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Rather, they see the destination as having been a theological necessity. Bethlehem had been King David's hometown. And in a confused 1st century theological landscape in which many Jews expected a mighty new leader but disagreed on his nature, David's biblical status as God's "anointed one" (or "Messiah") provided a potent precedent of divinely sanctioned kingship. Binding Jesus to him by family (through Joseph) and birthplace consolidated that definition, which then matured into Christianity's far grander messiahship. Says White: "No Bethlehem, no David. No David, no messianic prototype. Matthew and Luke both understood that." The way each Gospel writer got the Holy Family there, by contrast, reflected his particular preoccupations.
Matthew was once again trying to tie his Nativity ever tighter to the Old Testament so that potential Jewish converts could feel comfortable with the new religion. The clue is Herod, whose failure to track down Jesus leads him to order the death of all local children under age 2. That "Slaughter of the Innocents" is a near replay of a much earlier infanticide: Pharaoh's murder of all the male infants of Israel in Exodus. Jews would recall that Pharaoh's most famous escapee (via those bulrushes) was Moses, who eventually received the Law from God at Sinai. Through the echoing narrative, Matthew was arguing for Jesus as Moses' successor. Says The Birth of Christianity's Crossan: "One of the things Matthew's going to do later in his Gospel is have Jesus up on a new mountain giving a new law. We call it the Sermon on the Mount."
And Luke, of course, once again had his eye on the pagan world. His key term is the census. In Jesus' time, the immensely popular Emperor Augustus was setting himself up not just as the ruler but also as the semidivine savior of the world. Wherever his censuses reached, his aggressive version of the Roman civic faith followed (along with his tax collectors).
Luke's description of an empire-wide census at the time of Jesus' birth, with Palestine's part conducted by the Syrian governor Quirinius, seems inaccurate. There is no other record of a census in Palestine at the time, and Quirinius was not yet governor. But he did administer an infamous census on Augustus' behalf some 12 years later, in A.D. 6. Resentment over it sparked a rebellion by Jewish messianic zealots that seethed for decades and finally backfired horribly in the Romans' razing of Jewish Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
Luke would have remembered that slaughter. By documenting Joseph and Mary's compliance with Quirinius' census, he was broadcasting to Roman readers that his fellow Christians were not that kind of messianists, intent on armed revolt. But by framing Christ's birth in the context of that empire-wide tally, he was also suggesting that not just Jewish Palestine but also the entire known world was a possible horizon for Christ's kingdom. It was a delicate line. The adult Jesus would later put it nicely (although Luke may have inherited this particular phrase from the earlier-written Mark): "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's."
THE STAR
"O star of wonder, star of night/Star with royal beauty bright"
--WE THREE KINGS