Bah, Humbug: Christmas and the Bible

We're all familiar with the postcard/nativity scene version of the Christmas story. Jesus is lying in the manger surrounded by Mary and Joseph, shepherds, Wise men, animals and angels, all huddled together in the stable with a star shining overheard. The glaring problem with this picture is that it never appears in the Bible anywhere. This postcard version is actually a simulacrum created by conflating the nativity stories of Luke and Matthew. Its mostly Luke's version, but the Wise men are added from Matthew, ripping them away from the darker context of their story.

In reality, the two stories of Jesus birth a quite different. In Luke, which dominates our postcard portrait, Mary and Joseph go from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the Roman census, where they find no room other than a stable for the birth of Mary's child. Jesus is born and placed in the manger (a very subtle foreshadowing of the Eucharist). In the meantime, shepherds watching their flocks are visited by an angel, who tells them of the miraculous birth (leading to the greatest Christmas special moment ever, Linus's recitation of Luke 2:8-14, notice, he does it from memory!). After a quick but eventful trip to the temple, they are all on their way back to Narzareth, and the story drops out for the next 12 years. The function of Luke's story is to establish Jesus' royal and divine lineage, to link him to the Messianic tradition rooted in King David, and his divine lineage to God (notice Luke's genealogy goes back to Adam and God).

Matthews story is the minority report in our nativity scene (he only adds the Wise men and star), and after a review, its easy to see why. After an angel visits Joseph in a dream explaining the whole pregnant Mary thing, Jesus is born. There is no mention of a trip or a census, and the assumption of the text is the Mary and Joseph are living in Bethlehem. At some point after Jesus was born, the Magi come to offer gifts. Since its hard to determine a specific dwelling when you're navigating by star, they stop by Herod's to inquire about the new born king. Herod tells them to look in Bethlehem and to come back when they find them so that Herod can..err..um..bring gifts as well. The Magi find Mary and Jesus in a house, pay their respects and then are told in a dream to go back by another road, which they do, after warning Joseph about Herod. Joseph takes the family to Egypt. Herod, realizing that their not coming back, proceeds to kill all newborns and toddlers. Matthew's story focuses less on David and the universal message of salvation, and more on establishing Jesus as the heir of Abraham and Moses (Matthew's geneaology stops at Abraham). The slaughter of the innocents and the escape to Egypt mirror events in the life of Moses.

The BIG problem is not that the stories disagree in detail, but that they are mutually exclusive. Some people like to explain away differences in the Gospels by using the analogy of two witnesses explaining the same event. Well, in this case, there are too many contradictions to even attempt to hold the stories together. If one is a historical literalist (everything in the Bible is true and accurate in every detail), then...well...epic fail.

Scripture provides little support for the primacy of either account. Mark (a likely source for both Matthew and Luke) mentions nothing about Jesus's birth. John, characteristically, goes back to the dawn of creation, but doesn't mention details about the birth either. Extra-canonical sources don't help either, because neither the census from Luke or the slaughter from Matthew are documented outside that specific Gospel. Either event would have been significant enough to warrant a mention in the written record, so the lack of evidence for either casts doubt on the historicity of both accounts.

Personally, these texts are one of the things that broke me of biblical literalism or inerrancy. One cannot read the Bible intelligently from that point of view and hold these stories together. In their place, I have come to a view of the authority and inspiration of Scripture that I think is both more rational and more in keeping with Scripture itself, but that's a post of another day.

I do, however, find Good News in both of these stories. Each is true not so much in the historical details that they present, or in the harmony they create together, but to the extent that they tell us something true about Jesus. The Good News is that Jesus is the one who fulfills the law handed to Moses and is the Messianic king who comes fulfilling the promise to David. Jesus fulfills the promise to Abraham, blessing all nations, and is Emmanuel, God with us, incarnate among us, the Word made flesh. This is the real Truth of Christmas.