 21.12, where it has been translated "maidservant", and at Genesis 20.17, where it means slave girls - concubines! That is how far away the word almah is from even an assumption of the condition of virginity.
The doctrine backfired when opponents of Christianity claimed that the real reason Jesus was said to have no human father was to cover up the fact that he was illegitimate. A story from late in the 2nd century said that the man who made Mary pregnant was a Roman soldier named Panthera. This was a genuine name at the time, but it could also have been a deliberate mocking play on the word parthenos.
It is only Matthew's Gospel that gives us the story of the Massacre of the Innocents. After the departure of the wise men, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him to take Mary and the child away to Egypt because Herod would want to kill him. They leave and stay in Egypt until Herod is dead. While they are away, Herod has all the male children under two years old, in and around Bethlehem, slaughtered, hoping of course to have killed in the process the infant destined to be "king of the Jews".
As history this is terrible, but as literature it is brilliant. It is terrible history because this massacre never happened. It is not recorded anywhere else. Josephus, for example, hated Herod the Great, and would never have suppressed a tale of such terrible slaughter. Christian editors of Josephus would hardly have edited it out either. (This is without mentioning that it is not possible to harmonise this event with both the birth of Jesus and the "history" of the census in Luke, ten years after Herod died.)
Matthew, to whom the fulfilment of prophecy is particularly important, refers (2.15, 17-18) to one passage from Jeremiah (31.15) about Rachel weeping for her children - she was actually weeping over the exiles as they were taken into captivity in Babylon - and also to one from Hosea (11.1): "I called my son out of Egypt", which actually referred to God calling his son Israel at the time of the Exodus.
We can not dismiss this as just more examples of events being manufactured to fit prophecies, as this will not do justice to Matthew's accomplishment. Matthew was drawing on the Exodus story and using parallels and ironic reversals to establish his key concept that Jesus was the new Moses and the completion of the Jewish Law.
In the first two chapters of Exodus, the Pharaoh orders that only girl children born to Hebrew women can be allowed to live: the boys must be killed, thrown into the river. The baby Moses is hidden away, then put in a basket among the reeds on the banks of the Nile, from where he is rescued by Pharaoh's daughter. Eventually he leads his people from captivity to the Promised Land.
No reason is given in Exodus for the murder of the male children; but in the first century there were expanded popular versions of Biblical tales. Josephus tells us (in "Antiquities") that the current "full" story was that a scribe prophesied to the Egyptian king that a child would be born to the Israelites who "would abase the sovereignty of the Egyptians and exalt the Israelites, were he reared to maturity." This is why the killings are ordered.
Matthew was giving his readers an echo of the Exodus story: once again, a king was ordering a massacre to try and kill a boy child who would grow up to be a future leader. Once again, he would escape. But where the enemy in the original story was a pagan king, this time it was a Jewish king; and whereas Moses was to escape from Egypt, Jesus had to escape to Egypt - to find refuge in a pagan land. In terrible irony, the Jewish king Herod would read Jewish scriptures (to discover the birth in Bethlehem), but reject Jesus; while the wise men from a pagan country would read the stars, and would accept him. Finally, perhaps, where Moses saved his people from slavery, Jesus would save them from their own sins.
Here was the tension and the heartbreaking true drama within Christianity, claiming Jewish scriptures and Jewish destiny, rejected by the synagogues, only finding a home among the Gentiles.
There was no massacre and no flight into Egypt. It was a literary device. There was no virgin birth, no stable, no star. This has been said before.
In the first century, divinity and miracles were claimed for a number of people. We do not need to accept any of the claims as true; they are just indications of the kind of culture it was. Two things remain, that are difficult to believe.
One of them is the insistence by the ordinary modern Christian on the "simple" belief that Jesus really was divine, really was "the Son of God"; even if they are told about and dismiss all the other claims, and even if they are prepared to think about the nature of the thought processes in the people who did the preaching and told the stories and wrote the Gospels and made the claims.
Bearing in mind that claims to divinity were generally made for Roman emperors in capital cities, the other thing that is difficult to believe is that similar claims were made for a penniless peasant preacher out in the sticks. He must have been really something." |
