About a year ago, I published a post on another blog (which has now gone private) with the same title as this post. When I did, I felt like I had to summarize and leave out so much information (while this post is much longer, the feeling is still there) - this is one of the perils of blogging (write too much and people might not read it, write too little and people might not get it). I had always wanted to write a longer version of the same post, and originally intended to include this as part of the series I keep saying I'm going to eventually finish and publish which I'm calling "Judaism and the Mystical Christ". But, due to the season we're in and the fact that this just seemed to flow naturally from the last post I published, On Being a Skeptical Christian, I felt it appropriate to just do it.
Originally, when I published my old post titled "The Truth in the Nativity", I mentioned that after reading an article on Huffington Post about a concept called "Pub Theology" and reading the book by the same name (and author), I started talking to some people about starting our own group. In our discussion, we agreed that one of the goals of the group would be to give people a chance to voice their views, no matter what they may be, and to be a safe-haven for people of varying backgrounds to explore the deep questions of life together. This would be a way to bring skeptics and believers together. We wanted to give our group a unique name, and decided to call it "The Thirsty Skeptics" - and the previously mentioned last post on my blog explains some of my own thought process behind living out that name as well.
The Nativity is one of those stories of faith that can be a battleground for these dualistic fights. Are we really to believe that a virgin conceived a child as an act of God? The skeptics will tell you that this is superstition, and the true believers will call you a heretic if you don’t repent and believe. Are these the only options?
My own proposal (and that of many scholars) for what the stories of the Nativity represent are that they are part of a mythicized history. Now right there, some of my readers might be tempted to throw their keyboard on the ground, shout at the screen, and close this window. I hope they keep reading. But the reaction would be understandable because with our modern western sensibilities, "myth" is virtually synonymous with "lie", and is seen as a vicious attempt to mislead a person. This can hardly be helped when we speak of "dispelling myths" and watch TV shows called "MythBusters" (I love that show, by the way). But the ancients did not share these sensibilities - they had no problem with mixing myth and history together. For them, this was a way to infuse a historical event with meaning - to tell the audience what the events meant, not only for the present, but to point "the Way" forward to the future as well. (And I hope with that last sentence my readers hear an echo in a certain statement from the gospel of John where Jesus says he is "the Way").
I will be further exploring this concept of mythicized history in my upcoming series, but for now I'd like to move forward to examine some of the problems with taking The Nativity as literal history. I'm going to start with an issue that by itself is no kind of proof at all (it would be called an argument from silence), but taken along with what follows I believe it takes on some importance.
The Omission
There is, today, a scholarly consensus that the gospel of Mark is the first of the four gospels to be written – partially because of the analysis of language, and largely because of the fact that Matthew and Luke both seem to use Mark as a source document. There are very few passages in Mark which are not also found in either Matthew or Luke, while the latter two seem to have some other sections in common which are not in Mark – scholars believe they drew on another common source that was a lost document referred to as "Q". Matthew and Luke also have stories and sayings which are unique to each of them.
Keeping in mind the Marcan priority, it is interesting that Mark has completely omitted any mention of the birth of Jesus. It was apparently either not considered important, or simply not known. Additionally, it is widely agreed that the apostle Paul was the earliest Christian writer, and he never mentions Jesus’ birth story in his writings. Even more curious, the gospel of John, which is regarded to be the last of the four gospels to be written, also does not mention Jesus’ birth.
Why is it that this story was completely left out of all the earliest writings, as well as the gospel of John? And why was the story added in later by Matthew and Luke?
The Differences
The second problem with a literal historical interpretation of the Nativity stories is that there are contrasts between Matthew’s story, and Luke’s version of it.
The first striking difference is the genealogies. While both trace Jesus back to King David, Matthew only goes back as far as Abraham, and Luke goes back to Adam. But if you line up both genealogies starting with David, you’ll notice that between David and Jesus, they don’t have a lot in common - and perhaps worse, the names they do have in common are ordered differently. You can see this here:
I've heard some apologists try to get around this difference by saying one is the genealogy of Mary and the other Joseph, but both genealogies go from Joseph to Jesus, so that seems to me a convenient stretch. But there are a few other problems between the genealogies as well - Matthew goes from David to Solomon (a king), and Luke has the prophet Nathan as David's descendant (which is pretty unlikely - I'd use this as an argument for taking this metaphorically, as in a "spiritual ancestor"). But also notice how Luke has Eliakim before Salathiel and Zorobabel and Matthew after? And while both genealogies have a similar name for Joseph's grandfather (the difference between Matthat and Matthan may amount to a mispelling that occurred somewhere), there is a difference in Joseph's father.
The next difference you might notice in the stories themselves is that there seems to almost be a discrepancy between the two as to where Joseph and Mary lived. Luke has their hometown as Nazareth, traveling to Bethlehem because of a census. Matthew simply says that Bethlehem was where Jesus was born – as if this were their hometown. In Matthew, Nazareth only becomes Jesus’ home after the family had moved to Egypt for a while, then moved to Nazareth because Joseph was afraid to move back to Bethlehem with Archelaus reigning in Judea (see Mt. 2:21-23). If you read the entire story of Luke and pay attention to the logistics, the path goes: Nazareth (Lk. 1:26), Bethlehem (Lk. 2:4), Jerusalem (Lk. 2:22), Nazareth (Lk. 2:39) - this addition in Luke of going to the temple 8 days after Jesus was born presents a bit of a problem for those who wish to mash the two stories together as they were supposed to be avoiding Herod, not going to his own home city (note how the presentation at the temple is often left out in Christmas pageants).
I would also like to note here that Mark only ever mentions Nazareth as being Jesus’ hometown. The gospel of John seems to support the idea of Jesus coming from Nazareth as well – and we find that this town does not have a very good reputation (see John 1:46).
The third difference you will find is in the visitors – Matthew has "wise men from the East" who follow a special star (how does a star visibly move through the sky in a way that can lead to a place?), while Luke omits this entirely and has shepherds visiting instead. This does not represent a direct contradiction, but it is curious that there is no overlap between the stories amongst the visitors. Also, the visit of the wise men poses an additional problem with the visit to Jerusalem - if the family had gone off to the temple, the Magi might have missed them!
One must also ask, of Matthew's star - how does a star visibly move through the sky in a way that can lead to a place? This story might make sense if we still believed in a three-tiered universe, but, if taken literally, makes no sense at all in our post-Copernican views of the universe. As former Bishop John Shelby Spong puts it in "Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel":
Could a star wander through the sky so slowly that wise men could follow it? That might be conceivable if we assumed that God or one of God’s angels could pull that star on a string across the roof of the earth, which would be the floor of heaven, to guide these wise men to their destination. We are told, however, in Matthew’s story that the star did not lead them to the Christ child. It rather led them to the palace of King Herod (Matt. 2:1, 2). Did the star get lost? No, Matthew was saying, it simply needed to be reprogrammed by Jewish scripture in order to get back on the right track (Matt. 2:3-6 [...]). Reading the Bible literally requires the suspension of all reason. What kind of people, we might also ask, would it be who, upon seeing a new star in the sky, would immediately interpret that star as announcing the birth of a new king of the Jews, and therefore set out at once on a journey to an unknown destination to pay homage to that infant king? Did they keep not only the camels nearby to transport them, but also a supply of gold, frankincense and myrrh, just in case these gifts were needed for this purpose?The fourth difference is in the plot of Herod in the second chapter of Matthew. There are historical problems with this story. While there is ample evidence to show that Herod was ruthless and cruel, there can be found no other evidence of this massacre besides the tale in the gospel of Matthew. This is remarkable, as there are many chronicles written about “Herod the Great”, and the stories of his cruelty are not omitted in them, so it doesn’t appear to be that a coverup is going on here.
There are other differences between the birth stories, but let’s move on to another historical problem: Luke’s census. Luke claims that the Syrian governor, Quirinius, called for a census and people were required to go to their hometown to register for this. There is historical evidence to show that 10 years after Herod’s death – in the year 6 A.D. – such a census did, in fact, happen. But now we are faced with two major issues:
- As Herod was dead when this census happened, we now have a discrepancy between the timing of Jesus’ birth between Luke and Matthew.
- Because the purpose of a census was taxation, a census would have registered citizens in their current residence in order to assess their property. There is nothing written in any of the legal code of Rome – and Rome was known for their thorough documentation – to suggest a practice of sending people to their original hometowns for such a census. Additionally on this point, there are about fifty generations between David and Joseph - so if Rome had actually ruled that everyone from David’s time up must go to the hometown where their ancestor from fifty years ago resided, the descendents “of David” would have numbered in the billions (had they all survived). Not only would this have flooded the little town of Bethlehem beyond what it could bear, but tracking this would have been impossible with Rome’s technology.
- There is no record of Rome having ever required an entire family to register together for a census - on the contrary, only the head of the household is required to register on behalf of his household. So it would have made no sense for Joseph to drag his pregnant wife along on a very long journey by foot.
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| Depiction of a Roman Census |
Luke’s suggestion that the entire Roman economy would periodically be placed on hold as every Roman subject was forced to uproot himself and his entire family in order to travel great distances to the place of his father’s birth, and then wait there patiently, perhaps for months, for an official to take stock of his family and his possessions, which, in any case, he would have left behind in his place of residence, is, in a word, preposterous.And there's one final issue I'd like to explore with Luke's story. Let's put it this way - if Luke were created as a movie, it would be a Disney musical. In Luke's Nativity, characters (Mary, Zechariah, Simeon, and the angels) spontaneously burst into songs with very well-developed poetry, and no one around seems to have a problem with this - a problem which Disney's "Enchanted" explores:
In a Disney musical, bursting into well-developed song spontaneously is no problem, but in real life it doesn't really work out that way. It tends to work more like this:
So with these problems with viewing this story as history, what is the spiritually minded person who is drawn to the story of Jesus to do with these problems? Does he insist that the stories of Matthew and Luke are true, despite these issues? Or does he reject Christianity altogether and either become agnostic, atheist, or look at other religions for spiritual guidance?
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| Something's wrong here... |
The Truth of the Nativity
A reasonable case can be made that a man named Jesus existed and was executed by Rome. I say that this is reasonable because it is confirmed by sources which were not “Christian” in nature. The historian Josephus mentions Jesus twice in separate sources. The first mention is in Book 20 of his Antiquities of the Jews. In chapter 9, he describes law-breakers being stoned, and one of them is “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James.” The second is a longer passage in the Testimonium Flavianum in which Josephus describes Jesus as a wise man who was a “doer of startling deeds,” a teacher who gained a large following, was condemned to death on a cross by Pilate, and “up until this very day the tribe of Christians (named after him) has not died out.” Now, it is important to note here that scholarship widely agrees that the passage of the Testimonium Flavianum is not accurate in its entirety but was added to later on by the Church in order to give more weight to its claims - however, it is not a majority opinion that the entire passage was made up.
The second “non-Christian” source for the validity of Jesus’ existence is from the Roman historian Tacitus, who records in “The Annals” that the Emperor Nero pinned the blame for the fire on Rome “on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus….”
And in addition to these, there is a reference that scholarship argues over from Suetonius. Suetonius and Tacitus are of some importance as they were in no way in support of Christianity - and thus would have no reason for making up a historical person or even writing about one which could have been completely made up as myth.
So we can reasonably assume that there was a man named Jesus who lived and died by execution in Rome, and Christianity broke out as a result of his movement.
But what can we reasonably say about his birth?
There is actually a very old argument by opponents of Christianity that Jesus was an illegitimate child of his mother. Shockingly, this may actually have Biblical grounding. In Mark chapter 6, we find Jesus preaching in his hometown, and the reaction was one of surprise – as if Jesus was not the same man they had known who grew up with them. Verse 3 has the audience saying “Is not this...the son of Mary?” When you put this into the historical context, this is a very important statement: in this day and age, there were no surnames, and you would identify people by their fathers – Jesus would have been “Jesus bar Joseph” (literally: "Jesus son of Joseph"), not “Jesus bar Mary”. Calling someone by their mother’s name was not just unusual, it would have been seen as an insult – the implications would have been obvious to anyone in that culture: Jesus was an illegitimate child. Even more curious, Matthew and Luke both have similar reactions, but Matthew has the audience ask first about his father and then about his mother (Mt. 13:55), and Luke drops the reference to Mary altogether (Luke 4:22).
Now, as there is no argument, even from Mark, that Jesus had brothers, it is impossible to know how this illegitimate birth occurred – whether Mary had been raped by a Roman Centurion (as the Greek philosopher Celsus argues), or whether Joseph and Mary had just jumped the gun. But with the evidence, it is plausible to conclude that Jesus was at least widely regarded as an illegitimate child!
So what does this mean for the stories of Matthew and Luke?
A Tale of Two Lordships
The conclusions I draw from this evidence - as I mentioned before - are that Matthew and Luke are both mixing mythology and legend with historical fact – a practice which would not have been unusual with writers in that day. Moreover, the audiences would have realized this! If it was widely known that there had been a man named Jesus who had gained a following and who was considered to have been illegitimately born, the audience would have picked up on the fact that Matthew and Luke were trying to get them to see these circumstances in a new light. They would have picked up on the fact that a well-known story was being retold in a new way.
With this in mind, I suggest that rather than asking "is this story factual?", we should rather ask "what were they trying to say?" In other words, it's not so much that I am saying "these are the things I don’t believe" or "these are the things I reject", but more along the lines of asking: what is the message the writers of the gospels wished to convey? What were the important ideas they wanted to get across? And when we find that a literal interpretation of a story is not plausible, that doesn’t so much mean that we are saying that it is not true, as merely saying that it’s a different kind of truth - just as a fable or a parable is not literally truth but is metaphorically true. Or, as scholar John Dominic Crossan puts it in Who Is Jesus?: Answers to Your Questions about the Historical Jesus:
My point... is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.The first thing you need to consider when trying to answer the question of meaning is the intended audience. Starting with Luke, the stage is set for explaining the similar intentions of the author of Matthew. Luke is widely regarded to have been intended for an international audience – meaning that he was not so much writing for Jews, but for the purposes of evangelizing non-Jews within the empire of Rome. As such, there are certain details which this audience would have picked up on that are largely ignored by modern readers.
The very word "gospel" has a meaning which is largely lost on modern readers. It comes from the Greek word "euaggelion", which literally means “good news”. But this word was not used for just any good news – it was used to indicate a specific kind of good news: the news of a new Caesar and/or the news of victory (when Pheidippides returned from the battle of Marathon, he cried "euaggelion"). Vol. 2 of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament says that "euaggelion" was "a technical term for news of victory".
To understand how such an ambiguous word could indicate such specific connotations in that culture, consider this - in American culture, if I said "inauguration", people would immediately assume I was talking about a ceremony for a new President. However, the word literally means "a ceremony to mark the beginning of something" - it is our frequent use to indicate a Presidential inauguration that gives it the connotation I'm speaking of, and due to the frequency that euaggelion appeared in the context of speaking of a new Caesar, the assumption would be similar in that culture.
This is the inscription on a tablet from the city of Priene, believed to have been inscribed around 9 B.C.:
The providence which has ordered the whole of our life showing concern and zeal has ordained the most perfect consummation for human life by giving it to Augustus by filling him with virtue for doing the work of a benefactor for men and by sending in him as it were a savior for us and those who come after us, to make war cease, to create order everywhere ...; the birthday of the god (Augustus) was the beginning for the world of the euaggelion[translated “good news”] that have come to men through him... [emphasis mine]
There are other similar inscriptions to be found - in the city of Myra (on the southern coast of western Turkey) is found an inscription to the "divine Augustus Caesar, son of a god, imperator of land and sea, the benefactor and savior of the whole world." North of this city is Halicarnassus where there is the following inscription:
Since the eternal and immortal nature of everything has bestowed upon mankind the greatest good with extraordinary benefactions by bringing Caesar Augustus in our blessed time the father of his own country, divine Rome, and ancestral Zeus, savior of the common race of men, whose providence has not only fulfilled but actually exceeded the prayers of all. For land and sea are at peace and the cities flourish with good order, concord, and prosperity. [emphasis mine]
The Roman poet Virgil wrote in the Aenid:
From this noble line shall be born the Trojan Caesar, who shall extend his empire to the ocean, his glory to the stars, a Julius [Augustus], name descended from great Iulus!Afterwards, the speaker (who happens to be Jupiter) says that “wars shall cease and savage ages soften” into peace on earth.
In "The First Christmas", scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan write:
Julius Caesar, along with his grandnephew and adopted son Octavian - the later Caesar Augustus - belonged to the Julian tribal family (gens). They claimed a millennium-old descent from the goddess Venus, daughter of Jupiter, and her human consort Anchises, a Trojan hero from the time of that legendary war against the Greeks. The divine son of Venus and Anchises was named Aeneas, and it is through his son, Julus, that the Julian line claimed descent.As you can see, this was a common way of speaking about Rome’s emperors. Rome treated its emperors as divinely sanctioned authority – gods, even. They were the “savior of the world”, they were called "Lord", they made wars cease (by having crushed all their enemies), they brought economic prosperity (to those who were already rich to begin with), and their birth was good news (literally euaggelion– and it was only good news to some). Notice how the language matches language used of Jesus - "providence", or the "eternal and immortal nature of everything" has given us this "savior" as an answer to "prayer", who has brought benefits that exceed expectations and the kingdom of this "divine" figure shall have no end and his glory shall extend to the stars.
The Roman governor of the province of Asia minor, Paulus Fabius Maximus, also wrote of how "the birthday of the most divine Caesar" (speaking of Augustus) was "set on a part with the beginning of everything", "that he restored order when everything was disintegrating and falling into chaos", changed "the whole world" which "would have met destruction...if Caesar had not been born as a common blessing to all. For that reason one might justly take this to be the beginning of life and living...." He continues on to propose that Augustus' birthday be treated as the New Year's Day. Note especially how, for the Roman cultus, Augustus' birth marked the beginning of a new creation.
One can hardly help but hear the echos on the declarations the gospel writers make about Jesus - putting him in direct competition with Caesar, which would have been very subversive (high treason, even). But let's compare this to the message Luke has an angel bringing to lowly shepherds to see the difference:
Luke 2:10-12Luke’s audience would have immediately picked up on the fact that he was borrowing language commonly used about Rome’s Caesars and pointing them at Jesus, but he was doing this in a way that turned the whole thing upside down. Rather than being good news just for Caesar’s allies (specifically those who were rich and important), it was good news for all the people. The message of this son of God’s birth was brought not to the rich and powerful, but to lowly shepherds: the poorest of the poor (shepherds in that culture were often former land owners who'd lost their land to the banking system, and were now working for "minimum wage" on their own land) - the gospel is proclaimed to the marginalized ones, rather than the royal dominators. And this Savior was born in a manger. The message would have been clear to Luke’s audience: greatness does not lie in a palace – greatness is found in the lowliest of places. Jesus’ entire story plays on this juxtaposition. He does not pander to the rich and powerful as Caesar does – Jesus values the poor; the sick; the outcasts of society, and says that the kingdom belongs to them. Jesus does not make peace by crushing his enemies through warfare and hoisting his enemies up on crosses – he makes peace by giving up his own life on a cross.
But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see - I am bringing you good news [literally euaggelion] of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” [emphasis mine]
Now it should be noted that virgin births were not all that uncommon in the time when the gospel of Luke was written, and Augustus (literally "worthy of worship") had his own tale. In "The Lives of the Caesars", Suetonius writes of a prophecy that came before Augustus was born "which gave warning that nature was pregnant with a king for the Roman people; thereupon the senate in consternation decreed that no male child born that year should be reared; but those whose wives were with child saw to it that the decree was not filed in the treasury, since each one appropriated the prediction to his own family." Do you notice the similarity between this story and Matthew's story of Herod killing all the baby boys in Bethlehem?
Suetonius goes on to describe the conception:
When Atia had come in the middle of the night to the solemn service of Apollo, she had her litter set down in the temple and fell asleep, while the rest of the matrons also slept. On a sudden a serpent glided up to her and shortly went away. When she awoke, she purified her self, as if after the embraces of her husband, and at once there appeared on her body a mark in colors like a serpent, and she could never get rid of it; so that presently she ceased ever to go to the public baths. In the tenth month after that Augustus was born and was therefore regarded as the son of Apollo.One key difference to note here - Apollo did not request any permission from Augustus' mother. This amounts to a divine rape of sorts. Meanwhile, in Luke's gospel, an angel is sent to Mary prior to the conception, which is a stark contrast.
Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan write about this story in "The First Christmas":
The story of Octavian’s divine conception is modeled on the earlier and similar conceptions for the Greek general Alexander, imperial conqueror of the Persians, and for the Roman general Scipio Africanus, imperial conqueror of the Carthaginians. Augustus was destined to out-conquer them both.
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| He’s not that kind of god… |
Matthew makes similar moves on his audience – the Jews. The Jews had always believed that one day, a Messiah would come and would restore the kingdom of Israel. This Messiah was expected to overthrow Rome through a display of power and might, and restore the temple in Jerusalem. In the time Jesus was born, Rome had appointed Herod as the “king of the Jews”, and he had heavily taxed his people in order to undertake a massive rebuilding project in the city of Jerusalem, including a new temple. But Herod was widely known as a ruthless and cruel ruler – even killing his own wife and sons. Herod flexed his power through bloodshed and by humiliating his enemies – and he was called “the Great” for the fear that he instilled in his subjects.
Herod also believed in peace through victory, domination, and by crushing one's enemies. But as Borg and Crossan write in "The First Christmas":
The terrible truth is that our world has never established peace through victory. Victory establishes not peace, but lull. Thereafter, violence returns once again, and always worse than before. And it is that escalator violence that then endangers our world.What the author of Matthew does with the story of Herod killing the sons of Bethlehem, and Jesus’ escape to Egypt, is to frame Jesus' story as a sort of reverse Exodus – Herod is the cruel Pharaoh, and Jesus is returning to the place where Moses was called by God. Thus, when Jesus leaves Egypt, he is the new Moses coming to Israel to deliver them and bring new law and order. But he doesn’t do this in the way the Jews expected – his law is a law of love, and he overthrows Israel’s enemies by exposing their cruel might as a fraud, for the death they bring to him has no power over him and the non-violent resistance movement he started gains huge numbers after he is gone.
Additionally, the numbers Christianity gained in the years following Jesus’ time on earth were mostly non-Jews. This is a mystery that the apostle Paul ponders in the book of Romans – why aren’t the Jews accepting Jesus? With this setting in mind, the meaning of the visit from the wise men in Matthew becomes clear as well – he’s telling his Jewish audience “look, foreign dignitaries from other religions see that Jesus is special and important and have joined his movement while you’re still holding on to your pride!” The fact that the word used for these visitors is "Magi" harkens to the "magicians", "enchanters", and the "diviners" that are the portrayal of Israel's enemies in Daniel 1:20, 2:2, 4:7, and 5:7. But Matthew paints a pictures of these "enemies" as pro-Jesus, while Herod "and all Jerusalem with him" are anti-Jesus (2:3).
In addition, Matthew's star leading the Magi echoes back to Balaam's prophecy in Numbers 24:17, which speaks of "a star" that "shall come out of Jacob" which will "crush the borderlands of Moab, and the territory of all the Shethites." This is exactly what most Jews looked for - a king that would crush all of their enemies. Yet again, Matthew reverses the expectation with the non-violent Jesus who offers peace to Israel's enemies. If we see the symbolism of light coming in the middle of the night of the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year, it is not necessary to wrestle with the problems this creates when trying to mesh this idea as a historical fact with science - it is metaphor! And Matthew's star finds its parallel in Luke 2:32 where Jesus is "a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel" and in John where Jesus is the "true light, which enlightens everyone" (1:9) which "shines in the darkness" (1:5), as well as finding precursors in the light of creation shining in the emptiness (Gen. 1:2-3), Abraham's smoking fire pot and flaming torch (Gen. 15:17) which appeared in "a deep and terrifying darkness" (Gen. 15:12), Israel's "pillar of fire" (Ex. 13:21) that led them out of the wilderness, and the Psalmists "word" (parallels John's logos) which is a "lamp to my feet and a light to my path" (Ps. 119:105), and even in the prophets (see Isaiah 9 and Isaiah 60 for two examples). In addition, this image of light that brings a new self appears in the story of Paul's conversion (Acts 9:3-4, 22:6, 26:12-18), and in his letters (see 2 Cor. 4:4, 4:6, Eph. 5:8-14). Light always symbolizes not only the presence of but also the experience of the sacred by those who have struggled in darkness for far too long - and it always seems to come when those who are struggling feel as though the darkness has won or even to those who seem to be the darkest.
For Matthew's Jewish audience, his picture of Jesus as Messiah would have been a striking and scandalous reversal of their expectations - undermining the religious purity culture of his day. Matthew is declaring that Jesus is Savior not just for Jews, but for the whole world - including Israel's enemies. As Matthew has Jesus declare in 28:19:
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.What both authors are doing is to challenge their audience's value structures. They are in essence saying: "what you think is valuable is worthless, and what you thought was worthless was actually seen as incredibly valuable by God. And what you thought looked like power was weakness, and what looked like weakness to you was real strength." These audiences were used to seeing the miraculous within gaudy, extravagant riches and surrounded by overwhelming military might. But the birth stories of Matthew and Luke ask their audiences to see the miraculous in a man of questionable origins; a man who may have been born illegitimately, and whose parents took a chance on their own reputation by staying together for his birth; a man who was an outcast even among his own people; a man who was poor and lowly; a man who came from a place that had a bad reputation; a man who had no army of men with swords and spears following him, but rather fought by allowing himself to be killed without lifting a finger to defend himself.
Both narratives are performing reversals of the way their audiences were used to viewing the world. Luke reverses the way the euaggelion works, with good news going to the “least of these” (as Jesus would say), and has the true ruler of the world being a humble peasant king. Matthew has foreign dignities coming to pay respects to this same peasant king, while his own people are plotting to kill him – challenging the exclusivity that was so common among Jews of the day.
The point of these stories is not to be historical fact, but to be a parable of sorts, pointing to the kind of character Jesus had and the meaning that he represented. The ridiculous nature of Luke's census pointed to the extravagant lengths the Domination System of Empire went to in order to control its citizens - much like the ridiculous efforts Herod stoops to in order to protect his power. These stories were never meant to be seen as facts, but as a political satire of sorts - pointing at the desperate attempts by Empire to hold on to its control, which only caused more unrest and turmoil with its people. Fighting over the factual nature of these stories is to completely miss their point!
Rather, the meaning in the birth stories of Matthew and Luke is to ask their audience to turn away from the extravagant, and to see the miracle in the mundane. Because when you can’t experience awe without seeing gaudy riches, miraculous events, and cruel displays of strength, you become numb and unable to experience wonder at all. But Jesus came to awaken us to the wonder all around us in the life of those we all too often overlook – those lonely outcasts of society who were made in the image of God.
So, while I’m not sure these stories were factually accurate, I affirm them as true, and I hope you can see the truth in them as well.
