The Birth of the Messiah

"Raymond Brown’s book is great because it is the only full-length scholarly commentary on the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. For somebody who has grown up listening to the Christmas stories, or has made the effort to read the Gospel stories of Jesus’s birth in Matthew and Luke, but has questions about any of the particular things that are said, questions of historicity, all of that can be found in Brown’s book. Not only is there detailed word-by-word explanation of what every single verse means, but there are also a number of helpful appendices that deal with specific issues that come up in the study of the infancy narratives. For example, the disagreements between Luke and Matthew in terms of Jesus’s genealogy. “The accounts of Jesus’s birth haven’t ever been that influential in how people actually celebrate Christmas” There’s also the question of the historicity of the census that Luke says was taken while Quirinius was Governor: Luke doesn’t quite seem to be getting his historical information correctly. Also, the question of whether or not Jesus was born in Bethlehem and what the historical arguments for that are. They’re really not very good. Most biblical scholars believe that Jesus was born in Nazareth, in Galilee, and that he was later said to have been born in Bethlehem because that was where the Messiah was believed to have to come from. Exactly. Yes, in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, it says he is born in Bethlehem. You would think, since these two infancy narratives agree on it, that that would speak favourably to historical credibility. The problem is that Matthew and Luke have very different ways of explaining why Jesus is born in Bethlehem. In Luke you have the census. The family lives in Nazareth and they only go down to Bethlehem because everybody is required to go back to their home town. Jesus is born while they’re there and then they go back to Nazareth, because that’s where they live. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In Matthew, on the other hand, it seems as if Jesus is born in Bethlehem because that’s where his parents live. So when the Magi come and visit Jesus, it says that the star shone over the place where the child was. It doesn’t say it was a manger like in Luke; it says it stood over the house where the child was. Presumably they just lived in Bethlehem and they only left because Herod was trying to kill Jesus and resettled in Nazareth because of that. So Matthew and Luke disagree and Mark never says anything about Jesus being born in Bethlehem. John, interestingly enough, has a scene in chapter 7 where some people are debating whether or not Jesus is the Messiah. And somebody essentially says, ‘He can’t be the Messiah, the Messiah is supposed to come from Bethlehem.’ This is presented in John with no trace of irony, as if John doesn’t even know this tradition that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It’s just stated very bluntly that he wasn’t. So this idea of Jesus being born in Bethlehem, even though that ends up being absolutely central to Christian tradition and the piety surrounding Christmas, there’s not a lot of historical information speaking of it and there’s some very good reasons to doubt that claim. He’ll look at the range of available sources. He’ll look at the Gospels, but he’ll also look at later Christian literature, at Jewish literature of the same time, the work of Roman historians, the work of Roman poets. He’s basically taking a very historical approach and trying to understand the infancy narratives as products of the time they were written in the late first century."

"I put Raymond Brown in for two little reasons and one big reason. The little reasons are that it would be monstrous not to have a Roman Catholic, because there are now many good biblical scholars. I also needed to have an American, because in the last 40 years, Americans have been the most productive in writing about Jesus. I wish he’d been a woman because then I’d have a woman writer as well: I’m afraid these books are all by white males, and three of them are dead. But, more importantly, I wanted to include a commentary. The reason I wanted a commentary is that the four best books on Jesus are called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Of the hundreds of commentaries, I chose this one because it’s Christmas time, the story that’s told at the beginning of Matthew and Luke’s Gospel. This book is a commentary on those two chapters in Matthew and two chapters in Luke. Brown was an exegete. That means he’s trying to say what the texts are saying. He’s not so much saying, ‘We can’t know what happened: there’s hardly any history in the birth narratives,’ he’s trying to get at the meanings of the text. That’s the important thing. A commentary addresses the difficulties that a reader is likely to find in the biblical text, difficulties that are not only historical but also hermeneutical and to do with religious or theological meaning—what it’s all about. Some commentaries don’t give you very much on that, but Ray Brown does give quite a lot. There’s very little history in there, except that Jesus was born. Somewhere. And his mother was Mary. Not sure about his father, we don’t know. Joseph was presumably dead by the time Jesus was grown up, as he doesn’t appear. Nevertheless, these stories are fraught with both religious and deep theological meaning. They are important for that reason. Also, they’ve fed into the tradition in a lot of different ways. A lot of Christians have thought they were a straightforward matter of fact, which can’t be right, given the contradictions between Matthew and Luke. But they’re there in the creed, so they’re part of Christian doctrine, and therefore important to reflect on. As a Catholic priest, Brown wants to say how these texts relate to Catholic doctrine, especially what Catholics believe about Mary. What actually happened, I don’t suppose he knows, but he’s very cautious and reverently agnostic about it. He isn’t wanting to be upset people by saying, ‘It’s a load of rubbish!’ He doesn’t think it is a load of rubbish. Nor do I. That’s the Christmas story. How much of that depends on the historical reality? Except that Jesus was born and that Jesus was important. All the stuff—say the ox and ass in the stable—they’re not there in Matthew or Luke. It’s a detail taken from Isaiah. As is the crib. Yes, that’s in Luke. That’s the main Christmas story, in Luke, plus the wise ones, the Magi, in Matthew. That’s a nice story, because it has Jesus becoming a refugee. According to Matthew’s account, they fled from Herod to Egypt. It’s important to me, when we think about refugees today, to remember that about Jesus. I doubt if it’s historically accurate, but Jesus did say, ‘Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ In my sermons over Christmas I’ll have that in mind. The Christmas story is vital, but not much of it is history, which doesn’t matter. Exactly. So Matthew’s short birth narrative has a lot of quotations from the Old Testament. His main point is that all this happened to fulfill what the Old Testament prophets said was going to happen. It’s the story of Israel and the Messiah . . . and God. In Luke, which is a much longer one, he talks about John the Baptist’s birth as well as Jesus’s. He sees the spirit of God is at work in all this. Yes, Luke knew he wasn’t writing history. Luke wanted to write history when he wrote the Acts of the Apostles. It’s not a modern critical history, but it’s history of a sort. In the story of Jesus’s ministry and arrest and death there’s quite a lot of history too. But in the birth narrative Luke knows perfectly well that he is telling a story to bring out the real meaning, and he even does it in Biblical language. His style in chapters one and two is different from the rest of the Gospel, it’s echoing the style of the Greek translation of his Hebrew scriptures. Yes, nobody knows the date of Jesus’s birth. Around December 25th was already a Roman pagan festival, Saturnalia. The Greek church actually celebrates it more on January 6th. The western church plumped for December. I suppose because it was close to the solstice."