The Birth of Jesus

Only Matthew and Luke describe Jesus's birth. Mark and John have no infancy narrative, and Paul, writing earliest, mentions neither Bethlehem nor a virgin birth.

The familiar nativity scene combines the two: Matthew's magi and star with Luke's shepherds and manger. Read separately, the accounts differ on when the birth occurred, where the family lived beforehand, what happened afterward, and Jesus's genealogy.

The two accounts compared#

Matthew explains why the family ends up in Nazareth, which implies they were not from there. Luke explains why they were in Bethlehem, which implies the same in reverse.

The dating problem#

The two datings are separated by about ten years, and the interval is documented.

Josephus treats the census as the direct consequence of the annexation, which happened only after Archelaus was removed — ten years after Herod died.

There is a further difficulty with Luke's description. Roman censuses assessed property and were conducted where people owned it, not where distant ancestors had lived. No Roman census is known to have required travel to an ancestral town, and Judea under Herod was a client kingdom, not a Roman province subject to imperial census at all.

The massacre of the innocents#

Matthew 2:16 reports Herod ordering the killing of every male child under two in and around Bethlehem.

Bethlehem was a village of perhaps 300 to 1,000 people, so the number of male infants under two would have been roughly twenty. The silence is therefore less striking than it first appears — but Josephus records considerably smaller incidents from the same reign.

The episode closely parallels Exodus 1:22, where Pharaoh orders Hebrew infants killed and the future deliverer escapes. Matthew presents it as fulfilling Jeremiah 31:15.

Prophecy citations#

Matthew reads several passages as predictions. In their original contexts they are not.

The Isaiah case matters because the virgin birth depends on the Greek translation rather than the Hebrew text.

Common objections#

"Quirinius held an earlier post, or Luke means a census 'before' Quirinius"

Two harmonizations are offered. One proposes an earlier Syrian command for Quirinius around 6–4 BCE. The other reads the Greek prōtē in Luke 2:2 as "before" rather than "first," giving "this census was before Quirinius was governor."

Neither is impossible, and the grammatical reading has been defended by serious scholars.

The evidence against the earlier governorship is that the sequence of Syrian governors in this period is reasonably well documented and does not leave a gap for him. The Lapis Tiburtinus inscription, sometimes cited, does not name its subject.

The grammatical reading strains the Greek and creates a new problem: it makes Luke date the birth by an event that had not happened yet, which is an odd way to fix a date.

Luke also gives a second time marker — Luke 1:5 places the conception of John the Baptist "in the days of Herod, king of Judea" — so Luke's own account contains both datings.

"Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence for the massacre"

Correct as a general principle, and it has real force here given the small number of children involved.

It carries less weight against Josephus specifically. He devotes substantial space to Herod's cruelties, including the killing of his own family members, and had every reason to record another instance. Nicolaus of Damascus was at Herod's court.

The stronger consideration is not the silence but the narrative shape: infants killed by a tyrant, the future deliverer escaping, a return from Egypt, and an explicit "out of Egypt" citation. Matthew is constructing a Moses parallel, and the parallel is the reason the episode is there.

"The genealogies serve different purposes — one is Mary's line"

The usual harmonization: Matthew traces Joseph, Luke traces Mary.

Luke 3:23 names Joseph and continues with the standard patrilineal formula. Mary is not mentioned, and the reading requires supplying her.

The proposal first appears in the fifteenth century. Earlier attempts at harmonization, such as the levirate-marriage explanation Eusebius preserves from Africanus, took a different route — indicating this was not how the early church read the passage.

"Two accounts can be complementary rather than contradictory"

Often true, and it works for some of the differences. Matthew's magi and Luke's shepherds can both have visited; each writer selecting different material is ordinary.

It does not resolve the dating, which is a positive claim on both sides separated by ten years. It also does not resolve the sequence after the birth: Luke has the family completing the temple rites and returning to Nazareth, while Matthew has them fleeing to Egypt and staying until Herod died. Harmonizing requires inserting an unmentioned interval into Luke.

What the evidence shows#

Matthew and Luke give incompatible dates for the birth, separated by about a decade, and Josephus documents the intervening events. Luke's census also does not match how Roman censuses worked.

Neither the massacre nor the flight to Egypt is corroborated outside Matthew, and both fit a pattern the author is building — Jesus as a new Moses. The passages Matthew presents as prophecy refer, in context, to other things.

This does not establish that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem or that the accounts are wholly invented. Both writers may be working from earlier traditions.

What it does show is that the infancy narratives were composed as theological arguments in narrative form, decades after the events, and are not two independent reports of the same occasion. The genealogical and literary evidence on the Gospels generally is in The Gospels.