Luke 8: 8-39. This section is only very rough right now. A great deal needs to be done to clean it up.
Luke relates:
After Caesar Augustus removed Herod Archelaus1a as ethnarc for Judaea, the emperor appointed Quirinius as his legate for the newly formed Syrian tetrarchy, thus putting the Judaean part of the new administrative area under direct Roman rule. In the name of the emperor, Quirinius required that everyone in his tetrarchy register for a census. As Herod the Great, Archelaus's father, was a hereditary ruler of Judaea, he had paid Rome a vassal's tribute, which his tax gatherers gained without necessity of a census. But Quirinius, imposing the Roman system, required to know how many people lived in his region for taxation purposes. Luke tells us that this was Quirinius's first census, which records put at about a.d. 6 or 71 in current dating. (As any census was prohibited by Jewish law, a revolt soon broke out.)2
Every adult male went to his ancestral town in order to register himself. This included Joseph, who had been living in the Galilean town of Nazareth. As a descendant of David, Joseph had to go to the Bethlehem in Judaea. He brought along a very pregnant Mary, his fiance/wife under Jewish law.
As explained in Footnote 1, it appears that Luke may be mistaken as to the reason for the couple's trip.
For some unspecified reason, Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem with his pregnant wife.
On arrival in Bethlehem, her water broke and the baby was delivered – in an animal manger because the inn was full up. Mary wrapped her firstborn son in a newborn's cloths.
Several shepherds were keeping a night-watch on their flock in a field nearby. Suddenly, Jehovah's angel was right next to them, and everything lit up with God's glory. The men were frightened, but the angel said, "Nothing to fear. Behold: I bring you awesome news that is wonderful for everybody. Born to you today in David's city is a Savior [later known as Christ the Lord]. And here is a sign for you: Lying in a manger, you will find a baby in newborn cloths."
Suddenly a host of divine beings appeared with the angel, thundering:
On the eighth day after birth, it was time for the baby to be circumcised in order to fulfill Jewish law. At the ceremony, the lad was officially given the name Jesus (which means Jehovah helps or Jehovah saves).
Once Mary's time of purification was done (when Jewish women were kept apart from others after the menstrual period or after childbirth3, they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, in accordance with Jewish custom based on the scriptures that say that every firstborn who is male will be deemed holy to Jehovah.4 (Under the law, they were required to offer for sacrifice in the Temple either a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.5)
Now there was a devout and upright man in Jerusalem who had been looking for the Consolation of Israel. Being one of the rare Jews blessed with the Holy Spirit, he had been assured by the Spirit that he would not see death before first seeing what he had so longed for [that is, the Lord's Anointed].
The Spirit led him into the Temple, and on seeing the baby with his parents, took him in his arms and praised God,
Soon after this, the prophetess Anna, the daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher, approached. She was a very old woman who had been married for seven years and a widow for 84 years. She spent most of her time in the Temple, worshiping, fasting and praying for others night and day. She talked about the boy to anyone who was interested in the Redemption of Israel.6
What about the virgin birth?
A crucial point about the assertion of the virgin birth is that you do not have to believe it in order to be saved. All that is required for salvation is to be truly sorrowful for what you have done wrong and are doing wrong and to believe that Jesus can, and will, forgive you and heal you on the inside. That's all. Nothing else is necessary.
With that clarified, here are some thoughts on why a virgin birth was necessary.
As we know from the extreme example of abused children themselves becoming abusive to others, sin is contagious. In fact, sin spreads very much like physical disease. The domino effect is so pervasive that no one avoids it during the course of his or her life.
Yet, I suggest, sin is also transmitted via spirits, and in particular via the spirits of people during the sex act. This theory has had many adherents, from Augustine (354-430), to Ambrose (340-397) to Barth (1886-1968), though it has fallen into disfavor in modern times. Yet I do not mean to say that sex during marriage is not ordained by God. On the other hand, pair-bond marriage is for the fallen, not the risen who are admitted to paradise.
In order for God to ransom us from our terrible captivity and from the grim fate of death, it was necessary that a deadly injustice be done to a sinless person. Who would God choose for that role other than someone with whom he was on very intimate terms? And yet no man who had Adam's spiritual seed in him could qualify. Why? Because sin is transmitted during the sex act between two people.
As an adult, Jesus is well known for asserting that if a person even looks at another person with lust, the heart is stained by sin. Yes, I realize that such feelings are natural -- in this fallen world. During the sex act the male at least is experiencing some sort of intensity, and perhaps the female. At the point of conception, the soul is imparted to the new being. Whatever sin is staining each person may also stamp the new creation.
In fact, in some cases "lower" souls enter humanity this way; or possibly one of the biological parents already has a "lower" soul, thus tending to unconsciously "believe" a lower soul into existence. I am referring here to the souls of the "children of perdition" who, though human, are not truly made after the image of God. These are the tares that will be sifted out and destroyed when the time comes. They were never meant to be.
But even for those not born as tares, the imprint of sin is passed from one generation to the next in the human race.
These observations lead us to realize why Jesus was born of a virgin. The natural seed of Adam was spiritually tainted. Jesus, as the new Adam, must begin life without taint. His mother Mary, pure in heart, did not experience lust during the act of conception. She was a meek vessel. The Holy Spirit assured that conception was indeed immaculate. Thus, a new beginning for humanity could occur, with a man who was born with no sin becoming a "man of sorrows, acquainted with grief" (IS 53:3). In this conception, we have the Son of God becoming a son of humanity (Son of Man). God mercifully made his utterly innocent son into sin for our sakes. By taking the sin of humanity upon himself, he actually became a cesspool of sin on the cross. The "man of sorrows" was a "man of sin" for our sakes.
Of course, we may wonder: how is it that Mary was not tainted by the sin of Adam? But the point is that Mary experienced no carnal desire during a sex act, because there was no sex act. She did transmit her human nature to her son. Another point is that "God does not look upon sin" (paraphrase of HAB 1:13 and of Paul's theology), so that whatever problems she may have had God overlooked, declining to see them as sinful. All this is speculation. The issue is that it was necessary, for our sakes, that a sinless man come into our fallen world so as to pay off the devil by submitting to a total injustice.
Christ's sacrifice would have been worthless had he not been utterly blameless. Sin cannot save. Sin cannot heal. Sin can only make you sick and kill you. By suffering the outrageous injustice of judicial murder, Jesus was able to renew and revive humanity.
Yes, he was a man born of the Spirit. But his and the Father's gift to us is that we can also be born of the Spirit with no taint of sin. On account of Jesus, God does not look upon the "old man of sin" -- our animalistic or carnal nature. So when the Father and Son send the Holy Spirit to remake our lowly spirits into a new creation, there is no sin during the process of being born again! We are now in with the In Crowd. No worries.
Though a born-again person should put Jesus first in his or her life, we all know that one may be truly born again and yet unable to tolerate the idea of not marrying. Jesus leaves the believer free to decide. Whom the Son sets free is free indeed (JN 8:36).
We can understand why some Christian thinkers concluded that Mary must have remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus. As the "Mother of God," they thought it inappropriate that she would have ever had carnal relations. And certainly one can point to NT references in which Jesus indicates that paradise's pleasures are better than sex, which is why people who have been deprived of sex have nothing to worry about.
Plus, would not any siblings born in the usual way be tainted with sex-transmitted original sin?
But the fact is that the gospels refer to Jesus' brothers and sisters, including James, the brother of Jesus, who led the Jerusalem church after the resurrection. The standard answer is that these were cousins or close neighbors who had grown up with him. So the conclusion is that we do not know whether Mary gave birth to other children by Joseph. I would say that I do not see a strong theological reason for denying that she bore other children.
1. Scholars tend to agree that the date implied for Jesus' birth here is implausible. That is, 6 or 7 a.d. seems contrary to various other data given. For example, Archelaus is the son of the Herod in Matthew who tried to have Jesus killed. Thus, they tend to see Luke's infancy narrative as a pious interpolation – perhaps inserted to fight the Marcion heresy, which dehumanized Christ. My take is that, though the scholars have a point, what is impossible for man is possible with God, who is in charge of time and history.
In his An Introduction to the New Testament (Anchor/Doubleday 1996), Raymond E. Brown notes, "The wrong temporal sequence in the Acts reference suggests that the Luke-Acts author did not know precisely when this census took place ... and so he may have mingled it with the troubled times of Archelaus's father, Herod the Great, ten years before."
In addition, Brown reports that the Roman Catholic Church adopted the method of critical Protestant theologians in positing a three-tier layering of formation of the four gospels: Jesus' public ministry in Judaea and Galilee in the first third of the First Century, apostolic preaching about Jesus in the second third of that century, composition of the written gospels in roughly the last third of the century. In an authoritative RC Church document, "the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission proposed the three-stage development as a way of explaining that, although they contain historical material, the Gospels are not literal history."
Though I tend to agree with Brown and others, I point out that no one can be sure what the precise history was. Many events once considered historically impossible have since been accepted as accurate.
In any case, it seems to me plausible that the writer or an editor of Luke took a group of remembered incidents and wove them together as best he could. So we come to the idea that the story may well be substantively correct, with some details possibly being inaccurate.
In this respect, I find interesting that Brown's list of Roman legates for Syria includes Quintilius (or Quinctilius) Varus for 6 to 4 b.c., or perhaps a year or so longer. That time period corresponds to the period of Jesus' birth, which is estimated to have occurred within 6 to 2 b.c. (See Brown's The Birth of the Messiah, Appendix VII.) In other words Quintilius governed in the time frame for Jesus' birth. The names of the two governors strike the ear as very similar and we can well imagine people confusing them. So is it unreasonable to conjecture that the two names were merged in the historical data available to the writer of Luke? The chief problem with that idea is that Quintilius would not have compelled the vassal king of Judaea, Herod, to perform a census. But, in 4 b.c., a rebel named Judah seized the arsenal of Galilee's largest city, Sepphoris, and armed the citizenry. In response, the Syrian governor Publius Quinctilius Varus sacked Sepphoris – which is just a few miles north of Nazareth – and sold the population into slavery. Also interesting is the fact that this Judah was the same man who in 6 a.d. led a revolt against the census of Quirinius, the one noted in Luke. Hence, we have the possibility that Joseph took his family south to get clear of the rebellion or its aftermath. So it does indeed look as though the Luke account's time discrepancy was a result of a simple confusion of nearly identical names. Luke's writer assumed Joseph was responding to Quirinius's census, which was associated in his mind with Judah's rebellion – though he was unaware that there had been two rebellions by the same man fought against first Quintilius in 4 b.c. and then Quirinius in 6 a.d. (these years correspond to Archelaus's reign).
The idea that Joseph fled the war zone with his pregnant wife makes more sense than his taking her 90 miles in order to enroll in a census. Scholars tend to doubt that the Romans would have required such a thing – though Roman punishments could be harsh. In fact, the high plausibility of my conjecture tends to corroborate the essential claim that Joseph removed with his pregnant wife from Nazareth to Bethlehem. As said, a skilled carpenter can work anywhere.
If this idea is right, though, we have the historical fact that the insurrections were not confined to Galilee. A bloodbath struck Jerusalem as religious patriots tried to remove the Roman eagle from the Temple. Perhaps Joseph stopped in Bethlehem so his wife could give birth but, considering the awful atrocities (Rabbinical tradition calls this period a "terrible" time for Jews), headed south to one of the Jewish colonies in Egypt. We would expect that God would make sure his precious son was kept in safety.
On their return journey they once again decided to avoid Bethlehem and Judaea in particular, says Matthew because Archelaus was (still) ruler. Though Galilee was ruled by Herod Antipas, his rule evidently wasn't considered to be quite as awful as that of Archelaus, whose reputation was very bad.
We may guess that the writer of the Lucan infancy account assumed that the couple was settled in Nazareth and so must have showed up in Bethlehem during the great census. Notice though that Luke has Mary visiting Elizabeth in the hills of Judaea, not Galilee. It seems more likely that Mary would have gone the much shorter distance from Bethlehem than from Nazareth. (Mary would have been available to help her cousin, which would explain why Joseph let her go.) But if so, the manger story becomes suspect.
If, as is quite possible, Joseph was a master carpenter, he could have set up shop in nearly any town of substance. So it is unsurprising that he could have been a craftsman in Nazareth, only to set up trade in Bethlehem. After all, the child was very young and the parents might well have been reluctant to take him over the somewhat difficult 90-mile journey. Later, we assume he earned a living in one of the Jewish colonies of Egypt. Eventually, Nazareth became Jesus' home town. This is the story line we follow in this book. So we are assuming that Joseph brought his pregnant wife to Bethlehem for some unspecified reason eight to ten years prior to the census of Quirinius. My guess is that he left Nazareth in order to spare his wife the humiliation of everyone knowing that the birth had come too soon to have occurred within normal wedlock. It may be that early Christians were averse to mention of that point, not wishing to give ammunition to skeptics or simply being unwilling to make it seem as though there was all that much of a scandal. (We know, for example, that the composers of Matthew and Luke polished passages from Mark in order to show what they regarded as true reverence.)
If we decide against reconciling the lucan and matthean accounts, we may speculate as follows: When Joseph heard about what the Romans had done in the nearby town of Sepphoris, he immediately made haste to flee Galilee with the pregnant Mary, or even with Mary and the baby Jesus, assuming he could have been born in Nazareth (though I think the former the more probable). When the Romans retook Sepphoris, there was a massacre, with many women and children killed. The survivors were sold into slavery.
So we may imagine that the Matthean writer had heard, in part, of the massacre at Sepphoris and Joseph's flight southward, and brought in King Herod's well-known antagonism to potential rival claimants to the throne to explain Joseph's flight southward (this time from Bethlehem to Egypt rather than from Nazareth to Bethlehem). In addition, we now know from history that Herod had had three of his adult sons executed for supposedly endangering his hold on the throne. This information may have become mixed with the old account of the Sepphoris massacre.
In addition, we also know that shortly after the death of Herod in 4 b.c., his son Archelaus suppressed an insurrection at the Temple by Jewish fanatics who had stoned to death a contingent of his soldiers. About 3,000 people died after the army arrived in full force. Jesus would have been about two years old when this occurred, echoing Matthew's tale about Herod ordering the death of boys aged two or younger. We can imagine that if Joseph fled with his family from Galilee to escape the revolutionary violence there, then he also would have wished to avoid the Jerusalem area, and Bethlehem was only five miles away, when he heard of the Temple massacre. Where would be a logical place for a peace-loving man with a wife and child to flee? South to one of the Jewish colonies in Egypt. Fortunately, a good carpenter can work his trade almost anywhere.
Of course, all that does not explain the story of the three magi. Hence, we would have to conclude that that was a pious literary touch. Still, as we can detect strong elements of truth in both infancy accounts – despite the garbles – we might expect that there is something to the story that some wise men paid homage to Jesus when he was very young (think of the incident when he was 12 years old, confounding the sharpest Scripture scholars in the Temple).
After Caesar Augustus removed Herod Archelaus1a as ethnarc for Judaea, the emperor appointed Quirinius as his legate for the newly formed Syrian tetrarchy, thus putting the Judaean part of the new administrative area under direct Roman rule. In the name of the emperor, Quirinius required that everyone in his tetrarchy register for a census. As Herod the Great, Archelaus's father, was a hereditary ruler of Judaea, he had paid Rome a vassal's tribute, which his tax gatherers gained without necessity of a census. But Quirinius, imposing the Roman system, required to know how many people lived in his region for taxation purposes. Luke tells us that this was Quirinius's first census, which records put at about a.d. 6 or 71 in current dating. (As any census was prohibited by Jewish law, a revolt soon broke out.)2
Every adult male went to his ancestral town in order to register himself. This included Joseph, who had been living in the Galilean town of Nazareth. As a descendant of David, Joseph had to go to the Bethlehem in Judaea. He brought along a very pregnant Mary, his fiance/wife under Jewish law.
As explained in Footnote 1, it appears that Luke may be mistaken as to the reason for the couple's trip.
For some unspecified reason, Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem with his pregnant wife.
On arrival in Bethlehem, her water broke and the baby was delivered – in an animal manger because the inn was full up. Mary wrapped her firstborn son in a newborn's cloths.
Several shepherds were keeping a night-watch on their flock in a field nearby. Suddenly, Jehovah's angel was right next to them, and everything lit up with God's glory. The men were frightened, but the angel said, "Nothing to fear. Behold: I bring you awesome news that is wonderful for everybody. Born to you today in David's city is a Savior [later known as Christ the Lord]. And here is a sign for you: Lying in a manger, you will find a baby in newborn cloths."
Suddenly a host of divine beings appeared with the angel, thundering:
Glory to God in the highest heaven!Once the angels vanished, the shepherds made haste to see what the Lord had revealed. In Bethlehem, they quickly found Joseph and Mary, with the baby lying in the animal manger, as they had been told. Immediately they told the parents about what they had just seen and heard concerning the child. Mary never forgot this incident, and continuously mulled it over.
On earth, peace among humans, for whom he cares deeply.
On the eighth day after birth, it was time for the baby to be circumcised in order to fulfill Jewish law. At the ceremony, the lad was officially given the name Jesus (which means Jehovah helps or Jehovah saves).
Once Mary's time of purification was done (when Jewish women were kept apart from others after the menstrual period or after childbirth3, they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, in accordance with Jewish custom based on the scriptures that say that every firstborn who is male will be deemed holy to Jehovah.4 (Under the law, they were required to offer for sacrifice in the Temple either a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.5)
Now there was a devout and upright man in Jerusalem who had been looking for the Consolation of Israel. Being one of the rare Jews blessed with the Holy Spirit, he had been assured by the Spirit that he would not see death before first seeing what he had so longed for [that is, the Lord's Anointed].
The Spirit led him into the Temple, and on seeing the baby with his parents, took him in his arms and praised God,
Now let your servant depart in peace, O LordAfter blessing the parents, Simeon told Mary, "This child is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel, and for a sign which is spoken against, so that the real thoughts of many will be revealed. Yes, and a sword will pierce through your own soul."
for, as you said, my eyes have seen your salvation
prepared in front of all peoples:
a light for revelation to the gentiles
and the glory of your people Israel
Soon after this, the prophetess Anna, the daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher, approached. She was a very old woman who had been married for seven years and a widow for 84 years. She spent most of her time in the Temple, worshiping, fasting and praying for others night and day. She talked about the boy to anyone who was interested in the Redemption of Israel.6
What about the virgin birth?
A crucial point about the assertion of the virgin birth is that you do not have to believe it in order to be saved. All that is required for salvation is to be truly sorrowful for what you have done wrong and are doing wrong and to believe that Jesus can, and will, forgive you and heal you on the inside. That's all. Nothing else is necessary.
With that clarified, here are some thoughts on why a virgin birth was necessary.
As we know from the extreme example of abused children themselves becoming abusive to others, sin is contagious. In fact, sin spreads very much like physical disease. The domino effect is so pervasive that no one avoids it during the course of his or her life.
Yet, I suggest, sin is also transmitted via spirits, and in particular via the spirits of people during the sex act. This theory has had many adherents, from Augustine (354-430), to Ambrose (340-397) to Barth (1886-1968), though it has fallen into disfavor in modern times. Yet I do not mean to say that sex during marriage is not ordained by God. On the other hand, pair-bond marriage is for the fallen, not the risen who are admitted to paradise.
In order for God to ransom us from our terrible captivity and from the grim fate of death, it was necessary that a deadly injustice be done to a sinless person. Who would God choose for that role other than someone with whom he was on very intimate terms? And yet no man who had Adam's spiritual seed in him could qualify. Why? Because sin is transmitted during the sex act between two people.
As an adult, Jesus is well known for asserting that if a person even looks at another person with lust, the heart is stained by sin. Yes, I realize that such feelings are natural -- in this fallen world. During the sex act the male at least is experiencing some sort of intensity, and perhaps the female. At the point of conception, the soul is imparted to the new being. Whatever sin is staining each person may also stamp the new creation.
In fact, in some cases "lower" souls enter humanity this way; or possibly one of the biological parents already has a "lower" soul, thus tending to unconsciously "believe" a lower soul into existence. I am referring here to the souls of the "children of perdition" who, though human, are not truly made after the image of God. These are the tares that will be sifted out and destroyed when the time comes. They were never meant to be.
But even for those not born as tares, the imprint of sin is passed from one generation to the next in the human race.
These observations lead us to realize why Jesus was born of a virgin. The natural seed of Adam was spiritually tainted. Jesus, as the new Adam, must begin life without taint. His mother Mary, pure in heart, did not experience lust during the act of conception. She was a meek vessel. The Holy Spirit assured that conception was indeed immaculate. Thus, a new beginning for humanity could occur, with a man who was born with no sin becoming a "man of sorrows, acquainted with grief" (IS 53:3). In this conception, we have the Son of God becoming a son of humanity (Son of Man). God mercifully made his utterly innocent son into sin for our sakes. By taking the sin of humanity upon himself, he actually became a cesspool of sin on the cross. The "man of sorrows" was a "man of sin" for our sakes.
Of course, we may wonder: how is it that Mary was not tainted by the sin of Adam? But the point is that Mary experienced no carnal desire during a sex act, because there was no sex act. She did transmit her human nature to her son. Another point is that "God does not look upon sin" (paraphrase of HAB 1:13 and of Paul's theology), so that whatever problems she may have had God overlooked, declining to see them as sinful. All this is speculation. The issue is that it was necessary, for our sakes, that a sinless man come into our fallen world so as to pay off the devil by submitting to a total injustice.
Christ's sacrifice would have been worthless had he not been utterly blameless. Sin cannot save. Sin cannot heal. Sin can only make you sick and kill you. By suffering the outrageous injustice of judicial murder, Jesus was able to renew and revive humanity.
Yes, he was a man born of the Spirit. But his and the Father's gift to us is that we can also be born of the Spirit with no taint of sin. On account of Jesus, God does not look upon the "old man of sin" -- our animalistic or carnal nature. So when the Father and Son send the Holy Spirit to remake our lowly spirits into a new creation, there is no sin during the process of being born again! We are now in with the In Crowd. No worries.
Though a born-again person should put Jesus first in his or her life, we all know that one may be truly born again and yet unable to tolerate the idea of not marrying. Jesus leaves the believer free to decide. Whom the Son sets free is free indeed (JN 8:36).
We can understand why some Christian thinkers concluded that Mary must have remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus. As the "Mother of God," they thought it inappropriate that she would have ever had carnal relations. And certainly one can point to NT references in which Jesus indicates that paradise's pleasures are better than sex, which is why people who have been deprived of sex have nothing to worry about.
Plus, would not any siblings born in the usual way be tainted with sex-transmitted original sin?
But the fact is that the gospels refer to Jesus' brothers and sisters, including James, the brother of Jesus, who led the Jerusalem church after the resurrection. The standard answer is that these were cousins or close neighbors who had grown up with him. So the conclusion is that we do not know whether Mary gave birth to other children by Joseph. I would say that I do not see a strong theological reason for denying that she bore other children.
1. Scholars tend to agree that the date implied for Jesus' birth here is implausible. That is, 6 or 7 a.d. seems contrary to various other data given. For example, Archelaus is the son of the Herod in Matthew who tried to have Jesus killed. Thus, they tend to see Luke's infancy narrative as a pious interpolation – perhaps inserted to fight the Marcion heresy, which dehumanized Christ. My take is that, though the scholars have a point, what is impossible for man is possible with God, who is in charge of time and history.
In his An Introduction to the New Testament (Anchor/Doubleday 1996), Raymond E. Brown notes, "The wrong temporal sequence in the Acts reference suggests that the Luke-Acts author did not know precisely when this census took place ... and so he may have mingled it with the troubled times of Archelaus's father, Herod the Great, ten years before."
In addition, Brown reports that the Roman Catholic Church adopted the method of critical Protestant theologians in positing a three-tier layering of formation of the four gospels: Jesus' public ministry in Judaea and Galilee in the first third of the First Century, apostolic preaching about Jesus in the second third of that century, composition of the written gospels in roughly the last third of the century. In an authoritative RC Church document, "the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission proposed the three-stage development as a way of explaining that, although they contain historical material, the Gospels are not literal history."
Though I tend to agree with Brown and others, I point out that no one can be sure what the precise history was. Many events once considered historically impossible have since been accepted as accurate.
In any case, it seems to me plausible that the writer or an editor of Luke took a group of remembered incidents and wove them together as best he could. So we come to the idea that the story may well be substantively correct, with some details possibly being inaccurate.
In this respect, I find interesting that Brown's list of Roman legates for Syria includes Quintilius (or Quinctilius) Varus for 6 to 4 b.c., or perhaps a year or so longer. That time period corresponds to the period of Jesus' birth, which is estimated to have occurred within 6 to 2 b.c. (See Brown's The Birth of the Messiah, Appendix VII.) In other words Quintilius governed in the time frame for Jesus' birth. The names of the two governors strike the ear as very similar and we can well imagine people confusing them. So is it unreasonable to conjecture that the two names were merged in the historical data available to the writer of Luke? The chief problem with that idea is that Quintilius would not have compelled the vassal king of Judaea, Herod, to perform a census. But, in 4 b.c., a rebel named Judah seized the arsenal of Galilee's largest city, Sepphoris, and armed the citizenry. In response, the Syrian governor Publius Quinctilius Varus sacked Sepphoris – which is just a few miles north of Nazareth – and sold the population into slavery. Also interesting is the fact that this Judah was the same man who in 6 a.d. led a revolt against the census of Quirinius, the one noted in Luke. Hence, we have the possibility that Joseph took his family south to get clear of the rebellion or its aftermath. So it does indeed look as though the Luke account's time discrepancy was a result of a simple confusion of nearly identical names. Luke's writer assumed Joseph was responding to Quirinius's census, which was associated in his mind with Judah's rebellion – though he was unaware that there had been two rebellions by the same man fought against first Quintilius in 4 b.c. and then Quirinius in 6 a.d. (these years correspond to Archelaus's reign).
The idea that Joseph fled the war zone with his pregnant wife makes more sense than his taking her 90 miles in order to enroll in a census. Scholars tend to doubt that the Romans would have required such a thing – though Roman punishments could be harsh. In fact, the high plausibility of my conjecture tends to corroborate the essential claim that Joseph removed with his pregnant wife from Nazareth to Bethlehem. As said, a skilled carpenter can work anywhere.
If this idea is right, though, we have the historical fact that the insurrections were not confined to Galilee. A bloodbath struck Jerusalem as religious patriots tried to remove the Roman eagle from the Temple. Perhaps Joseph stopped in Bethlehem so his wife could give birth but, considering the awful atrocities (Rabbinical tradition calls this period a "terrible" time for Jews), headed south to one of the Jewish colonies in Egypt. We would expect that God would make sure his precious son was kept in safety.
On their return journey they once again decided to avoid Bethlehem and Judaea in particular, says Matthew because Archelaus was (still) ruler. Though Galilee was ruled by Herod Antipas, his rule evidently wasn't considered to be quite as awful as that of Archelaus, whose reputation was very bad.
We may guess that the writer of the Lucan infancy account assumed that the couple was settled in Nazareth and so must have showed up in Bethlehem during the great census. Notice though that Luke has Mary visiting Elizabeth in the hills of Judaea, not Galilee. It seems more likely that Mary would have gone the much shorter distance from Bethlehem than from Nazareth. (Mary would have been available to help her cousin, which would explain why Joseph let her go.) But if so, the manger story becomes suspect.
If, as is quite possible, Joseph was a master carpenter, he could have set up shop in nearly any town of substance. So it is unsurprising that he could have been a craftsman in Nazareth, only to set up trade in Bethlehem. After all, the child was very young and the parents might well have been reluctant to take him over the somewhat difficult 90-mile journey. Later, we assume he earned a living in one of the Jewish colonies of Egypt. Eventually, Nazareth became Jesus' home town. This is the story line we follow in this book. So we are assuming that Joseph brought his pregnant wife to Bethlehem for some unspecified reason eight to ten years prior to the census of Quirinius. My guess is that he left Nazareth in order to spare his wife the humiliation of everyone knowing that the birth had come too soon to have occurred within normal wedlock. It may be that early Christians were averse to mention of that point, not wishing to give ammunition to skeptics or simply being unwilling to make it seem as though there was all that much of a scandal. (We know, for example, that the composers of Matthew and Luke polished passages from Mark in order to show what they regarded as true reverence.)
If we decide against reconciling the lucan and matthean accounts, we may speculate as follows: When Joseph heard about what the Romans had done in the nearby town of Sepphoris, he immediately made haste to flee Galilee with the pregnant Mary, or even with Mary and the baby Jesus, assuming he could have been born in Nazareth (though I think the former the more probable). When the Romans retook Sepphoris, there was a massacre, with many women and children killed. The survivors were sold into slavery.
So we may imagine that the Matthean writer had heard, in part, of the massacre at Sepphoris and Joseph's flight southward, and brought in King Herod's well-known antagonism to potential rival claimants to the throne to explain Joseph's flight southward (this time from Bethlehem to Egypt rather than from Nazareth to Bethlehem). In addition, we now know from history that Herod had had three of his adult sons executed for supposedly endangering his hold on the throne. This information may have become mixed with the old account of the Sepphoris massacre.
In addition, we also know that shortly after the death of Herod in 4 b.c., his son Archelaus suppressed an insurrection at the Temple by Jewish fanatics who had stoned to death a contingent of his soldiers. About 3,000 people died after the army arrived in full force. Jesus would have been about two years old when this occurred, echoing Matthew's tale about Herod ordering the death of boys aged two or younger. We can imagine that if Joseph fled with his family from Galilee to escape the revolutionary violence there, then he also would have wished to avoid the Jerusalem area, and Bethlehem was only five miles away, when he heard of the Temple massacre. Where would be a logical place for a peace-loving man with a wife and child to flee? South to one of the Jewish colonies in Egypt. Fortunately, a good carpenter can work his trade almost anywhere.
Of course, all that does not explain the story of the three magi. Hence, we would have to conclude that that was a pious literary touch. Still, as we can detect strong elements of truth in both infancy accounts – despite the garbles – we might expect that there is something to the story that some wise men paid homage to Jesus when he was very young (think of the incident when he was 12 years old, confounding the sharpest Scripture scholars in the Temple).
1a. The best account of Archelaus's reign is from the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia
https://miraclecurebook.blogspot.com/2020/09/herod-archelaus-troubled-career.html
2. Most of the information in the first paragraph comes from Roman sources, rather than from Luke. Also at several other points I have added supplementary detail.
3. Leviticus 12
1 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,Leviticus 15
2 Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a woman have conceived seed, and born a man child: then she shall be unclean seven days; according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she be unclean.
3 And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.
4 And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled.
5 But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her separation: and she shall continue in the blood of her purifying threescore and six days.
19 And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even.
20 And every thing that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean: every thing also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean.
21 And whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
22 And whosoever toucheth any thing that she sat upon shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.
23 And if it be on her bed, or on any thing whereon she sitteth, when he toucheth it, he shall be unclean until the even.
24 And if any man lie with her at all, and her flowers be upon him, he shall be unclean seven days; and all the bed whereon he lieth shall be unclean.
4. Leviticus 12
6 And when the days of her purifying are fulfilled, for a son, or for a daughter, she shall bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt offering, and a young pigeon, or a turtledove, for a sin offering, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest:
7 Who shall offer it before the Lord, and make an atonement for her; and she shall be cleansed from the issue of her blood. This is the law for her that hath born a male or a female.
8 And if she be not able to bring a lamb, then she shall bring two turtles, or two young pigeons; the one for the burnt offering, and the other for a sin offering: and the priest shall make an atonement for her, and she shall be clean.
5. Deuteronomy 15:1
And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,
2 Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast: it is mine.
6. Luke says that after the Temple rite was finished, the family returned to Nazareth. If so, then Matthew's account does not agree. See Footnote 1.
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