Four Nativities
What can we learn from the divergent accounts of Christ’s advent?
The Gospels teach us that the Son of God came into the world to save sinners, including ourselves, but they do not have identical accounts of how He came.
Matthew and Luke tell of His birth. As even the most casual reader will notice, their narratives agree on only three points: that His stepfather Joseph was a descendant of King David, that He was born in Bethlehem, and that His mother Mary was a virgin when she conceived Him.
About the rest, they differ. According to Matthew –
Joseph was descended from King David through his son King Solomon and the subsequent kings of Judah.
The revelation of Mary’s virginal pregnancy came to Joseph in a dream.
Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 B.C.
Mary and Joseph resided in Bethlehem. Jesus was presumably born at their home.
Three wise men from the East, guided by a miraculous star, visited the infant Jesus in Bethlehem, hailed him as “King of the Jews” and brought him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Warned by another dream, Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt to escape Herod’s plot to murder their child.
After Herod’s death, the Holy Family returned to Israel and settled in Nazareth.
According to Luke –
Joseph was descended from King David through Solomon’s brother Nathan, who never became king.
An angel appeared to Mary and told her that she would bear Jesus virginally.
Jesus’s birth coincided with a census conducted by a Roman official named Quirinius. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, that census took place in the year 6 A.D.
Joseph and Mary resided in Nazareth before Jesus was born. The census necessitated going to Bethlehem, because that was the “home town” where Joseph, as a descendant of King David, was required to register.
Jesus was born in a manger; no other accommodation was available for visitors.
An angel told local shepherds of the birth of the anointed savior, whom they would find “wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger”. The shepherds then went to Jesus and adored Him.
Luke implies that Mary herself was his direct or indirect source, (Luke 2:19) which is certainly possible. Matthew’s sources are unknown.
The Gospel of John says nothing about the mundane details of the Nativity. Instead it declares that Jesus is the Word of God, who existed “in the beginning” and also “became flesh and dwelt among us”. The first event of His earthly life that the Gospel records, after a long prologue, is His baptism by the prophet John.
Jesus’s baptism, preceded by a few lines about John the Baptist, opens the Gospel of Mark. His human birth has no place in the narrative.
From a secular point of view, these discordances are unsurprising. Legends abound about the births of famous men, and discrepancies regarding even non-legendary facts are not uncommon. If one sees Jesus as no more than an itinerant preacher with delusions of grandeur, it is easy to conclude that some of his equally deluded followers wove fantasies around his life story (Matthew and John), while their more level-headed comrades stuck to the quotidian facts (Luke) or passed over in silence all that occurred before the start of his ministry (Mark).
For a Christian, the matter is more complicated. Why doesn’t the Bible, the Word of God, furnish a straightforward biography of its central figure? Why leave His worshipers wondering about when he was born and what happened at that time? Why offer two accounts of his birth that have barely anything in common? And two other accounts that either reduce the Nativity to a bald statement (“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”, John 1:14 (JKV)).
I am certainly in no position to analyze the literary mind of the Maker, but I will venture to suggest that the Gospels’ approach to Jesus’s coming into the world is more valuable to Christians than a unified, consistent account could be. From our limited, human perspective, Jesus is a well of contradictions: human and divine, a helpless infant in swaddling clothes and He by whom all things were made, the fulfillment of the laws of Moses and their supplanter, tortured to death and death’s conqueror. A narrative that tried to integrate those paradoxes into a coherent whole would exceed our capacity to understand it. We would lose one thread or another of the divine plot.
John tells us directly that Jesus is one with God the Father. Matthew links Him to Jewish history – as the revival of the legitimate line of Israelite monarchs and the antagonist of the non-Davidic usurper Herod – and gives a glimpse of the universality of His ministry in the form of foreign wise men, who not only hail Him as “King of the Jews” but offer a gift of myrrh, used in embalming, that foreshadows the infant’s salvific death. Luke places Him in His contemporary setting, Israel under the Roman yoke. Mark leads with His baptism. “And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:10-11 (KJV))
Note, too, that the very limited overlap between Matthew’s and Luke’s infancy narratives carries an implicit message: The three elements in common, viz., Davidic descent (where the fact of descent is emphasized but the precise lineage left uncertain), birth at Bethlehem and Mary’s virginity, are central to the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. Facts that appear only in Matthew or only in Luke are peripheral.
Similarly, John and Mark, so very different in so many other ways, begin with assertions of Jesus’s intimate relationship with His Father, thus giving a common background to Matthew’s quasi-myth and to the angel’s startling revelation to Mary.
Multiple narratives cannot enable us to grasp the whole of what is beyond our ken, but the technique reduces the risk that any vital part will fall by the wayside.
Χριστὸς Γεννᾶται! Christ is Born! Δοξάσατε! Glorify Him!