Christmas is virtually upon us. I’ve decided to return to a few posts I’ve given in years past, lost in the archives here or there, of particular relevance to the season. This one continues a bit on the theme of the relation of our (only!) two birth narratives in the New Testament, reflecting on the significance of Jesus being born precisely to a *virgin* in Matthew and Luke. As it turns out, they see the significance differently.
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Occasionaly I have raised the question of why anyone should think that you have to believe in the Virgin Birth in order to be a Christian. The reality is, of course, that many Christians do not believe in it, but recognize that it is a story meant to convey an important theological point – a point that could be true whether or not the story happened – that Jesus was uniquely special in this world, not like us other humans, but in some sense the unique Son of God. Just as the moral of a fairy tale is valid (or not) independent of whether the tale happened, so too with stories like this in the Gospels, whether you choose to call them myths (in a non-derogatory sense), legends, tales, or simply “stories intending to convey a theological truth.”
It is interesting, and not often noted, that Matthew and Luke – the two Gospels (in fact, the two NT books altogether) that recount the story of the Virgin Birth – do so for different reasons and draw different conclusions from it. The stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 are very different from each other, and appear to contain down right discrepancies. I don’t actually teach this to my students. I instead give them an exercise. If you haven’t ever done this, you should try it. I have them list everything that happens, event by event, first in Matthew 1-2 and then in Luke 1-2; and then I have them compare their lists. What is similar? What is different? And are any of the differences actual discrepancies that cannot be reconciled?
The differences are striking, and in fact – as I’ve pointed out on the blog before – some things cannot be reconciled …
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