” that predates Mark*, the earliest of the canonical gospels. Some modern scholars like Crossan think the Markan passion story is too much of a piece (based on textual and linguistic analysis) with the rest of Mark to have been incorporated from a separate source. And the argument cited (by Thiessen) that Mark’s passion narrative is too similar to Matthew’s to be coincidence. My personal position is that the anointing in Luke, where it shifts from Matthew/Mark from the head to the feet, is continued in John, indicating that community had a copy of Luke’s gospel. Granted there were no bookstores or publishers in 1st century Palestine, so the greater likelihood is the four gospel communities had no real knowledge of each other. But the only two stories common to all four gospels are the passion, and the anointing. The Q hypothesis is that Luke and Matthew had a copy of Mark, but also Q (which explains why Matthew and Luke have stories common to Mark, but also to each other not found in Mark). The Q hypothesis rests on close textual analysis: Matthew and Luke have too many words and phrases in common in the same places (sayings, mostly, but some stories, too) for it to be coincidence they have much not found in Mark (where the same connections to Luke and Matthew are found). The gospels were put together this way, though we have no reliable source for Mark. Which makes that gospel practically sui generis. That’s not a claim we can make about the other three canonicals, or about the apocryphal gospels regarding the childhood of Christ.
For me, the key similarity is the anointing story. It connects John to Luke, when Matthew and Mark have the same anointing story; Luke changes it dramatically, and moves the anointing to Jesus’ feet. John also has the story, and also moves it to Jesus’ feet. Coincidence? I think not.
Thiessen has other points to make, and I’m not trying to refute him here. I just mean to point out the assumption John’s gospel stands wholly apart from the synoptics is not a valid one. And also that the canonical gospels can not only be read together, but can be read as being conversant with each other. Well, at least in one direction: from Mark towards John (i.e., oldest to newest).
But the more interesting question is: if there is a passion narrative that predates Mark (part of Thiessen’s argument is that some parts of Mark’s passion must be from sources contemporaneous to the events, which are earlier than Mark’s gospel by at least 30 years); why is there no conjectured nativity narrative?
Part of the reason is Luke’s nativity is nothing like Matthew’s. But where do these two stories come from? The theory is this story is the most prominent part of Special Luke and Special Matthew. But for all the variations, both stories put the birth in Bethlehem, have Jesus live as a child in Nazareth, present Mary as a virgin mother, and name the father Joseph. Which, frankly, points to a common narrative behind Special Luke and Special Matthew. And what is that?
Matthew and Luke clearly use the nativity for their own theological and narrative purposes. Working from the basic similar facts, they present radically different and factually irreconcilable tales. I don’t mean factually challenged or even incorrect; but the fundamentalist hypothesis that everything in the scriptures is factually true founders on the nativity stories. The two can’t be reconciled.
As I said, there are common points; the Holy Family (a much later appellation, but we won’t fear anachronism here) is : Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. The child is born in Bethlehem, but raised in Nazareth. But that’s all the two stories have in common.
Conjectural sources have to be made of more than this. Three names, a birthplace, another place for childhood to adulthood; there’s not much there. And what the two gospels do with these bare elements is striking.
Luke’s version is the “basic” one in our telling: it provides the manger, the animals, the shepherds, and four songs (not a small thing: how many Easter carols do you know?). Matthew “adds” the singular star and the Magi. That’s how we usually build our Christmas story: angels, shepherds, a manger; then a star and magi. We don’t often imagine one without the other. But they are different elements of different stories. Matthew also adds the Massacre of the Innocents, but while that is observed during Christmastide, we seldom think of it as part of the nativity (it is; we should; we’ll come back to that in considering Matthew’s theological purposes). Luke has the census and the journey to Bethlehem, which ends at the manger. But let’s start where Luke starts: with Mary’s cousin’s husband.
In other words, with family. Matthew starts with Joseph before he has a family. So, again, a commonality: family. But Luke starts with family for very particular narrative reasons.
Because Zechariah is very extended family: the husband of Mary’s older cousin Elizabeth, soon to be father of Jesus’ herald, John. But related to Jesus only by marriage, and present in this story only because Joseph is notably absent. Joseph is the central character of Matthew’s story, but he’s largely sidelined by Luke.
Luke’s narrative, in fact, centers Mary. Zechariah is related to her by marriage. He is first visited by Gabriel, but the angel doesn’t like the priest’s questions, and strikes him dumb. Mary fares better, and gets her questions answered. She even offers the first song of Luke’s narrative. Zechariah gets the second one, but only after his son is born and he follows the angel’s direction to name the child John. That also ends part one of Luke’s nativity.
It’s best to understand these two stories as being told in three parts each. Luke’s nativity story begins in the temple with Zechariah; his part of (and in) the story ends with the birth of John and the Benedictus (at least Zechariah goes out with one of the four songs in Luke's nativity). Part two begins with the census forcing Mary and Joseph (finally named!) to Bethlehem. (We’ll get to the three parts of Matthew’s story in a minute.) Gone are Elizabeth and Zechariah; new are the angels and the shepherds.
And here we can start to discuss the question of Luke's purpose in his nativity. Matthew and Luke's opening stories are irreconcilable except for the most important of the dramatis personae: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Luke's thesis in his gospel is also radically different from Matthew's (although Matthew 25, especially 31-46, is as radical as anything in Luke's gospel teachings. And that parable is pecular to Matthew.). Luke is far more concerned with the marginalized, the oppressed, the outcast, the ragged fringes of human society. Zechariah is a priest and so presumably a comfortable member of Palestinian society; or at least not as poor as a carpenter, like Joseph (set aside all notions of "markets" and "trades." Such things only started to exist in the collapse of the medieval period in Europe. A "carpenter" was a man with no work and only the income he could garner from someone who needed his skills. The system was patronage, not "free market," and without a patron you relied wholly on the kindness, and pocketbooks, of strangers; who usually had no more than you did. The fishermen Jesus will recruit as disciples later, usually portrayed as poor? Well off compared to Joseph the carpenter.). Mary is not described as impoverished, either; but while the children of Abraham are free to practice their temple religion, they are still under the thumb of Rome. And when Rome decrees you travel to a far away town to be counted for a census (which benefits Rome, not you. Again, not the Constitutional Census which apportions government power and benefits), you go. So, rather like the poor immigrants put on buses by governors of border (or non-border) states and sent far away, the family of Mary and Joseph have no choice but to comply with government orders.
As for the "inn" in Bethlehem, again we retroject anachronisms into the story. There were no "Motel 6's" in first century Bethlehem, no "No Vacancy" signs hung above businesses open to house the weary traveler. People did then as most do now: they stayed with family. The word translated as "inn" in Luke is better translated as "guest room." And all the story means is, not that the Holy Family met with inhospitality in Bethlehem where they had extended family (else why were they returned there to be counted?). It means they were humble peasant folk, poorest of the poor, and did as the poor did: wrapped their newborn in strips of cloth and laid him in a feeding trough because that's what poor people did. Jesus identifies with the poor in Matthew 25 ("whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me"), and Jesus is born among the poor, as one of the poor, in Luke.
Jesus, Jesus, rest your head
You has got a manger bed
All the evil folk on earth
Sleep in feathers at their birth.
Jesus, Jesus rest your head
You has got a manger bed.
Luke's is probably the most resonant of the infancy narratives, if only for that distinct display of abject poverty at the coming of the King of Heaven. Well, that and the angels.
Few of Luke's songs are captured so well in music as the Gloria of the angels. It's the chorus of "Angels We Have Heard On High." That scene is recited by Linus to Charlie Brown and the assembled kids in a spotlight on a darkened stage. It is the most evocative scene in the birth narratives, and it brings the shepherds, the stinking, dirty outlaws of Bethelehem, the biker gangs in more modern parlance, to the home where Jesus lies. Which must have shocked hell outta Mary and Joseph; but there you are.
Light, or glory (the glory which comes off God and obscures God in the Hebrew Scriptures is light, pure and simple and overwhelmingly bright), is a key part of Luke's story; and it's a key part of Matthew's story. We see the shepherds in dark fields, fields maybe illuminated by moonlight, and we imagine the scene shocked into day by the appearance of the angels and "the glory of the Lord" which "shone around about them." No wonder they were afraid. Who wouldn't be? That touch is Luke's way of assuring us this is real, that he means it, that we are to accept that it happened. And you can; or not. "May it be unto you according to your faith."
The point of the shepherds is not to give the angels an audience or excuse to show up and start singing. The point of the shepherds is to have the revelation. There are two basic forms of information: that which is discovered, either by diligent search or simply by diligent study; and that which is revealed. The birth and nature of the Christchild is revealed in both Matthew and Luke; but how it is revealed and who it is revealed to, are two very different things in the two stories. In Luke, the revelation comes to the shepherds, people as far down the economic scale as Joseph the carpenter; and perhaps even further down the social scale, out there with lepers and prostitutes. But these are the ones first told that Christ is born, and God is well pleased with humanity. That is not a plot point idly chosen. And the message brings the shepherds to the child, which visit closes the second part of Luke's nativity story.
The shepherds and the second part of this three party story underscore one of Luke's themes: Jesus came as
ptochoi to the
ptochoi, because God cares about the
ptochoi. Matthew and Luke both got their Beatitudes from "Q" (they aren't in Mark or John). But while Matthew's version is more "spiritual" ("Blessed are the poor in spirit"), Luke's are much more concrete: "Congratulations, you poor! God's domain is yours!" That statement is a little less startling when you think about the angels showing up to tell the shepherds the good news, and inviting them to go see for themselves the extraordinary thing God has done.
So we've started with the heights of Palestinian Hebraic society (the priestly class), leaving aside the satrap King Herod (we get to him in Matthew), and descended to the most outcast, most poorly regarded, precisely "wrong kind of people" to have at our Christmas celebration (would you invite a gang of smelly bikers to your Xmas dinner? Neither would I.). We move slightly back up the chain in the third part of the tale, with the presentation of Jesus in the Temple shortly after his birth.
We won't bother with the technical details of this part of the story. As Fr. Brown notes, the "sequence of birth, circumcision, presentation, and purification...provide no more than a loose frame and are not the substance of the narrative." The rituals of circumcision and purification don't even appear in Luke's telling; "presentation" is the excuse that moves the holy family to the Temple, the last scene of the baby Jesus in Luke's gospel (Jesus' next appearance is as a young boy teaching the elders in the Temple). So why does Luke include this episode in his nativity narrative? I rather like Fr. Brown's explanation:
The angelic proclamation to the shepherds which follows the birth of Jesus announces the identify of the child in terms of the expectations of Israel. Simon's Nunc Dimittus announces the destiny of the child "in sight of all the peoples," including the Gentiles. And so there is no real duplication between the two pronouncements, but rather a development.
I would put it in terms of literary analysis: Luke is setting out a prologue to a story. Part of the purpose of the entire infancy narrative is to announce both the destiny of the child who becomes the subject of the gospel, and to announce the identity of said child. Paul identified Jesus in his resurrection. By the time of the gospels (written after Paul's death), that identity has moved back to the transfiguration (Mark 9:2-13), a story both Matthew and Luke repeat. So the identification of Jesus with God moves backwards from post-death to the midst of Jesus's life. Matthew and Luke move it back further. Both take it back to before Jesus' conception, so it is present (and known/revealed) in his birth. (John moves it back further still: "In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the word was before God, and the word was God." You can't get back any further in time than that.) Telling the story of that revelation at birth is the purpose of the narrative stories. Within that purpose, Matthew and Luke have separate purposes related to the themes of their gospels. Within Luke's framework, the purpose of Simeon and Anna is twofold: one, to give a woman equal status with a man ("There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Galatians 3:28) Luke, remember, centers his nativity on Mary. The primary players are Mary and Elizabeth. Joseph has no speaking role at all, and Zechariah whiffs at the plate the first time he's at bat.
But the Nunc Dimmitus also serves a narrative role: it proclaims the identify of Jesus as a light to all people (not just the children of Abraham), and that he will cause suffering and division and, frankly, have a rough road to travel (because a sword will pierce Mary's heart, also). It's an interesting foreshadowing, because Matthew does the same thing, for the same reasons, in his nativity narrative.
MATTHEW AND BABY JESUS
You'll notice I've skipped lightly over the genealogies in Luke and Matthew. These are actually of great importance to post-exilic Israel. They aren't just a pedigree list of whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower (or, in Texas, were present during the Texas Revolution. Seriously. My wife and daughter can claim descent (matrilineally, as the Hebrews did it) from one of the fighters with Sam Houston at San Jacinto. Some people down here take that shit seriously.). The genealogies are actually registers of who is still among the children of Abraham. When faced with a diaspora, records can be helpful (or just internal government oppression. Records of citizenship will get you out of the clutches of ICE.). I'm skipping them not because they are an unimportant part of the nativity stories, but because they are actually a "fourth part" in my analysis. It's a separate consideration, tracing down the lineage Matthew and Luke provide (they aren't the same in all respects). Upon reflection, I should have added "genealogy of Jesus" to the set of common elements of these two stories. But that's all I'm going to say about it here; except to note, again, the difference in narrative purpose: Matthew puts his genealogy at the beginning of his gospel. Luke places it after the Simeon story, and before beginning the story of Jesus of Nazareth, his life, death, resurrection, and teachings. There's a lot of interesting narrative and thematic analysis to be had there alone; but this is already at four related posts, and this one itself hasn't even touched solidly on Matthew yet.
So let's move on.
Matthew opens, as I say, with the geneaology of Jesus. Luke opens with telling us who was in charge when Jesus was born, because power will play a direct role in his nativity story. It plays an even more direct, and nakedly aggressive, role in Matthew's; but Matthew starts with what has been most important to the children of Abraham since the Exile: genealogy. That at least establishes Jesus as a true descendant of Abraham (although he is Mary's child, not Joseph's. But Joseph names the child, accepting him as his own, so ultimately this is not about modern notions of "blood," or even more modern (and so "refined") notions of genetics.). Matthew then presents us with the first crisis (as we insist on thinking of it): Mary is pregnant, and Joseph knows it's not his child.
Before I drop my long quote in here from a previous post, let's note that the language of Matthew 1:18 focusses on Joseph, but it implies a close, if not intimate, relationship between Mary and Joseph already. Keep that in mind as I try, here, to explain 1st century Jewish marriage law:
If you take this story as in any way "real," (rather than Matthew's attempt to place Jesus as Messiah within Hebraic tradition and prophecy), you end up with the Raymond Brown attempts (I use the good Fr. metaphorically, and not caustically) to evaluate Galilean v. Judean marriage customs and the like (apparently it was the not unusual in Judea for a man to have "relations" with his betrothed before the marriage was formalized, but that was "not done" in Galilee. So which condition prevailed on Mary and Joseph?). Why, though, does Matthew raise the question of adultery at all? Luke doesn't raise it, and he includes an immaculate conception in his story.
As far as we can tell, Galilean custom was more strict than Judean on sexual relations for a couple between the initial engagement, which established a legal right, and the final ceremony, which established a common home. [Let me note this custom of legal right before common home prevailed into the 19th century in Britain in some form, as the ending of an engagement could be a breach of promise action, based on contract law.] But even in Galilee, villagers would have presumed that Mary's pregnancy came not from fornication or adultery, but from a slightly ahead-of-time marital consummation. Apart from Mary, only Joseph knew whether that could have been the explanation. Note, by the way, that while adultery only affected a husband's rights, Mary could not have committed adultery unless Joseph already had marriage rights over her.
Jon Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, Excavating Jesus (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p. 79. (Most of what follows, except for parenthetical comments, is drawn almost directly from this book.)
So, as Crossan and Reed ask, why did Matthew tell the story this way?
Since they were already officially engaged, pregnancy, even if not exactly proper bfeore Mary's move from her father's to her husband's home, would make nobody save Joseph suspect adultery. Eyebrows might raise and tongues might wag, but little else would happen, and it certainly would not make Jesus' conception adulterous....And even if he claimed it, he might not be believed. Around the year 200 C.E., for example, the Jewish legal codification in the Mishnah recorded the following debate: "If a man says, 'This my son is a bastard,' he may not be believed. Even if they both said of the unborn child in her womb, 'It is a bastard,' they may not be believed. R. Judah says: They may be believed." (Quiddushin 4:8)
Back to the law today; no man can deny paternity of a child born during marriage unless there is a blood test proving he is not the father. I actually had a case like this, where the wife was pregnant by her boyfriend during a pending divorce (yes, it had been pending that long). No one disagreed that the child was the boyfriend's, and the father of the child wanted to raise it as his. But the law said the child was the husband's, until proven otherwise, and simple denial of paternity by the husband and even the mother/wife, was not enough. Nor was a blood test of the fetus viable. It was a legal tangle because the child was due before the marriage was due to be legally terminated. So the issue needed to be resolved, but there were real legal and procedural questions about how to do that. That’s what my life used to be like.
These issues last a long time, and for good reason: parentless children have no one to speak for them, or care for them. So why does Matthew do this? The explanation Crossan comes up with involves the story of Moses. Not the story in Exodus, but the story in Josephus' Jewish Antiquities and Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities. Folk tales, in other words, about the birth of Moses. You know, the kind of thing Hollywood does when it wants to tell the story of, oh, say, the birth of Jesus. And then the popular imagination turns Moses the Hebrew into Charlton Heston.
That there are parallels to the nativity stories in scripture is not new, of course. Luke's story of childless Elizabeth recalls at least 4 stories: Genesis 16:7-16; Genesis 18:1-15; Judes 13:3-24; and 1 Samuel 1:1-20. Matthew works in one of Josephus's stories about Moses' birth with the aftermath of Jesus' birth: the Massacre of the Innocents. According to Josephus, the birth of a leader of the enslaved Jews was predicted and Pharoah ordered all male children born to the Israelites around the time predicted, thrown into the river. (You can see how these stories embellish on the scriptural ones, and pick up details for verisimilitude.) Now it gets more interesting.
In Exodus, the parents of Moses marry after Pharoah decrees all male Israelite children should be killed. Why marry after that decree, though? (Remember, this is pre-14th century Europe; marrying for love is an anachronism, except in Hollywood movies.) The folk literature explained that the marriage occured before the decree, and Jochebed is already pregnant when it is made (note the parallels in Matthew again: Herod makes his decree after the birth of Jesus, not before, though the Magi knew of the birth before it happened). Josephus records that God appeared to Moses' father in a dream and reassured him of Moses' fate: "This child...shall indeed be yours; he shall escape those who are watching to destroy him, and...he shall deliver the Hebrew race from their bondage in Egypt, and be remembered...even by alien nations." (quoted in Crossan, p. 83).
In another version, recorded by Pseudo-Philo, Moses' sister Miriam has a dream which foretells the greatness of Moses. Other versions in later texts (which may be earlier in tradition) have Jochebed and Amram divorced and convinced to marry again because of this dream. So there's a fairly rich amount of literature here for Matthew to draw on. And he does so in order to establish the connections, both scriptural and in the popular mind, between Jesus and Moses (one more link, from many: Jesus gives his sermon "on the mount" in Matthew, as Moses came down from Sinai with the law. In Luke, Jesus "looks up" at his disciples when he begins that sermon.)
So, does Matthew record a story about a family in crisis? From our point of view, yes, yes he does. But from Matthew's point of view? The crisis, more likely, was in the community of believers he wrote for, struggling to establish its identity in first century Palestine. Which is interesting if for no other reason than that, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Much of what Matthew writes, in other words, reflects the conditions of his community as he was writing; not our situations today. I don't mean by that, that there isn't something "timeless" (if not of the "eternal") in Matthew's story. But some of the details are subject to becoming anachronism and even misleading if we don't pay careful attention to what they meant to Matthew's audience, the only one he ever knew.
I'm not going to worry too deeply about the theology of Matthew right now, except to point out this story all centers on Joseph, which means that without Luke's gospel we wouldn't give Mary a second thought today. She has no role in this story; no voice, no agency, not even a chance to talk to an angel. The movement from talking about Joseph, the husband of the mother of God, is a seamless transition from that patrilineal geneaology. Luke gives us the obverse: Joseph appears by name only in Luke’s nativity. It's almost as if he has, as Sojourner Truth pointed out about the role of man in the birth, nothing to do with it. This is why we need two nativity stories, I suppose. It also presents, if you want to think about it, a reversal of expectations; in the 1st century, and even today.
Anyway, Matthew has his purposes in his nativity, and they clearly serve a Jewish audience familiar with Hebrew scripture, rather than Luke's audience who is clearly more familiar with more Gentile cultures. Matthew relies heavily on scriptural references that Luke barely touches on. Luke does
echo the Hebrew scriptures in his birth stories (John the Baptist and Jesus), and in his songs, especially those of Mary and Zechariah. But it's thanks to Matthew that we think of "Isaiah 'twas foretold it, this rose I have in mind." And all the other connections to the Hebrew Scriptures; which are worth belaboring, to a point.
I know I've mentioned before the "confusion" over the "young girl" v. "virgin" language in Matthew. I'm not even sure the term "virgin" meant the same thing to the translators of the Septuagint (where the term appears and from which Matthew quotes extensively) as it does today. There's a lot of discussion around this, in other words, and frankly it's not worth much to me. Matthew, like Luke, wants to emphasize that, back to Sojourner Truth, "man had nothin' to do with it!" And I'm fine with that.
We all prefer Luke's version because he gives us a rich story: Zechariah and Gabriel, Gabriel and Mary, Mary and Elizabeth, and then the journey to Bethlehem because of political power, and the birth of a peasant child, wrapped in rags, laid in a manger for a crib. "Why does this story never wear out?",
Carl Sandburg asked. Why should it?, we all answer.
Here's what we get in Matthew:
Joseph got up and did what the messenger of the Lord told him: he took [Mary as] his wife. He did not sleep with her until she had given birth to a son. Joseph named him Jesus.
Jesus was born at Bethlehem, in Judea, when Herod was king.
--Matthew 1:24-2:1, SV
I stop there because that's where Matthew stops. Or actually, part one of Matthew's nativity narrative stops with verse 25 of chapter one. Chapter two begins the next part of the narrative; verse one is just the connecting sentence between the vision of Joseph, and the appearance of the Magi, guided by a different vision.
It's important to Matthew's narrative that he tell us Jesus was born when Herod was king, because now Herod enters the narrative, and dominates it in ways even Caesar doesn't in Luke's telling.
Astrologers from the East showed up in Jerusalem just then. "Tell us," they said, "where the newborn king of the Judeans is. We have observed his star in the east and have come to pay him homage."
--Matthew 2:2, SV
There's a lot going on there, so while I won't dissect this verse by verse (oh, maybe I will; we'll see), let's take this up first. Matthew is giving the revelation of the birth to Gentiles. Luke gave it to shepherds. He has his reasons for choosing the marginalized; Matthew is almost in line with John, here: the revelation doesn't come to Israel, but to Gentiles. And it comes in a change in the natural world: a new star. The astrologers have discerned in this star the news that a king of the Judeans has been born. They find this significant enough they have to come observe the child, and honor him.
And the revelation has God's hand behind it, just as the revelation to the shepherds did. Angels are messengers from God, not just winged demi-gods floating about doing "angel stuff." The Greek word we took directly into English as a noun for them meant “messenger.”They come with purpose; but no angel comes to the astrologers. What comes to them is a change in nature, which they interpret. And that brings them to Jerusalem, where they are sure they will find more information. But, of course, Herod is in the dark; and doesn't like being enlightened.
When this news reached King Herod, he was visibly shaken, and all Jerusalem along with him.
Well, when the king sneezes, the corridors of power catch cold, eh?
He called together all of ranking priests and local experts, and pressed them for information: "where is the Anointed supposed to be born?"
Notice Matthew conflates the Anointed one with the "new king of Judea." That's going to be one of his themes throughout his gospel. The experts, of course, reach for scripture, which not coincidentally supports Matthew's references to scripture outside the use of it by these characters in his story. Wheels within wheels.
They replied, "At Bethlehem in Judea." This is how it is put by the prophet:
And you, Bethlehem, in the province of Judah,
you are by no means the least among the leaders of Judah.
Out of you will come a leader
who will shepherd my people, Israel.
This passage serves several purposes for Matthew. One, the fact the "experts" know immediately that the astrologers are looking for Bethlehem because of Isaiah is actually Matthew speaking through them. But it supports Matthew's claims that the prophets prefigured the Messiah in Jesus of Nazareth. This also gives him the narrative opportunity to put the authority of God (through the prophet, the person who spoke for God) into his narrative behind the identity of the Christchild, much as the angels (messengers from God) do the same in Matthew. The star and the astrologers (Magi, if you prefer) are not God's messengers; but they serve to allow Matthew to mark the importance of this birth; which, after all, is the point of the story, isn't it?
Then Herod called the astrologers together secretly and ascertained from them the precise time the star became visible.
I'm going to leave Matthew there and come back a few verses later, because beyond that the story is just narrative detail for getting the magi on the right road. But I want to note that language so often overlooked when we put the star above the stable and the magi alongside the shepherds: "...the precise time the star became visible."
I keep hesitating to say this star's appearance indicates a disturbance in creation because of the birth of the Christchild, but it was interpreted that way by Christians for millenia afterwards. God's presence in creation in the Hebrew scriptures is always represented by earth tremors and winds and even fire (though God is in none of those things, meaning God merely provokes them by God's very presence). In the same way I think Matthew means this momentous event (in his telling) causes a new star to appear; and that appearance is the revelation, the epiphany, to the Magi as to who the child is. It also didn't happen before Jesus was born; but on the day of his birth.
And that becomes significant soon:
And there guiding them on was the star that they had observed in the East: it led them forward until it came to a standstill above where the child lay. Once they saw the star, they were beside themselves with joy. And they arrived at the house and saw the child with his mother Mary. They fell down and paid him homage. Then they opened their treasure chests and presented him with gifts--gold and incense and myrrh. And because they had been alerted in a dream not to return to Herod, they journeyed back to their own country by a different route.
Suddenly the star stops being a peculiar astronomical event and becomes a miraculous one. It is the doxa but it is also an angel, a messenger as a guide, now leading the magi where they need to go. Having finished the journey, they are given their reward. And having paid homage to the Christchild, they get a warning in a dream to never see Herod again.
And then (condensing it again) the same messenger (angel) appears to Joseph and warns him to flee to Egypt to escape the death plot of Herod. Among other things Matthew is recapitulating the movement of Israel into, and out again, from Egypt. Egypt was the salvation of Israel, until it became their oppressor and God led them on the Exodus through Charlton Heston...er, Moses. As I've
had occassion to mention before, the flight into Egypt also echoes the flight of refugees to America, where they come seeking asylum as they also seek to escape death at home.
In Matthew's telling, it wasn't only the Magi who had a "cold, hard coming."
Matthew also uses this story to buttress his scriptural bona fides again:
There [in Egypt] they remained until Herod's death. This happened so the Lord' prediction spoken by the prophet would come true: "Out of Egypt I have called my son."
But that story also serves as a pivot from the journey of the Magi and the massacre of the innocents to the final scriptural reference in Matthew's nativity story (Luke uses canticles; Matthew uses scriptures. The same purpose in their narratives, but different techniques.):
When Herod realized he had been duped by the astrologers, he was outraged. He then issued a death warrant for all the male children in Bethlehem and surrounding region two years old and younger. This corresponded to the time [of the star] that he had learned from the astrologers. With this event the prediction made by Jeremiahthe prophet came true:
In Ramah the sound of mourning
and bitter grieving was heard:
Rachel weeping for her children.
She refused to be consoled:
They were no more.
My Scholar's Version helpfully points out that Ramah was about five miles north of Jerusalem, and was the place from which the Israelites were sent into exile in Babylon. Again, Matthew connects his nativity to Israel’s history in more ways than one. Rachel is the wife of Jacob, or as you might know him from his other name: Israel. And there’s that story from Exodus, when Pharaoh ordered the murder of all the Hebrew children, the order Moses escapes.
Matthew's nativity ends with Joseph receiving word of the death of Herod, in Egypt, from another messenger of God. But he returns to Nazareth, because Herod's son, Archaelaus, is now king. Why poke the bear? Matthew shows once more the agency of Joseph, and also his actions to protect his family and his "adopted" child. It also allow Matthew a closing scripture reference for his nativity story:
He [Joseph] heard that Archaelaus was the king of Judea in the place of his father Herod; as a consequence, he was afraid to go there. He was instructed in a dream to go to Galilee; so he went there and settled in a city called Nazareth. So the prophecy uttered by the prophet came true: "He will be called a Nazorean."
Again, several points there: Joseph has some agency, and God uses that agency to make the outcome of history fit the prophecy. Joseph fears returning to Bethlehem, so the messenger says "Have you considered Galilee? Really lovely this time of year!" And Joseph chooses Nazareth, which suits the prophecy (per Matthew, anyway) just fine.
As I say, Matthew writes for a Hebrew/nascent Jewish audience, and the more he can work this into their weltanschaaung, the better. It's no different from us. How many nativity scenes, without or without Magi, do you see where the Holy Family isn't white northern European? Sometimes you get diversity in the Magi, and one of them is African. I have a set where one is clearly caucasian, one is African, and one is Asian. But a Middle Eastern Jesus? A Joseph who looks like an Arab, a Mary who isn't the ideal young white woman?
Yeah, good luck with that.
The nativity stories each have several common elements: the place of birth, the names of the Holy Family members, the place where Jesus was raised not being where he was born. Why the latter is so is explained differently, however; and the main character of the story, the person whose point of view matters, shifts considerably. Joseph receives all the messages and makes all the decisions in Matthew's telling; Joseph is little more than a name in Luke's version. Even Simeon addresses Mary, not Joseph, at the circumcision; and it's Mary who keeps all these warnings and messages, and stores them away for future consideration. The reasons for the difference are, IMHTheologicalOpinion, both literary and theological. The literary considerations have to do with how these stories connect to the main narrative each gospel writer tells. These nativity stories are only an introduction to those stories, but introductions are very important things. You can't (or shouldn't) introduce ideas or plot points that aren't at least pre-figured in the introduction. Simeon in Luke foreshadows the troubles Jesus will provoke, not just in the world but in his mother's heart. Matthew shows the birth disturbs not just the natural world but, more directly and consequentially, the human one. Gold may be a gift for a king, but incense and myrrh are elements of burial, not just expensive Christmas gifts that shame the recipient who can't repay in kind. Matthew's Jesus is the Messiah come to redeem Israel, as promised. Luke's Jesus is the redeemer of Jew and Gentile. Both are still more alike than different, but in the difference in the details lies the difference in how the two gospels tell their two separate, but also related, stories. Matthew and Luke both rely heavily on Mark and the conjectured sayings gospel "Q," but they make very different things of that common material, too. And there is a lesson in that, too: that our relationship with God is our relationship with God, and no one else's. My daughter's relationship with me is not the emotional relationship she has with her husband, nor with her mother. And my relationship with her mother is not the relationship I have with my daughter, or my wife has with her.
And so it is with God. We all know the same persons, my wife, my daughter, and I; but we all know them differently, and so know different persons. It often helps me to compare the daughter I know with the daughter my wife knows. My wife is, among other things, much wiser than I am; and always has something to tell me that I need to know, and wouln't otherwise.
It's a useful analogy, I think.
*Or maybe it doesn't predate Mark. Raymond Brown, whose scholarship I will NOT challenge, points out the development of the Christian narrative (my term) in the New Testament as generally agreed. It started, not with the nativity (which, after all, was an Egyptian cultural concern, seeing as Pharoahs were gods), but with the crucifixion and resurrection. Put simply, that's all Paul talks about (aside from one mention of the eucharist service being based on what we now call the "Last Supper" of Jesus of Nazareth); and Paul's letters are inarguably the earliest "books" in the NT. Mark and John don't mention a nativity (although John is the "youngest" of the canonical gospels). The timeline of the story of Jesus' life, in other words, develops backwards. It starts with the death and resurrection, but as Fr. Brown points out, you can't really base a following on the death of its leader/founder/
raison d'etre. So the next layer (again, Paul has little to say about the life or "sayings" of Jesus of Nazareth) are sayings gospels, like the known Gospel of Thomas, and the conjectural "Q" and "Signs Gospel" behind Matthew and Luke, and John (respectively).
Having established a set of teachings by Jesus (the primary purpose of all four gospels; by John, Jesus, as one of my professors memorably said, regularly sucks all the air out of the room. He’s all talk.), the next logical step is to establish an infancy narrative. From there the next logical step became the non-canonical infancy narratives.
Whichever is another long post for another day.
