This battered crèche was a gift from my Mom and Dad for Wendy’s and my first Christmas together, now forty-three years ago.  It has been unboxed and reboxed time and again, its figures handled by tiny hands or batted by little paws–and indeed, as the unexplained placement of a sheep in the loft shows, our now full-grown mischievous sons still play with it!

One feature of our crèche, and indeed of most if not all that I have seen, is the presence of both a shepherd and the three kings.  The same was true, no doubt, of Christmas pageants all over this past year, with the baby Jesus visited by shepherds in bathrobes and sandals, and by kings in cardboard crowns, bearing their gifts of cigar boxes and shampoo bottles covered with gold and silver foil.

But of course, they do not appear together in our Bibles!  The shepherds are only found in Luke 2:1-19, while only Matthew 1:18–2:23 has the Magi.  Tradition has found a way to fit them together, suggesting that while the shepherds found the baby the night of his birth, the foreign sages came later, a year or two after the child was born.  We have even given each story its own season of the Christian year, consigning Matthew’s Magi to Epiphany!  But the stubborn presence of the wise men in our crèches and our Christmas carols shows that we have never really bought that rationalization.

A closer read reveals that in fact Matthew and Luke tell two entirely different stories.  Not only the shepherds, but also Caesar’s census, Mary and Joseph’s forced journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the angelic host, indeed the manger itself appear only in Luke.  Not only the Magi, but also the star, King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, and the flight of the Holy Family are only found in Matthew.

There are of course shared elements in these accounts.  Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus’ parents were named Mary and Joseph.  Both agree that he was born in Bethlehem, but grew up in Nazareth (Mark and John say nothing of his birthplace, but also identify Jesus as being from Nazareth).  Matthew and Luke share the tradition that Jesus’ birth was miraculous, as his mother was a virgin: a truth announced to Mary by the angel Gabriel in Luke 1:26-38 and revealed to Joseph in a dream in Matthew 1:18-25, but mentioned nowhere else in Scripture (although Paul may allude to this tradition in Galatians 4:4; concerning Matthew’s citation of Isaiah 7:10-16, see this earlier blog).

Those common elements regarding Jesus’ birth, however, are woven into two entirely different nativity stories.  In Matthew, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not only because prophecy said that the Messiah must be, but also because Matthew assumes that that is where Joseph and Mary lived.  They leave Bethlehem as refugees, fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous designs (Matt 2:13-18).  Even after Herod’s death, they cannot return to their home, as Judea is now ruled by Herod’s equally wicked son Archelaus, so instead they settle in Galilee to the north, in the village of Nazareth (Matt 2:19-23).

Luke, on the other hand, assumes that Joseph and Mary are from Nazareth.  To get them to Bethlehem, where tradition and prophecy say Jesus must be born, he brings in the Roman government:

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed [Greek apographesthai; better “registered” or “enrolled”].(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)  And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)  To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child (Luke 2:1-5, KJV).

Luke’s account of a Roman census is difficult on several grounds.  First, there is no evidence, outside of Luke, for a universal census ordered by Augustus.  There was indeed a census of Syria and Galilee conducted by Publius Sulpicius Quirinius (“Cyrenius” in the KJV), the Roman military governor of Syria.  In Acts 5:37, Gamaliel recalls the bloody revolt of Judas the Galilean, launched in response to that census, an event Jewish historian Josephus also records (Antiquities 20.5.2).   But Quirinius’ census was taken around 6 CE.  Jesus was born at least ten years earlier, as Matthew and Luke (implicitly; see Luke 1:5) place his birth during the reign of Herod, who died in 4 BCE.  Finally, the whole point of a census is determining where people can be found, for purposes of taxation (as the familiar KJV rendering has it) or of conscription into forced labor or the military: which is why Quirinius’ census prompted such a violent response (compare 1 Chr 21:1-30//2 Sam 24:1-25).  It is difficult to see any point in having people go somewhere else, then.  Luke, it seems, is using the census as a plot device: to get Mary and Joseph from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem.

What can we conclude from this?  First, the gospels are neither histories nor biographies.  They are confessions, aimed at bringing people to faith in Jesus Christ.  It would be a mistake to hold them to factual standards which they do not claim and to which they do not aspire.  Trying to fold their distinct narratives into one another forces each narrative into a mold that does not fit.  Much like the two creation accounts in Genesis 1–3, or the two accounts of the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy, we need to allow each Gospel account of the Nativity its own integrity.

Failing to acknowledge such conflicts forces us to be dishonest about what the Bible actually is.  Claiming that the Bible is inerrant and infallible ultimately means leaving the actual words of Scripture behind, and substituting our own self-consistent, “common-sense” view of what the Bible must say for what Scripture actually says.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, “No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means” (“Our Theatres In The Nineties,” 1930). Certainly, Shaw had a point!  It is far easier, and simpler, to stick with what “everybody knows” the Bible says than to wrestle with what Scripture actually means.

On the one hand, the Bible continually frustrates our attempts to turn it into an end in itself: whether as an infallible witness to history, or as a self-sufficient, internally consistent rule of behavior.  The Bible is far more complex than that, as an honest reading of the text on the page continually reveals. But on the other hand, reading the Bible brings us into an encounter with the living God.  Reformed theologian Daniel Migliore put it very well: “Scripture is indispensable in bringing us into a new relationship with the living God through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.”  However, “Christians do not believe in the Bible; they believe in the living God attested by the Bible” (Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Second Edition [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004], 50). The distinction is vital, friends.

One intriguing result of allowing both Matthew’s and Luke’s account of the Nativity its own integrity has to do with those visitors who come to the Christ Child: Luke’s shepherds and Matthew’s Magi.

Luke writes in excellent Greek, for an educated, Greek-speaking, Gentile audience.  Clearly, Luke was well educated, which cost money.  His gospel opens with greetings to Luke’s patron, Theophilus.  Evidently, Theophilus was funding Luke’s travels and research as he wrote his account of the life of Jesus and the growth of the early church.  In sum: Luke comes from money; his project is funded by a patron with money, and he addresses himself primarily to an audience with money.

Yet, a major theme of Luke’s gospel is the community’s responsibility to the poor.  His gospel begins with a song sung by Mary when she learns that she has been chosen to bear the Christ:

[God] has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
        and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things
    and sent the rich away empty-handed (Lk 1:52-53).

So too, in Luke’s version of the beatitudes, we read, “Happy are you who are poor, [rather than, as in Matthew 5:3, “poor in spirit”] because God’s kingdom is yours” (Lk 6:20 ), counterbalanced by “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation (Lk 6:24).  It is no surprise, then, that in Luke’s nativity the birth of the Christ child is announced to the poor: to ignorant, unwashed Galilean shepherds!

The Magi were a clan of priests and astrologers from Persia–our words “magic” and “magician” both derive from “magi.”  Matthew does not tell us how many Magi came–the traditional number three comes from their three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh (Matt 2:11-12). The idea that they were kings from distant lands and races comes from Isaiah 60:1-6, traditionally read as fulfilled in their visit:

Still, there is an appropriateness to the tradition’s reading of the wise men as kings from three continents and three races.  After all, they come to the manger as the ultimate outsiders: not only from outside of Judea, but from outside the Roman empire itself–from the land of the feared Parthians, an armed and unstable threat on the empire’s eastern frontier. They are not Jews, either ethnically or religiously; while Matthew says nothing of their religious heritage, they would have been Zoroastrians.  Yet remarkably, it is Matthew, the most Jewish of the gospel writers, who tells their story. Matthew is the one who records a visit to the Christ Child from gentiles: foreigners and unbelievers, who come, not as enemies to threaten the Christ Child, but as pilgrims to honor him.

It as as though Matthew the Jewish scribe and Luke the urbane Greek scholar were each compelled, in their nativity stories, to recognize that the Christ Child was not the property of people like them.  Jesus has come to, and for, us all.