Matthew and Luke on Jesus’ Birth

with Caleb Friedeman

To hear the podcast click here.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.

David Capes
Let’s talk about some of the specific things that you find in Matthew’s birth account and then let’s talk similarly about Luke as well. What’s happening in the birth narratives that we really need to payattention to.

Caleb Friedeman
I think part 1 cues us up to be attentive when we come to Matthew, besides just resituating the burden of proof, it also really makes us think about sources and how an author is using them. Because sourcesare one of the historiographic features. And by the way, I don’t think that Matthew cites sources, so he doesn’t use the historiographic feature of sources in his birth material. But what he does do is usesources pretty evidently. I do a pretty close analysis of both the genealogy and the birth narrative proper.

And one of the really fascinating things is a lot of scholars agree that Matthew is using sources for his genealogy, and particularly the Old Testament. Places like First Chronicles 1-3, places like Ruth 4 are pretty evidently in view there.

So he’s using these sources and actually following them fairly closely. And where he departs from
those sources, he seems to be operating within a range of flexibility that was acceptable for Jewish genealogies. So that’s interesting, and it doesn’t track very well with the idea that this is just legendary. Matthew is following sources. If all he wants to do is write a legendary genealogy, why not just take every big name, Old Testament figure that he admires. Why not put Isaiah in there, regardless of whether they were related in any way. Why not just have a random assortment of the hall of faith or something like that?

David Capes
Yes, why not put Moses in there. Throw Noah in there.

Caleb Friedeman
Exactly, yes. Obviously, he likes Isaiah a lot because he cites him. Why not include people like that in there if this is just legendary genealogies of sources. Though, we find, I think, sources heavily implied by the birth narrative proper. A lot of scholars tend to focus on Matthew’s use of the Old Testament as being something that counts against historiographic intent. I actually think a close analysis of that material pushes the other way.

Because when you look at Matthew’s fulfillment citations, to me it’s quite evident that those citations and the texts that he’s selected depend on the story. Why would you pull this precise group of texts together unless you already had traditions about Jesus that made you think about them. Because most of them are not things that you would just readily relate to a Davidic Messiah figure just in the abstract. You would need to have traditions about Jesus in front of you.
And then you say, okay, how does Jesus fulfill this part of the Old Testament. Oh, I see a connection here. And by the way, you can also pull the citations out, and the story works pretty well without them.And I’m not the first scholar to have observed that. It seems to me that Matthew is pretty evidently working with some existing traditions, and then he is adding these fulfillment quotations into that. He’s working with some kinds of sources when he’s writing this birth material. Those are just a couple of the key points that I make about Matthew. And then for both Matthew and Luke, I talk some about the time elapsed. We can come to that in just a minute.

David Capes
Well, let’s move over to Luke. What are some of the features then that we need to pay attention to in Luke historically?

Caleb Friedeman
Just a few quick points here. I think it makes us take Luke 1:1-4, the preface, very seriously. And what I mean by that is, many of these ancient biographers like Luke will include a blanket note about their sources at the beginning of the biography. Prior to the birth material that seems to apply to the whole. Philo, for example, does this in his life of Moses, and Luke does a similar thing here. Because we have analogies for this kind of thing. It makes us say, wait a second. We can’t just bracket out the birth material when Luke has just made this claim about going back to those who were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.

We really need to think about how this material relates to that. Luke employs the historiographic feature of sources in Luke 1:1-4 and that applies to the birth material also. Though I argue that Luke actually presents Mary, Jesus’s mother, as a source within the birth material itself. Twice. Luke 2:19, and 2:51 where he describes Mary as preserving all the words in her heart. Based on my published dissertation. I’ve done that work there, and I reprise it here. But I make a fresh case for why we should regard that as a source marker.

And the last thing I’ll say, in terms of a historiographic feature, is I think Luke also employs what I wouldcall negative evaluation in the genealogy. When he says that Jesus was the Son as was thought, of Joseph. So that could be distancing. Where he just saying, I’m not willing to take responsibility for that claim. I think, though, when you read it in light of the rest of the account, where it’s pretty clear that Joseph is not Jesus’ biological father, then it’s suggesting a negative judgment on the idea that Joseph was Jesus’s father in a normal biological sense.

David Capes
Yes, that’s said in the genealogy? Okay, that goes over into chapter 3 then as well.

Caleb Friedeman
Yes, and that’s another interesting piece of it too. If we’re asking where Luke’s birth material is, he includes the genealogy later in the midst of adult material. Which again, makes It very difficult at that point if you want to hold the legendary intent hypothesis. Because what is going to cue the reader to shift from reading historically? Because the first part of Luke 3 is about Jesus’ adulthood, then you go to ahistorical in the genealogy, and then back to historically in the temptation, which comes right after the genealogy. That doesn’t really make sense.

Here’s the other really interesting thing to me, though. If that analysis is correct, and Luke employs nhistoriographic features 1,2,3.4, times. Three instances of sources and one instance of evaluation. I can’t find anywhere else in the Gospel of Luke where he does that, where he employs historiographic features. So that would actually mean he uses historiographic features more in the birth material and in relation to the birth material than he does in relation to the rest of the life. So obviously Luke 1:1-4 is going to apply to the whole life. But that gives you one use of sources, the historiographic feature for the whole life, where you actually have three other historiographic features that pertain specifically to the birth material. So if there’s any material in the Gospel of Luke, that we should be clear that it’s intended to be historical, it’s the birth material.

David Capes
It’s right there because it has those markers as opposed to every other place. Well, that’s fascinating. That really is fascinating. Your next job is to parse all this out. You’ve clearly made the case that it’s the intent of Matthew and Luke to write a historical account of the birth in the origin stories of Jesus. Now we got to go into the story itself and to carefully go through and to make some judgments about individual pericope or episodes within that material.

Caleb Friedeman
Yes. I think one of the interesting things about making that kind of case is the point that I make about time elapsed regarding Matthew and Luke versus other ancient biographers. I mentioned earlier that we have 360 years on average between the subject’s birth and when people like Nepos, Philo, Plutarch and Suetonius are writing about their lives. Obviously, scholars take different positions as to when the Gospels are written. But, if you just take a fairly consensus date of, let’s say somewhere in the 70s. 70 to 80 let’s say for both Matthew and Luke, well, that would mean that they’re far closer. Closer by centuries, almost three centuries closer than most ancient biographers were, most of the time to the events they’re writing about. And probably
would have had access to sources that accord with that kind of distance. So potentially an eyewitness source, or at least someone who would have known an eyewitness.

David Capes
Yes, and that’s part of Richard Bauckham’s case in his book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Well, we’ve got to come back to this, and we’re going to follow what you’re going to say about it in the next few years. Because I have a feeling there’s some articles and there’s some books following up on this. It needs to be done. Dr Caleb Friedeman, thanks for being with us today.