The two most indelible and widely-known parts of the story of Jesus are certainly the Christmas story, and the Easter story. Even the most casual churchgoer at least gets the basic narratives down.
It’s Christmastime at the time of this writing, so I’m in the mood to talk about Christmas.
I’ve heard the sermons enough that I feel I could do a decent job in the telling if called upon. But the trick with the Christmas services—really any service, but especially Christmas—is that pastors are duty-bound to treat the Biblical texts as history books. While we dive into them as piece of literature (and rightly so), the story we all know isn’t going to come under any real fire. I mean, to be fair, most churchgoers don’t want a history lecture on Christmas. So that’s where I’d like to butt in.
We have all grown up in a world where the Bible is treated as a history book with a unified message. The Bible is of course a compendium of many books, but nonetheless, it’s read and treated as a unified piece of historical literature. I.e., every piece of writing within is in agreement in telling the same story. If that’s your theological perspective as well, my point here isn’t to dispute that. My point here is to explain that there’s more to the story.
So to start, let me summarize the Christmas story we all know and love. Ignore the coloring for a moment:
In 1 BC*, the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, a virgin who was married to Joseph, and told her God was going to give her a baby that was going to be named Jesus. Joseph was a tad flummoxed, but went along with it. The Roman Emperor Augustus called for a census that required everyone to return to the town of their ancestry. So Joseph and Mary had to go from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem. Because everything was so busy with the census travel, the inns were all over-packed and the family had to take refuge in a barn. During that time, baby Jesus was born, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lain in a manger. Angels appeared to the shepherds in the area to tell them the good news about a savior being born. A star appeared over Bethlehem, which caught the attention of three wise men from the east, who understood it as an omen and set out to investigate. These men went to King Herod, and asked them where the new “King of the Jews” was, because they had nice gifts for him. Herod was infuriated, and tried to find baby Jesus and kill him. He couldn’t so he had all the babies under 2 in the area killed. Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt to wait out Herod’s craziness, and returned home after God gave the “all clear” to Joseph in a dream.
Don’t nitpick too much if you have qualms with the summary, I’m just painting with a broad brush to illustrate a point: this is two separate stories blended together. The text highlighted in blue comes from the Gospel of Matthew, and the text in yellow comes from the Gospel of Luke. The green is where they both mention the element of the story. The red is where we get contradiction. Both stories set the events in history. They don’t give a numbered year, but they link the account to events that we have dates for corroborated by a number of outside historical sources. And they don’t sync up.
“So you’re saying Christmas is a lie!?”
That’s a conversation for another day, if you want to have it. Not my point here. What I want to make the pitch for is that we don’t look at this as a modern history textbook, but as two similar yet distinct religious histories written nearly 2000 years ago. Again, we have grown up in a world where we make an effort to get our history as objective and as accurate as possible. We also live in a world without any real mythology in our day to day lives–at least not to the same extent as in the past. Myths are stories for kids (and nerds), fictional tales from long ago that have literary value. Most of us are familiar with pieces of Greek mythology (and by extension Roman mythology), but we certainly don’t appreciate that mythology to the extent, say, the Greeks and Romans did.
“But at the end of the day, they’re just stories.”
Yeah. Sure. But you can get a lot of life lessons out of them. Their fictitiousness doesn’t make them invalid.
“Yeah, but if religious faith can be grounded in actual, literal reality, that kind of trumps stories.”
I get that, but bear with me and step out of that mindset for a bit.
In antiquity, the delineation between history and mythology was much blurrier than it is now. What we take for granted is that written history is a new invention. The Greeks, for example, had a robust civilization for centuries before they had the ability to write anything down substantially.** Out of sheer reality, history was hard to sort out in a lot of circumstances. We’re not used to that in the modern day.
For example, the exact location for the development of Washington DC was formally picked by President George Washington after signing the Residence Act into law on July 16, 1790. The existence of George Washington is well attested. The development of the city of DC is well attested. We still have the original Residence Act in the National Archives. The ancient Greek city of Thebes was founded in…? Not so easy to explain with historical documents. So you have a mythology develop to explain the history.
The weird thing is that eventually, history and mythology end up blending. Rome’s history is a great example. We have the list of every Roman ruler from the city’s traditional date of founding in 753 BC. Here are all the kings (753-509 BC). Here are the subsequent Consuls, etc. up through the 9th century AD.The trick is that Rome’s records were largely destroyed when they got sacked by the Senonian Gauls in 390 BC (Rome was essentially a glorified city until well into the 300’s BC, not the massive Empire we’re more familiar with). So the records had to be reconstructed by Roman historians. The list of kings is heavily mythologized. But Rome certainly had kings. And Brutus may well have been the first consul as of 509 BC. Even though we have an unbroken list, we don’t know where the mythology ends and the factual history begins. And in antiquity, you had to live with that. That blur between myth and history was a potentially salient one. Historians in antiquity (not to mention the people in general) certainly debated how large that line should be (and if there should be one at all), but that blur was not uncommon in historical works of antiquity.
The vast, vast bulk of the contemporary historical information on Jesus was written not by dispassionate historians, but by early Christians. The most substantial accounts of his life are of course the four Gospels of the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—they were actually written anonymously and were unlikely to be written by the men whose nams they bear; I use the names in this essay out of convenience. We also have some snippets from the apostle Paul through his epistles a number of early churches. Paul’s epistles were written sometime in the 40s and 50s AD, and are the earliest sources that provide biographical information on Jesus. The Gospel of Mark was written sometime near 70 AD, and was the earliest Gospel written.*** Matthew and Luke were composed sometime in the 80s or 90s, and borrowed material substantially from Mark. The Gospel of John was likely the last (canonical) Gospel composed.
The birth of Jesus is mentioned in three of these sources: the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and Paul’s epistle to the Galatians. Galatians, or earliest source states in 4:4, “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law” (NASB). That’s it. There’s no engaging nativity story, nor any mention of a virgin birth. Paul’s concern with Jesus’ birth is simply that he was born of a mortal.
Mark, our earliest Gospel, and again the major source for Matthew and Luke, doesn’t mention Jesus’ birth either. Marks starts with Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist (Matthew 1:9). But by the time Matthew and Luke started their accounts of Jesus’ life, we had accounts of his birth. Matthew’s account is 1:18 through the end of Matthew 2. Luke’s account is 1:26-1:37 and 2:1-40.
The common thread between the two is that the Virgin Mary is told she would bear a son by an angel, and her husband Joseph ends up accepting the rather peculiar news. Her son, a rather important baby named Jesus, is born in Bethlehem. For both authors, that’s the main point of their narrative accounts. Where they differ substantially is in the details. Each author places Jesus’ birth in a specific historical event, and each event was an intentionally chosen by their respective authors, because each author had a different perspective of what was important about Jesus’ life. Oh, and the details are irreconcilably contradictory.
Matthew simply states that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (2:1). How Jesus got there wasn’t a concern. The only thing prior to Jesus’ birth Matthew relays is that God sent an unnamed angel to Joseph to explain the situation to him and make sure he marries Mary. Mary wasn’t made aware of anything, apparently, and was merely “found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit” (1:18). She was apparently pretty chill about everything….
What matters for Matthew is what happens after Jesus is born. According to Matthew, Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod the Great, i.e. 37-4 BC. Herod ruled Judea as a client king for the Roman Empire. The Romans had conquered Judea in 63 BC via General Pompey. They opted to have puppet client rulers as opposed to ruling it directly. Herod played ball with the Romans. And a number of Jews were not happy with his subordination.
Matthew tells us that magi (aka the wise men) from the east came to King Herod and inquired as to where the “one who has been born king of the Jews” was, as they “saw his star when it rose and [came] to worship him” (2:2). The magi managed to track down Jesus and shower him with gifts. Herod went bloodthirsty and started a policy of infanticide in the area around Bethlehem, but not before Jesus’ family escaped to Egypt. There the family would lie low and return to Nazareth when God gave Joseph the “all clear” in a dream.
In Luke’s account, the angel Gabriel appears to Mary to explain her upcoming situation. As for Jesus’ birth, Luke makes an effort to explain how Jesus ended up in Bethlehem. According to Luke, the family had to go to Bethlehem as the result of a census called by Augustus, administered by governor Quirinius. Quirinius (also known as Cyrenius) was a military and political figure with a fairly rich career (granted, it’s hard to compete for the spotlight when you share the stage with the likes of Caesar and Augustus). In 6 AD, he was put in charge of a newly reorganized Roman province of Syria, which included the territory that formerly encompassed Herod’s Judea. When Herod died, his sons took over as joint heirs of the territory. Alas, they were not as stable in rule as their father, and the Romans got fed up with them and sent Quirinius to oversee the area directly. In his rule, he instituted a census to sort out the tax situation (this was not an empire-wide census, but a regional one). The notion that people would have been obligated to return to some sort of ancestral homeland is unattested in other extant historical sources. It’s an absurd idea. What purpose would it serve? How would you even determine which “ancestral” home you go to? I’m loathe to accuse a government of efficiency, but such a strange edict would be incredibly expensive and difficult to enforce, and completely contrary to the idea of making taxation more efficient.
As a bit of an aside, the “inn” may not be a motel-type thing we tend to imagine. The word may have been a term that referred to the upper room of a house where the humans tended to use for living space (with animals occupying the lower room). So it’s not that they were turned away, but merely in an uncomfortable position in a house they were already welcome to.
Anyway, after about a month, the family brought Jesus to Jerusalem to make offerings at the temple. Following that, the family returns home to Nazareth without incident, as Herod had been dead for 12 years and Quirinius was not concerned about a Jewish usurper.
Each account makes a case for Jesus being important in a number of ways, the primary one being that his birth is the fulfillment of prophecy. Matthew directly references lines in the books of Micha, Hosea, and Jeremiah, while Luke’s references were allusory. Both are using their narratives to suggest that Jesus met the criteria for the promised messiah, and both were fitting Jesus into significant political events in the recent history of Judea.
Both accounts seem to have been constructed with a main objective: making sure people knew Jesus was born in Bethlehem. In the messianic Judaism that was in vogue in Jesus’ time (and a major basis of Christianity) the Messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem, as per the interpretation of Micah 5:2—Matthew references this directly, whereas Luke does not. The main pitch of Christianity is of course that Jesus was the messiah. So for Jews in the know looking for a messiah, they would have been expecting him to have been born in Bethlehem. This was apparently not a large enough (or extant) concern for either Paul or Mark, but apparently it was enough of an issue for Matthew and Luke to address. Matthew and Luke were obviously not working together on their histories—otherwise they would have gotten their stories straight, or at least argued with each other about the discrepancies. The reason for this concern? Probably that a number of people were asking something to the effect of, “Wait, Jesus of Nazareth is the messiah? Shouldn’t he be Jesus of Bethlehem?” In fact, this very question is raised by people in John’s Gospel in verses 7:41–42! Both Luke and Matthew felt the need to explain, “Well, he grew up in Nazareth, but he was actually born in Bethlehem”. John apparently was fine with Jesus not being from Bethlehem, as he does not challenge any assertions that Jesus was exclusively from Nazareth.
Ironically, the necessity of setting the record straight on this matter is probably the best evidence we have that Jesus was a real, historical figure, and not a purely fictitious one. If the Gospel authors had made Jesus up out of whole cloth, they wouldn’t have needed to make convoluted and contradictory stories about where Jesus was born. They could have just made him Jesus of Bethlehem and been done with it. The fact that they felt they had to go through the effort means they were fighting something many people took as a historical fact (i.e. Jesus was from Nazareth).
Both Luke and Matthew put more into their story than “In 1 AD, Jesus was born in Bethlehem”. Matthew embeds the nativity into the politics of King Herod. By painting Herod as an infanticide-instigating tyrant, he’s not only offering political commentary, but also linking Jesus to Moses. The narrative is essentially a reboot of the Moses episode, to put it in modern parlance. For Matthew and his predominantly Jewish target-audience, this allusive connection of Jesus to Moses makes a number of strong literary and political points. Herod and the Jewish monarchy has become corrupt and evil as the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The world has gone so topsy-turvy that God is leading his chosen one into Egypt now! But, this is a set-up for God and his messiah making things right.
Luke, meanwhile, puts his nativity story against the backdrop of the start of direct Roman control over the region. The census of Quirinius is cited as the straw that catalyst for the creation of the Zealot movement. The movement would grow throughout the first century, eventually leading to the First Roman-Jewish War, waged from 66-73 AD.This war would end with hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, a major Jewish diaspora, and the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem. The Gospels were written in the aftermath of this war which completely altered the landscape of the world Luke was writing in.
Matthew and Luke’s disparate accounts are, in the technical sense, mythology. But a haste to interpret this as pernicious fraud is not my aim. These were mythmakers composing very carefully crafted stories. It’s probably impossible to judge their motives accurately, but the idea that the only reason they did this was out of a malicious, manipulative attempt to defraud is an absurd insult to some of the most enduring, popular pieces of literature ever crafted. Jesus as the messiah was important to both authors. God sending his messiah to the world in a time and place was important. And we should not be so blasé as to think they were writing with anything other than good faith.
If you’re interested in digging into this topic in a bit more detail, I would highly recommend Jesus for the Non-Religious, by John Shelby Spong. For more on Jewish messianism and its place in Christianity, any decent book on the content in the Dead Sea Scrolls would probably be informative. If you want something interesting but heterodox, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth by John Allegro is fascinating. For something more mainstream, Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls by Hershel Shanks is pretty accessible. If you’re interested in a foray into looking at the Bible from a secular, historical approach, I highly recommend anything by Bart Ehrman. His Misquoting Jesus is a good starting point.
*Having seen this issue teaching, I want to make sure we all know there’s no year 0. It goes from 1 BC (also called BCE) to 1 AD (or CE). Makes it a pain to do subtraction with AD to BC, but the timeline was actually invented before negative numbers and number lines. I would change it if I had the power….
**Not worth getting into the weeds about Mycenaean scripts, if you’re going to be one of those guys (I mean, I would…)
***The earliest known, anyway. Some scholars speculate there were earlier source materials.