The Detour
Here's an interesting one: compare the events following Jesus' birth as recorded in Matthew 2 and Luke 2. Luke says Jesus' family journeyed to Jerusalem shortly after Jesus' birth, and went from there to Nazareth. Matthew says they first returned to Bethlehem, then fled to Egypt - a four year detour - before settling in Nazareth out of fear of Herod's successor.
That's a little odd, isn't it? Can we harmonize these two accounts? The key verse seems to be Luke 2:39:
When Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth.This verse seems to implicitly deny the return to Bethlehem and flight to Egypt, but my NIV Study Bible tells me that Luke simply decided not to record it. So the verse could be read:
When Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they [went back to Bethlehem, stayed there for close to two years, were visited by Magi, fled to Egypt and stayed another two years, then] returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth.This is a bit much for me, but those who need the Bible to be contradiction-free probably won't have difficulty with it. I think Luke would have to say something like "they did not return to Bethlehem, nor go to Egypt at any time, but went immediately Nazareth, where they lived until Jesus was grown" to sway those dead-set on inerrancy. It seems to me that such an explicit contradiction is unlikely to appear in any text, and if you were to interpret the texts of other religions so generously, you would find that a great many of them are also "inerrant" or "without contradictions".
Furthermore, if you insist that Luke has simply made a misleading omission here, it seems to me that you must allow for the possibility of other such omissions. This opens up all kinds of possibilities that a more straight-forward reading of the Bible seems to preclude, because anything that text does not explicitly deny could have happened. To me, this seems to defeat the purpose of having an inerrant scripture.
See also: Inconsistencies in the creation accounts
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2 comments:
I've always wondered what Christmas pageants would look like if we had only one of these two gospels.
Reading Matthew by itself, one would come to the conclusion that Jesus' parents lived in Bethlehem from before he was born until he was about two years old, before they fled to Egypt. The wise men visited him in a house (Matt 2:11), and Herod's order to kill all the infants suggests the time frame between his birth and the visit of the Magi.
Reading Luke by itself, one would get the impression that none of the politically important people noticed Jesus's birth. Luke does not mention either King Herod or the Magi. Yet the holy people at the Temple -- Simeon and Anna -- immediately recognized him.
I think each story has a valuable subtext that we can easily miss if we try to conflate the two or treat them as mere history.
Matthew points to Jesus' birth being a threat to the established order, even to the point of bringing non-Jews into the Kingdom.
In Luke, the birth story hints at what kind of Messiah Jesus will be: He was born to be a spiritual leader, not a political one.
I think both of these messages are true, regardless of whether we can reconstruct the actual historical details (which I don't think we can).
Some inerrantists claim that to deny the historical veracity of a Bible passage is to treat it as a fairy tale. I've found the opposite to be true: In downplaying the importance of history, we can open ourselves to the deeper meanings of the text. (And I think this is true even of those passages that are historical.)
I'd never noticed that. Very interesting.
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