Paul Clark Author Website

Just two sources

There are two first-century sources for this story: the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Other early Christian sources such as Mark, John and the letters of Paul don’t mention any of it.

And Matthew and Luke only agree about three things:

1. Joseph was directly descended from David via the male line.
2. Mary was a virgin.
3. Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

They disagree about everything else. Luke has Jesus born in a stable, Matthew in a house.[i] In Luke, shepherds come to visit; in Matthew, it is the wise men (he never says how many). In Matthew, Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre of innocents. In Luke, they present Jesus at the temple and then return home to Nazareth without the slightest hint of trouble.[ii]

How can we explain these contradictions? Why did the authors of Matthew and Luke write such different stories?

Typology

A good concept that will help us understand the gospel accounts of the nativity is typology, something frequently found in religious and mythical literature. Older myths or holy texts are seen as an archetype, a template for later religious leaders to follow. And even if they don’t actively follow them during their lifetimes, after their death, stories about them will emerge and evolve to fit the pattern of the earlier myth.[iii]

Perhaps we shouldn’t regard the invention of such stories about Jesus as pious fraud. Whoever invented them wouldn’t have seen them as history or biography as we understand these terms today. Rather, they saw them as parables whose fictions contained an essential truth about Jesus and who he really was.

Similarly, when early Christians found passages in holy scripture that looked like prophecies about the Messiah, they moulded their narratives to fit these prophecies. Perhaps they were consciously writing didactic myth. Or perhaps, because a prophecy pointed to a certain event happening to the Messiah, they assumed it must have happened to Jesus and simply fleshed out their narrative to include it.[iv]

The virgin birth

The virgin birth is the classic case that gives the game away.

One source of this myth is the seven different prophecies in Jewish scripture about a son of God.[v]

The other source is Isaiah 7:14-16. In this passage, the prophet Isaiah is trying to persuade the King of Judah not to ally himself with Israel and Syria against the Assyrians. In the Hebrew text, he offers a sign that the crisis will pass and says, “See that pregnant young woman who has just come into view? She will bear a son and will call him Immanuel (meaning God with us).”

But in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the young woman is referred to using the Greek word parthenos, which can mean esteemed young woman or can mean virgin.[vi] Early Greek-speaking Christians latched on to this as a prophecy of a miraculous virgin birth. From there, it was a short step to assume that this prophecy referred to Jesus, and therefore Mary must have been a virgin.

The vast edifice of the cult of the Virgin Mary is built on this simple mistranslation.

Two lists of begats

As well as predictions of the birth of a son of God/virgin birth, the Hebrew Bible also contained a competing tradition: 14 prophecies that said the Messiah would be descended from King David.[vii] Matthew and Luke both accommodate this tradition by asserting that Joseph was a descendant of David through the male line. They each provide a list of begats to prove the point.

There are two problems here. The first is that the two lists from David to Joseph are completely irreconcilable.[viii] And the second is that Matthew and Luke were attempting to reconcile two contradictory traditions about Jesus’ paternity. The virgin birth would mean that Joseph wasn’t Jesus’ father, so Jesus wasn’t really descended from David at all.

He (probably) wasn’t born in Bethlehem either

The early church also had a serious problem with Jesus’ place of birth.[ix] Everyone knew that Jesus was from Nazareth. But scripture, in the shape of Micah 2, predicted that the future ruler of Israel would emerge from Bethlehem.

So two different arguments developed to explain why a child who grew up in Nazareth was in fact born in Bethlehem. In Matthew’s story, Jesus was born in the house where Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem. But after their flight to Egypt and the massacre of innocents, they didn’t think it was safe to return home, so they moved to Nazareth.

In Luke, Mary and Joseph already lived in Nazareth but had to travel to Bethlehem for a census.

He writes of a census that took place throughout the Roman Empire, but historians can find no evidence of such a census. There was, however, a census in Judea in the year 6 CE. This was ordered by the governor Quirinius, who had recently assumed control of the province after the Romans removed their proxy ruler Herod Antipas.

There are big problems with this. Firstly, there could be no reason why a carpenter who lived in Nazareth would have to travel to Judea to take part in such a census. Secondly, the census took place at least seven years after the death of Herod the Great. But Matthew states that the same Herod launched the massacre of innocents after he heard about Jesus’ birth.

So Matthew’s explanation of the reason why Jesus’ was born in Bethlehem is incompatible with Luke’s. Either one is correct and the other is wrong, or they are both wrong and Jesus was (probably) born in Nazareth.

The adoration of the magi

The wise men bearing gifts are probably inserted into Matthew in order to fulfil what were taken to be prophecies in Isaiah 60, verses 3 and 6 and in psalms 68:29 and 72:10. As far as we know, Luke’s story of the shepherds isn’t put there to fulfil any prophecies. Perhaps it is an echo of frequent references in Jewish scripture to God as the good shepherd, or an echo of Paul’s description of Jesus as the Lamb of God.

The massacre of innocents

Outside Matthw’s gospel, we have no reference to any massacre of little boys in Bethlehem around this time. But this is precisely the kind of event that Flavius Josephus, our main source for the period, would have included in his histories. The fact that he doesn’t mention it can be seen as evidence that it never happened.

So what is the story of the massacre of innocents doing in Matthew?

It is a parable, the purpose of which is to give pious instruction comparing Jesus to Moses,[x] who was hidden in a reed basket as a baby to escape the massacre of Israelite babies ordered by the Pharoah. In both cases, “A baby is born under extraordinary circumstances; an evil king orders the slaughter of all infant boys of a certain age, but the baby escapes, survives and eventually becomes the one who saves his people.”[xi]

What do we really know?

So, bearing all this in mind, what can we know about the birth of Jesus?

The simple answer is practically nothing.

The fact that he was known as Jesus of Nazareth means he was probably born there. We know of no reason to doubt that his parents were called Mary and Joseph and that his father was a carpenter or a builder, so these things are likely to be true.

And that’s it. The rest is myth that evolved, either as a parable to show that Jesus really was the Messiah predicted in Jewish scripture, or because his followers found what they believed to be prophecies about the Messiah and moulded Jesus’ story to fit them.

Though personally I am an atheist, I don’t claim that any of this invalidates Christianity. Most of what I have written above is based on the work of Christian scholars who have approached the question with open minds and gone where the evidence has taken them. What it does invalidate is Biblical literalism, the idea that the Bible is the Word of God and as such is literally true and cannot possibly contradict itself.[xii]

And if that idea falls, then the intolerant fire-and-brimstone type of Christianity that depends on it falls too. Perhaps that is why conservative Christians play such elaborate games of theological Twister in an effort to prove that Matthew and Luke don’t contradict each other at all.[xiii]

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[i] Contrast Luke 2:7 and Matthew 2:11.

[ii] Contrast Matthew 2:13-14 and Luke 2:21-40.

[iii] Brettler, Marc Zvi: The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, Routledge, London 1995; pp. 48-61, Sanders: The Historical Figure of Jesus, Penguin Books, London 1995, pp. 83-5.

[iv] Sanders, op cit, p. 88; Barton, John: A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, Penguin Random House, London 2020, p. 253.

[v] Proverbs 30:4b, Psalm 2:7a, Psalm 2:12a, 2 Samuel 7:13-14, 1 Chronicles 17:13-14, Isaiah 9:6b, Psalm 89:26.

[vi] See Hayes, Christine, Introduction to the Bible (Kindle Edition), Yale University Press 2012, Loc 4660. See also  https://web.archive.org/web/20221122084129/http://thenonapologist.com/like-a-virgin-isaiah-714/.

[vii] 2 Samuel 7:12-13, 2 Samuel 7:16, 1 Chronicles 17:11-12a, Psalm 89:3-4, Psalm 89:29, Psalm 89:35-36, Psalm 132:11, Psalm 132:17, Isaiah 7:13-14, Isaiah 9:7, Jeremiah 23:5-6a, Jeremiah 33:14-15, Ezekiel 17:22-24, Ezekiel 34:23-24.

[viii] Contrast Matthew 1:6-16 and Luke 3:23-32

[ix] See https://historyforatheists.com/2017/05/did-jesus-exist-the-jesus-myth-theory-again/ (accessed 14/04/2024).

[x] Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus, pp.87-88; Martin: New Testament History and Literature, Loc 1874; MacCulloch, Diarmaid: A History of Christianity: The first Three Thousand Years (Kindle Edition). Penguin Books 2010, Loc 1865.

[xi] Martin, Dale B: New Testament History and Literature (Kindle Edition), Yale University Press, 2012, Loc 1873-1880

[xii] Barton, John: A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, Penguin Random House, London 2020, pp. 10-11; Stark, Thom, The Human Faces of God, What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (And Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It (Kindle Edition), WIPF & Stock, 2011, Loc 694-747.

[xiii] See for example the heroic efforts of Gregory R Lainer in https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/genealogies-of-jesus and Dave Jenkins in https://servantsofgrace.org/do-the-narratives-of-jesus-birth-contradict-each-other/.