The Birth Of Jesus – Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A poor girl and her husband-to-be are visited by an angel who tells them she’s going to give birth to a “child of God.” Forced by the census to return to the hometown of Yusuf’s ancestors, Maria had to give birth in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. The new family was visited by wise men who brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Sound familiar?
It is the story of the conception and birth of Jesus of Nazareth—a story ubiquitous in the Western world—as told by the first two chapters of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It has been memorialized in various Christmas songs, drawings, and pageants that display poorly but very cutely from the youngest members of your church. It’s just that most of it is probably made up.
The Birth Of Jesus
There are too many inaccuracies—both large and small—for us to treat the story of Jesus’ birth as told in the Bible as historical fact.
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For example, consider the census that forced Mary and Joseph to put their lives on hold and go to Bethlehem, the city of Joseph’s ancestors. Luke states it this way: “At that time a command was given from the emperor Augustus that everyone should be registered” (2:1). Romanians are great record keepers – especially for tax purposes. But there was never an empire-wide census under Caesar Augustus.
However, there is a census of Judea taken in 6 CE. But scholars now place Jesus’ birth somewhere around 4 BC, about 10 years before the census of Quirinius (the so-called Roman governor of Syria who ordered it). Luke also tells us that Joseph was from Nazareth, which, as the map below shows, was not part of Judea, and therefore not part of the census.
Luke easily explained that they were part of the census because they needed to record where their ancestors came from. That the family would be forced to go where their ancestors would be registered is, in the words of one scholar, “absurd” (Aslan, 2013, p. 30).
The Birth Of Jesus
The purpose of the Roman census was not just to count the number of people in an area, but to assess their property and determine how much money you owed the state in taxes. Furthermore, forcing people to go to their ancestral homes would require a complete shutdown of the economy, as people would go home, wait to be counted, and then return.
In Bethlehem. But starting there poses a different challenge: How do we get Jesus to Nazareth? Outside of these four chapters and one verse in John, Jesus is Jesus of Nazareth, or Jesus of Nazareth, or Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, the word “Bethlehem” does not appear anywhere in the New Testament (Meier, 1991).
To bring Jesus to Nazareth, Matthew sent the young family on a long journey through Egypt. Herod the Great, hearing from the Magi on his way to Jesus that a great child had been born, felt greatly threatened. At the last moment, he decided to slaughter “all the children in and around Bethlehem, from two years old and under” (Mat 2:16). Joseph was warned in a dream to flee to Egypt and stay there until Herod’s death. He is warned in another dream not to return to Bethlehem because Archelaus, the son of Herod the Great, is now in charge. Old Joe then decided to settle in Nazareth in Galilee, beyond the reach of Archelaus.
Christmas Bible Verses To Celebrate The Birth Of Jesus
But there are also two problems with this version of events. The first is logic. After Herod the Great died in 4 BC, Rome divided its territories between his three sons: Archelaus took Judea (including Jerusalem and Bethlehem), Herod Antipas would rule Galilee (including Nazareth), and the third son Philip received the rest (see map above). Therefore, whether Joseph went to Bethlehem or Nazareth, he still went to the place ruled by Herod’s sons. Why did the angel warn him only of Archelaus, when Herod Antipas, the king who would order the execution of John the Baptist, seemed equally dangerous? As one prominent scholar has pointed out, it seems a strange safety measure, indeed, “out of the frying pan and into the fire” (Meier, 1991, p. 212).
There is a much bigger problem. As another leading scholar has noted, “There is not a shred of corroborating evidence in any chronicle or history of the time, Jewish, Christian, or Roman” about Herod the Great killing an entire generation of children in Bethlehem in his quest to in vain for baby Jesus. It seems highly unlikely that such an event would go unnoticed by the community that would experience such atrocities. And it must be emphasized that historians know
There are other smaller and technically incorrect details. Luke 2:22 speaks of a purification ceremony in the Temple in Jerusalem for Mary and Joseph, but only Mary, defiled by Jewish law from birth, was to undergo the ritual. Similarly, Luke mistakenly placed part of the ceremony, the offering of “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons” as a sacrifice, as part of the offering of Jesus as the firstborn son in the Temple. The sacrifice will be part of Mary’s consecration ceremony, not Jesus’ offering (read for yourself in Leviticus 12).
Exploring Mary’s Birth Story: What The Debate About Jesus’ Delivery Can Teach Us — Theyoungcatholicwoman
In fact, the entire narrative of Jesus’ birth, including the virgin birth, is separate—isolated—from the rest of the New Testament. The other two gospels show no interest in the birth of Jesus, except that they play a larger theological argument about Jesus’ existence with God before the creation of the world (John 1:1-18). Even Paul, who literally believed that Jesus was God incarnate, makes no mention of the virgin birth or anything in this narrative.
All these things, big and small, can lead us to one conclusion: there may not be many historical facts in the narrative of the birth of Jesus found in the Bible. The manger, the shepherd, the wise man, the massacre, the census—all possible historical falsehoods embellished for dramatic or theological effect.
And to some extent, that’s to be expected. We do not know much about the birth or childhood of most of the towering figures of the ancient Mediterranean world, nor about the childhood of most biblical heroes.
The Birth Of Christ
What we should think about when we hear these stories is the person who actually wrote them. Both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are believed to have been written roughly between 80 and 90 AD, almost 60 years after the death of Jesus. (Mark is thought to be the earliest, written around 70 AD, with John the latest, perhaps as early as 120 AD.) The community that produced this extraordinary document may have been in a hurry to write down what they had to say, based on what was already written or in oral circulation. , because people who know Jesus, or people who know people who know Jesus, are dying. In a sense, the gospels tell us more about the people and the world who created these documents than they do about God or Jesus.
Try to imagine for a moment that you are one of them. These people, who did not know Jesus when He was alive, went through a struggle not only to define a man they did not know, but also to struggle to validate their own movement in the face of great criticism (and indeed, sometimes violent persecution . ) from established religious and secular authorities.
I, for one, feel comfortable in that. The fact that these early Christian groups struggled to understand their part, that they struggled to understand who and what Jesus was, even though historically they were closer to Him than we are today, is comforting. Are they not struggling with what modern Christians are struggling with? Who is this man Jesus? What does he mean to the world? What does it mean for our own lives?
Freebibleimages :: The Birth Of Jesus :: An Angel Tells Mary, Then Joseph, About Jesus (matthew 1:18 24, Luke 1:26 56, Luke 2:1 7)
The fact that Jesus may not have been born in a manger is not important. The truth of the Bible in any particular case makes no difference. Two thousand years ago, a poor man named Jesus preached about the coming of the Kingdom of God and was put to death for it. Wise man, manger, genocide or not, two thousand years later we’re still talking about it.
The two books I highlight in particular in this article are Reza Aslan’s 2013 Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and the first volume of John Meier’s seminal work on the history of the biblical story of the life of Jesus, “A Marginal Jew : Rethinking the Historical Jesus.” Another very useful volume, but not directly cited here, is Marcus Borg’s 2006 Jesus: Discovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary.
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