My Great Awakening

[John Fazio]

(01-03-2019 05:47 PM)Gene C Wrote:  

(01-03-2019 04:54 PM)John Fazio Wrote:  Gene:

I quite understand the audiences to which the two evangelists wrote, and therefore their general orientation, but that does not alter the fact that the two birth accounts are radically different and therefore cannot both be historical. In Matthew,
the birth occurs in a house and wise men come from the east, with gifts, following Jesus's star, at Herod's behest. Joseph then takes Mary and Jesus into Egypt, being warned by an angel of danger if they remain in Bethlehem, during which period Herod massacres the innocents and after which Joseph returns to Israel, but not to Bethlehem, but to Nazareth. No taxation, no inn, no manger, no shepherds. In Luke, Joseph takes Mary to Bethlehem because he is to be taxed there, being of the House of David. While there, she gives birth to Jesus in a manger, because there is no room for them in the inn. Shepherds come to the manger, having been told of the birth by angels. No house, no Herod, no wise men, no journey to Egypt and then to Nazareth and no massacre of the innocents. The two accounts are, obviously, very different and therefore cannot both be believed. Belief is not a matter of volition; it is a matter of faith and conviction. Two and two cannot equal six just because one wants to believe it. We all need to learn how to reason better than we often do.

John

In Matthew, it does not state where in Bethlehem the birth takes place, it does say when the wise men come to worship the child, they come to a house.
In Luke's telling of the story, it seems the Shepherds may have reached Bethlehem before the wise men and find Jesus in a manger.
In Matthew, by the time the wise men show up, we don't know how much later, Joseph has been able to find better lodging for his family.
I find it reasonable that Mathew would want to emphasize the ruthless actions of Herod, as his readers would be very familiar with the massacre of the innocents and some of the prophecies regarding the birth of Jesus found in the Old Testament. No contradiction, just different details told by the different writers.
Yes, the two accounts are different, but that does not mean they both cannot be believed.

Gene:

I find your attempt to reconcile the radically different accounts tortured. And I believe that any reasonable person would agree with that judgment. I recall Daniel Dennett's statement that many people do not really believe in the dogma of their faiths; they believe in belief, or as I prefer to express it, they believe in the desirability of professing belief. To begin with, there is absolutely no corroborating account in all of ancient history for the massacre of the innocents, which we would expect if it were historical (historians of the period, including Josephus, Philo, Tacitus, etc., say nothing about it). Secondly, there was no one there to record the event, as there was with the Passion. I believe the latter to be historical, because it appears in all four canonical gospels and because the accounts are essentially the same, the differences being only of minutia. And also because there were plenty of eyewitnesses who were still alive when the first three gospels were written and could therefore have contradicted the accounts, but none did. The far greater likelihood, re the Christmas stories, is that they were tacked on by two evangelists to invest the person of Jesus with a miraculous beginning, a common practice among the ancient writers and among peoples all over the world. Much else in the gospels was also tacked on---embellishments of the basic account of a life, again a common practice with ancient writers, especially when they were trying to persuade their audiences, which the evangelists clearly were. The facts that the accounts differ so substantially, that two of the four evangelists are silent on the subject (which we would not expect if one of the stories were true), and that Jesus himself never said anything about his birth (not that was recorded, anyway), condemns the stories as fiction. But that's nothing new; we all live with a lot of fictions.

Thanks for jousting. It stimulates the brain.

John