Here now is the fifth of my twelve favorite Christmas posts of years gone by, in our celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

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Yesterday’s blog was about the account of Jesus’ birth in Luke; today I talk about Matthew. Even a casual reading shows that these are two very different accounts. Matthew has nothing about the birth of John the Baptist, the Annunciation, the census, the trip to Bethlehem, the shepherds, the presentation in the Temple. Matthew’s version, as a result, is much shorter. Most of his stories are found only in his account. And some of the differences from Luke appear to involve downright discrepancies, as I will try to show in another post.

For now: Matthew’s version. Matthew begins with a genealogy of Jesus. Luke also has a genealogy, but it is given after Jesus is baptized in ch. 3, instead of where you would expect it, at his birth in ch. 1. I’ll explain my view of that in a later post. After the genealogy of Matthew in which Jesus is traced to David, the greatest king of Israel, and to Abraham, the father of Israel, we move right to the birth story.

Mary has conceived by the Holy Spirit; Joseph wants to divorce her quietly; he learns from an angel in a dream that she has conceived by the Holy Spirit, and that it has all been in order to fulfill the prophecy of Isa. 7:14, which Matthew quotes as saying “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.” They don’t actually call him Emmanuel, of course (a Hebrew term that means “God is with us”) but Jesus (which means “salvation.”)

All of that is in ch. 1.   Ch. 2 is mainly about the coming of the wise men and what happens in their wake.  The wise men have come from the east, following a star, to find the place where the new King of the Jews has been born so they can worship him.  Why anyone would want to worship a new Jewish king is never explained (did people worship Solomon?  Or Herod?).  Presumably the reader is to assume that it is “that” Jewish King, the Messiah, who will save people not from foreign oppressors but from their sin, as the angel himself points out earlier.  In any event, the wise men are led to Jerusalem and the star apparently stops or disappears.  So they make inquiries, word gets to the king Herod, he asks the jewish scholars where the messiah is to be born, they tell him Bethlehem – since so it is predicted in Scripture — he tells the wise men, and asks them to come back to tell him when they learn the child’s whereabouts, and lo and behold, the star reappears and leads them to Bethlehem and stops “over the place” where the child is.   The child is in a house (v. 11).   The wise men worship him with three gifts of gold frankincense and myrrh (we’re not told that there were three wise men, only that they had three gifts).  They then are warned in a dream not to return to Herod who wants to kill the child, so they go another way.

Herod realizes he’s been duped and sends out the troops to kill all the boys two years and younger in Bethlehem, the so-called “Slaughter of the Innocents,” said again to fulfill Scripture.   But Joseph had been warned in a dream and fled before the troops came, taking the child and his mother to Egypt.  They stay in Egypt until Herod dies.  But when they come back to the land, they are  unable to settle again in Judea, because Herod’s son Archelaus is ruling there, and he’s worse even than his father had been.  So they resettle in the north, in Nazareth, to fulfill the Scripture that said he would ba a Nazarene.

This is a terrifically interesting passage in its own right, a powerful and moving story.   But historically it is absolutely riddled with problems, as I’ll point out in the next post.  Here I simply want to make a simple point.  Suppose you were to read Matthew, and Matthew was the only Gospel you had ever read, and this is the only version of Jesus’ birth you had ever heard, so that you were not assuming that its story had to be filled out by some other account of these events (e.g., those of Luke or of the Christmas pageant you saw last night), and suppose you asked yourself, according to this account, what is Joseph and Mary’s home town?

The answer should be obvious.  Their hometown, for this account, is Bethlehem.  That’s where they’re from.  There is no word here about them coming from somewhere else.   Jesus is born, and it is in Bethlehem.  The live in a “house” there – as the wise men discovered.  Why would they be living in a house if they were just visiting for a weekend to register for a census?   Because they aren’t registering for a census.  They live there.

Further evidence: when Joseph brings the family back from Egypt, where is it he first plans to go?  Judea (the country Bethlehem was in), not Galilee (where Nazareth was).  The only reason he can’t return “home” is because of the wicked new ruler Archelaus.  So he has to move the family.  The original home was Bethlehem, but Jesus ends up being raised in Nazareth.

Note also, for a third piece of evidence, the wise men do not appear to come the night Jesus was born, as commonly imagined.  The star evidently appeared at Jesus’ birth, and it takes the wise men a long time to get there.  Evidence: when Herod tells his troops to slaughter the innocent boys, he instructs them to kill every boy 2 years and under.  If the child was born yesterday, there would be no need to kill the toddlers, only the newborns, or say any child under a month just to be sure.  This shows that for this story, the wise men came many months, or well over a year, after Jesus was born.  And where do they find him?   In Bethlehem.   In his house.  No way around it, I think.  Matthew assumes that Joseph and Mary originally lived in Bethlehem, and they moved to Nazareth only because they had to escape the wrath of the Judean kings.