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In the debates over the literal truth of the Gospels, just about everyone acknowledges that major conclusions about Jesus' life are not based on forensic clues. There is no specific physical evidence for the key points of the story. There are the Christian testimonies, which begin with Paul in the 50s A.D. and are supported in part by a 1st century Roman reference to "Jesus, the so-called Christ," a "wise man" who "won over many of the Jews and also many of the Greeks," and who is described as crucified in accounts from the next century. Beyond such testimony, there are literary tools used to weigh plausibility. Were the Christian narratives written close after the events? Were there many talkative eyewitnesses? Do they agree? The details of Jesus' birth--in a humble place attended by only a few--are ill suited to the first two criteria. Mark and John do not tell about the Nativity at all. And despite agreeing on the big ideas, Matthew and Luke diverge in conspicuous ways on details of the event. In Matthew's Nativity, the angelic Annunciation is made to Joseph while Luke's is to Mary. Matthew's offers wise men and a star and puts the baby Jesus in a house; Luke's prefers shepherds and a manger. Both place the birth in Bethlehem, but they disagree totally about how it came to be there.
One might be tempted to abandon the whole Nativity story as "unhistoric," mere theological backing and filling. Or one might take a broader view and, like the constantly evolving scholarship, look anew at these stories and what they tell us not just about the birth of Jesus but also about how his message was spread. "It's virtually impossible to reduce the accounts to a single core narrative," contends L. Michael White, University of Texas at Austin religious historian and author of From Jesus to Christianity. But that may not be the most important point. "What jumps out at close readers," he says, "is Matthew's and Luke's different roads to performing the vital theological task of their age: fitting key themes and symbols from Christianity's parent tradition, Judaism, into an emerging belief in Jesus and also working in ideas familiar to the Roman culture that surrounded them." Thus the Nativity stories provide a fascinating look at how each of the two men who agreed on so much--that Jesus was the Christ come among us and was crucified and resurrected and took away sin--could be inspired to begin his story in similar, yet hardly identical ways.
THE ANNUNCIATION
"Behold a virgin shall conceive"
--THE MESSIAH
There is no better introduction to the differences between Matthew's and Luke's approaches to the Nativity story than their tellings of the first key scene in the drama: the angelic announcement that a very special child will be born.