Well, it’s that time of year again. Regular church attendees are going to have to share their pews with people who have finally decided to make it out for their second service of the year. Their belief that Jesus bled and died so they can gain eternal salvation might be unshakable, but it apparently isn’t all that motivating, considering how little these believers seem to do in response. Nevertheless, they can at least be counted on to show up for a retelling of Jesus’s miraculous birth.
But what version will they hear? More than likely, they’ll hear a “Hollywood” version of the tale that incorporates the most exciting elements of the two versions that we read about in Matthew and Luke. A quick Google search turned up this one, which illustrates my point perfectly. But what if someone tried to tell the full version? A version that included every detail that both Matthew and Luke provide?
Honestly, it just can’t be done. I had wanted to attempt it here, but there’s just no practical way to do it. For example, the version I linked to above goes like this:
The Standard Tale
- Mary’s visited by an angel who tells her about the pregnancy (Luke)
- She and Joseph live in Nazareth of Galilee, but are forced to travel to Bethlehem in Judea for a census commanded by the Roman authorities (Luke)
- They’re unable to find normal accommodations and are forced to room in an area intended for livestock. Mary gives birth there and is visited by local shepherds (Luke)
- Wise men far to the east see a star that somehow signifies the birth of the Jewish Messiah (Matthew)
- They travel for an unspecified period until they reach Jerusalem, where they inquire about the child (Matthew)
- These inquiries reach Herod, the ruler of the region, and he asks the wise men to send back word to him once they find the child, so Herod himself can also pay his respects (Matthew)
- The wise men make their way to Bethlehem, find the family, bestow their gifts, and return home via a different route (Matthew)
- An angel tells Joseph to hightail it out of Bethlehem, because Herod’s sending a posse to wipe out all the children 2 years old and under in an effort to stamp out Jesus (Matthew)
- Joseph and his family flee to Egypt and remain there until an angel tells him it’s safe to return, because Herod has died (Matthew)
- Joseph intends to go back toward Bethlehem, but after finding out that Herod’s son is in charge, he takes the family to Nazareth in Galilee (Matthew)
So what’s wrong with this story? I mean, it’s very cohesive, and it makes for a compelling tale. What’s not to like? Its only real problem is that the very books of the Bible that provide its details, contradict its overall narrative.
Two Very Different Stories
Let’s go back to Luke’s version. After Jesus’s birth and the visit from the shepherds, we don’t read about wise men or Herod’s animosity. Instead, Luke 2:22 says that after the days of Mary’s purification were over, the family went to Jerusalem. The “days of purification” are referring to Leviticus 12:1-4, where the Law of Moses stated that a woman was to be considered “unclean” for 40 days after giving birth to a male child. So when Jesus was about 40 days old, Luke claims that they all traveled to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices as thanks for his birth. While there, two elderly people see Jesus and begin proclaiming praise and prophecies concerning Jesus. And there’s no indication that an effort was made to keep any of this quiet, which is very different in tone to what we read in Matthew. Finally, in Luke 2:39, we read “And when they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.” We’ll come back to this point in a moment.
The synopsis we looked at earlier incorporated most of Matthew’s version of the story. As we just read, his story ends very differently from Luke’s. However, it’s also significant to note that Matthew gives no indication that Joseph and Mary are from Nazareth. Matt 1:18 through the end of the chapter talks about Mary’s pregnancy, even though she and Joseph had never slept together, but it never specifies where they’re living. Chapter 2 begins with the sentence “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?'” Of course, it’s possible that Matthew still knew they were originally from Nazareth and just doesn’t bother to tell us that or divulge how they got to Bethlehem in the first place. But there are three context clues that point against such a possibility. First of all, regardless of how far the wise men had to journey, it likely took them quite a while to make the trip. When Matthew says “the east” he certainly doesn’t mean “east Jersualem,” and travel being what it was back then, any journey would have taken considerable time. The second clue is that Herod supposedly kills all the male children of Bethlehem who are 2 and under. So it’s unlikely that we’re supposed to still be thinking of Jesus as a newborn. Finally, Matthew says that when the family was able to leave Egypt, Joseph wanted to go back to Judea (where Bethlehem is). But after finding out Herod’s son was ruling, he became afraid and “went and lived in a city called Nazareth” (Matt 2:23). This is a very strange way to refer to Nazareth, if it’s where Joseph and Mary were already living.
So Matthew gives no indication that Joseph and Mary were just visiting Bethlehem. He never mentions a manger; instead, he references a house that they were staying in. He never talks about the shepherds from the fields, but has wise men who visit the child. He includes a story about Herod slaughtering a town’s children, though no other historical or biblical source ever mentions this. He claims that the family flees to Egypt until Herod’s death, that they want to return to Bethlehem, but finally settle in “a city called Nazareth.”
Luke, on the other hand, says that Nazareth is their home town, and they’re only visiting Bethlehem. He has no story about wise men, but does talk about shepherds from the fields that visit the newborn Jesus. Instead of Herod attempting to hunt them down and a subsequent flight to Egypt, the family travels straight to Jerusalem, where Herod lives. And there’s no effort to keep Jesus’s identity secret while they’re there, as two elderly prophets begin proclaiming who he is. And after making their sacrifices, the family simply goes back home to Nazareth, far from Herod’s reach (not that Luke indicates Herod’s even interested).
Can These Stories Be Put Together?
The main sticking points between the stories are the flight to Egypt and the trip to Jerusalem. On the one hand, Luke is very clear about his timeline: Jesus was only about 40 days old when they went to Jerusalem and then went home to Nazareth. Matthew doesn’t give specifics on how old Jesus was when the family was forced to flee to Egypt, except that it must have occurred before he was 2 years old.
Could the trip to Egypt have happened before the trip to Jerusalem?
No. First of all, considering all the details Luke provides, why would he have left out such an important event? Secondly, this means Herod would have needed to die within the 40 day purification period, but Matthew tells us that this still wouldn’t have been good enough, because Joseph was determined to avoid all of Judea while Herod’s son was reigning. There’s simply no way he would have felt safe enough to travel directly into Jerusalem. That just makes no sense.
Could the trip to Egypt have happened after the trip to Jerusalem?
No. Luke 2:39 is clear that the family went straight back to Nazareth after their trip to Jerusalem. And considering Luke claimed that Nazareth was already their home, why would they have needed to go back to Bethlehem anyway?
In fact, Luke’s claim that the family was from Nazareth creates a lot of problems for Matthew’s account. Nazareth was far outside of Herod’s reach. So if Herod really had hunted Jesus in Bethlehem, the family could have simply gone back to Nazareth rather than flee to Egypt. But this isn’t a consideration in Matthew’s account, because for him, the family has never been to Nazareth until they simply can’t go back to Bethlehem anymore, even after Herod’s death (Matt 2:23).
Additional Problems
I don’t want to spend too much time here, but for completeness sake, I need to mention a couple of historical issues. Both Matthew and Luke say that Jesus is born during the reign of Herod the Great. Historians usually place his death in 4 BCE, which means Jesus would have been born sometime before that. However, Luke says that Mary and Joseph had traveled to Bethlehem, because Quirinius, the governor of Syria, had commanded a census. However, Quirinius didn’t become governor of Syria until 6 CE — 10 years after Herod’s death. You can find additional resources about these two issues here.
Finally, Luke’s claim is that this census required Joseph to travel back to his ancestral home of Bethlehem, since he was of King David’s lineage. But David would have lived some 1000 years before Joseph. It’s ludicrous to think that the Romans would have cared about such a thing, or that they would have wanted their empire to be so disrupted by having people move around like that for a census. It would have been an impossible feat and would have made for a highly inaccurate, and therefore useless, census.
What Do We Make of All This?
The easiest way to understand why these accounts have such major differences in detail is to understand why either writer bothered with a story about Jesus’s birth at all. You have to remember that the writers of Matthew and Luke didn’t know one another and didn’t know that they were both working on the same material. They certainly didn’t know that their books would one day show up in the same collection. Both of them were working with two basic facts: Micah 5:2 seemed to prophesy that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem; Jesus came from Nazareth (John 1:45-46).
Since those two facts were at odds with one another, it’s easy to see how both writers would have been compelled to explain how Jesus could be from Nazareth but still be from Bethlehem. Unfortunately for them, close comparison shows that both versions simply can’t be true.
How would people react if they showed up for church this weekend and were presented with the full details from both of these stories? I like to think it would spur many of them into deeper study. That it would possibly make them question some of the things they’ve been taking for granted. But 2016 has been pretty demoralizing when it comes to the number of people who seem concerned about what’s true, and I’m not sure how many of them would see this information as a call to action. I know there are people who can be changed by facts. Perhaps there aren’t as many of them as I once thought, but I know they’re out there. And with the way information spreads these days, I’m sure they’ll eventually find the facts they’re looking for.
Finding Truth 
I couldn’t agree more! I find myself feeling this way about a number of things, especially religion and politics.
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Hi Sirius,
I appreciate what you say, and your willingness to engage with the issue. But I wonder whether your response is simply a reaction from your armchair, or whether it is based on any investigation into the matter? Here’s a few thoughts to ponder ….
We don’t actually know if there are ANY natural spontaneous remissions, because we can’t know that NO-ONE is praying for someone to recover. So the whole idea of a natural spontaneous remission is an ASSUMPTION. I am willing to accept that assumption, but let’s be aware that’s what it is. But we DO know there are cases where people have prayed for healing.
So we can never know whether the percentage of healings after prayer are greater than the percentage of spontaneous remissions. We (both “sides”) are working in a situation where we have to make the best we can with the information we have, just like the farmers I mentioned.
But we have a person who was pronounced dead by an expert team and then recovered – an event Gary (a doctor) agreed would be an extremely rare occurrence. (We would hope so, otherwise a lot of people are being pronounced dead far too early!)
A medical researcher finds ten well documented cases of unexpected recovery, sometimes for conditions or at a rate that are unlikely with spontaneous remissions.
Millions of people flock to Lourdes, we know they are all seeking divine healing, and many, many of them apparently receive it. Not many can be documented but some can be, and no medical explanation is found for about 70.
A doctor is about to be pronounced dead after his heart had been stopped for an hour and a half. Yet he recovers without brain damage, which he says is unprecedented.
A university academic doing anthropological fieldwork in Africa conducts a pilot study where people attending a healing meeting seeking healing of sight and hearing are tested before and after receiving prayer, and some (a statistically significant number) experience remarkable and virtually instantaneous recoveries.
In every case, the common threads are (1) an unexplained and rare recovery, and (2) specific prayer to the christian God for healing.
If you want to say there is no consistent connection, then you can say so. But I say most people would recognise the possibility of a connection if it was anything else. Certainly the farmers I spoke of had evidence that was similarly circumstantial and they decided to act. Yes, they found later that their productivity did increase.
And the people healed in these examples found that their productivity, and very lives, also increased!
I can understand you not being willing to accept the conclusion I draw, but I cannot understand how you can possibly be so adamant that miracles did not occur. This is information available to you to challenge your current worldview. You could choose to investigate open-mindedly, and see what you learn. There’s so much more information out there, though finding it and vetting to for quality is time consuming. But I will keep going, and you could too!
Best wishes.
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Hey UnkleE,
What you’re missing here is the difference between not making an unwarranted assumption about the facts you allege and declaring the opposite point of view being correct. At no point have I alleged the things you are claiming I’ve done. All I am saying is that your conclusion doesn’t fit your facts.
In essence, your position rests on some sort of divine intervention which cannot be confirmed by what you’re alleging. You have even admitted that causality cannot be shown, and mere proximity of circumstances does not itself promote one guess over another. Furthermore, lack of confirmation only means lack of confirmation, and not an open window to any fancy which a person can push through it.
Having an open mind does not mean changing it whenever different information shows up. It just means being able to appreciate things as close to as they really are. If I changed my mind just based on the facts alleged here regarding spontaneous healings, I would be dishonest with myself and others. And yes, I’ve viewed it from the perspective of one who believes and as one who doesn’t believe. The only difference between these views is that I cannot make what isn’t there appear anymore.
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Because you have not established that such events are miracles, only that something has occurred and is currently unexplained, or data is so vague that no conclusion can possibly be drawn other than the patient recovered.
And when we use the term miracle in this context we are referring to Christians or some sort of intercessory act by a divine entity … and in this case, we are referring to your god.
So let’s get our cards open on the table once and for all shall we?
1. We are, in all honesty, as far as I can judge, only debating the Christian deity, Yahweh/Jesus of Nazareth.
If you are making a case for supernatural intervention from another source then, as far as I can tell, you have not made any specific mention of what other source this might be, and one can be forgiven for assuming anything other than you are touting for your god, Yahweh/the character Jesus of Nazareth
2. The most notable and comprehensive study on the effects of intercessory prayer ( that I am aware of) was conducted by the Templeton Foundation using nearly 2000 subjects in a carefully controlled and monitored experiment.
The results are widely available and have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that intercessory prayer is a failure. And in fact, in certain cases had an adverse effect on the recovery of patients who were aware they were being prayed for.
You incessantly raise the subject of us accepting the expert consensus.
You berate everyone (on this blog) for ignoring the evidence/refusing to accept the evidence, ( and those who disagree with you on your own blog as well).
Yet here we have a predominantly Christian organisation investing millions of dollars in a controlled study using thousand of subjects, with the participation of numerous highly trained medical specialists in several top notch hospitals across the United States.
As this was effectively a Christian study the opportunities for crying foul or bias were obvious, yet the study for all intent and purpose was carried out honestly.
The results were unequivocal.
The study to determine if intercessory prayer had any positive effect on patient recovery determined it did not.
And yet …. you do not have the integrity to even mention it.
And you whine on and in that we won’t accept the conclusion you draw?
May I remind everyone by quoting you …. from your own blog.
Yes, Unklee …. we have the results of the most comprehensive study to date and it shows that intercessory prayer was deemed a failure. It does not work.
So it seems you simply won’t accept the evidence, will you?
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Oh, and unklee?
Here’s the perfect place to demonstrate the efficacy of intercessory prayer …
https://vivimetaliun.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/algumas-coisas-praticas-que-voce-pode-fazer-a-respeito-da-catastrofe-em-aleppo-na-siria/
Go on … knock yourself out. Let me start you off, shall I?
”Our Father ….”
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Hi Sirius, that’s your choice, and while I feel sad about it, I wouldn’t want to try to argue anyone out of their choice. Thanks for the opportunity to discuss.
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It is the honest, open-minded choice. It is the right choice.
And why on earth do you feel sad?
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Even if we grant the possibility that the Christian god sometimes performs miraculous healings, the facts are that the morbidity (illness) and mortality (death) rates among Christians are no different than among persons of other faiths in the same society (such as in the United States). Proving that even if Christian miracles do occur, they occur so infrequently as to not be statistically significant.
Trust in science, not faith.
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Unfortunately, I have to admit I am wrong: I found a study that states that Seventh Day Adventists live longer than any other religious group in the United States. However the researchers don’t attribute the increased life span to prayer but to life style: Seventh Day Adventists are vegetarians and abstain from alcohol and tobacco.
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The Miracle, Gary, is getting that many people to abstain from meat, alcohol and tobacco.
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Hey! I’m in the pound seats, I don’t drink, I’m vegetarian and gave up smoking five years ago! Brilliant!
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The following blog post by Biblical scholar Pete Enns is illuminating:
http://www.peteenns.com/what-permanently-screwed-me-up-about-the-bible-but-it-turned-out-well/
It helps explains the obscure way that NT authors applied the OT.
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@Peter
There really is only one thing to say ….
And contrary to what a certain Crispyan will have you beleive on this here very fine blog, that little video clip will tell you pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about Christianity.
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Biblical scholar John Oswalt provides ‘compelling’ evidence for the reality of the evidence. I can summarise it for you as three key points:
– The Bible looks like history, rather than myth;
– If the Exodus is not historical then the whole Christian narrative falls apart;
– Surely the Exodus must have happened because otherwise the Hebrews would have had no reasonable basis to assume ‘God’ was at work in their midst:
Now notice what Oswalt does not provide…actual evidence!
I should point out that Oswalt is a highly regarded Biblical scholar, he is crazy.
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@Peter
Yet most of Jews these days would likely think this bloke is simply a Dickhead.
Which is probably because he is a Dickhead.
The sooner people like this die out the better for humanity….
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I though I would add:
I am not an expert on body language … however.
If you listen to his closing statement. 7:34
”And what do we learn? We learn the foundations of Biblical truth. God is faithful.”
While he says this he smiles, and shakes his head .
He finishes by saying ”God is love”, and he nods his head.
This suggests ( in Western culture) he believes the latter, but does not beleive the former .
This is not an exact science but such gestures are fairly universal.
here’s one link to read.
http://changingminds.org/techniques/body/parts_body_language/head_body_language.htm
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Your post says: “So Matthew gives no indication that Joseph and Mary were just visiting Bethlehem. He never mentions a manger; instead, he references a house that they were staying in. He never talks about the shepherds from the fields, but has wise men who visit the child. He includes a story about Herod slaughtering a town’s children, though no other historical or biblical source ever mentions this. He claims that the family flees to Egypt until Herod’s death, that they want to return to Bethlehem, but finally settle in ‘a city called Nazareth.'”
These are the problems you bring up;
-Matthew doesn’t mention Joseph and Mary just visiting Bethlehem
-Matthew never mentions a manger
-Matthew never mentions the shepherds from the field
-Herod’s slaughter of the children not mentioned in surviving extra-biblical sources
In other words, the entire argument in this post is an argument from silence, i.e. a fallacious argument by its nature. As you note, Matthew and Luke’s Gospels are independent of each others and they didn’t know what the other was writing, and therefore to demand they speak of the exact same things in the exact same order for it to “not count” as a contradiction, when there are no contradictory details in the first place, is laughable. There are no errors or contradictions in anything you mention, therefore the post is rather useless.
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Hi Scientific Christian,
Sorry you found the post useless. You’re right that those specific objections I raised are arguments from silence, and I would agree that in and of themselves, they don’t necessarily cause a major problem for the Bible.
However, that’s not the main point I was trying to get across. In fact, the major problem between these two accounts is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to fit them together.
If Mary and Joseph were truly from Nazareth, as Luke states, then if they were afraid of Herod, they could have simply gone home to Nazareth.
If they had to flee to Egypt, as Matthew states, then when did they travel to Jerusalem with Jesus, as Luke states? If Herod were so bent on finding and killing him, why would they have traveled to the city Herod lived in? We could say that they went to Jerusalem before Herod was even aware of him, but that creates a problem, because there’s no further reason for them to go back to Bethlehem. And Luke says as much, because he states that they went back to their home in Nazareth when they had finished in Jerusalem. But this doesn’t give any room for Matthew’s story about Egypt and the slaughter of the infants in Bethlehem.
I don’t know if you read the entirety of my post or not, but I go into these kinds of issues after the paragraph that you quoted. That particular paragraph is just a collection of supporting arguments — when that context is considered in light of the more problematic disagreements (as outlined above), I think they form a pretty obvious picture: that Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives were never intended to fit together, because they’re telling two completely different stories. If you’ve never tried it, I recommend sitting down with the two accounts one day and trying to piece them into one cohesive narrative that includes all the details of each. It’s an interesting exercise.
Thanks for your comment. Feel free to write back any time.
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“I don’t know if you read the entirety of my post or not”
I think that summarized the problem here.
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Proverbs 18:13 says that it’s foolishness to answer a matter before you’ve heard it out. When I was a Christian, I violated this passage the most – because I thought I knew the truth, I thought I knew the conclusion to the whole matter, and I thought I had the right answer from a Divine answer key.
It was difficult to understand that questioning the claims of the bible was not questioning God.
It is imperative that we examine ourselves, our beliefs and our integrity. What is truth and how would we know it if we saw it? Matthew and Luke, in these narratives, present obvious problems if we’d just look at them honestly. If we can become like the child who honest enough to admit he didn’t see any clothes on the Emperor’s body, and humble enough to not be persuaded by the implication that you’re too dumb, too foolish or too unrighteous if you don’t see the marvelous wardrobe (or terribly benevolent Hebrew God & Son team), then we may begin to see things as they are – see that the bible is no more divine than Game of Thrones or any other cable TV program or work of Literature.
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When I was deconverting I ventured onto the internet sort of expecting ‘God’ to speak to me through the comments of Christians. Instead I tended to find comments like that from our friend the ‘Scientific Christian’.
Although this disappointed me at the time, ultimately I came to realise that the very human failings in the Christian comments were helpful. I meaqn helpful as a way of confirming my view that there was no divine inspiration operating behind the scenes.
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