In the traditional nativity story we all have in our heads, the accounts in Matthew and Luke (there are none in Mark or John) are combined. Each is seen as relating parts of the whole, and we need to add them together to form the story we celebrate every Christmas. We tend also to include things not in the Gospels at all, but derived from later traditions: the ox and ass (borrowed from Isaiah 1:3), the donkey that Mary rode on and the magi (not even numbered in the Bible) as three kings called Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar.
Yet in the Church nowadays, our Mass lectionaries discourage mixing elements from different Gospels together. They invite us instead to read each Gospel on its own terms. That is why we now have years of Matthew, Luke and Mark, with each Gospel read in order. The lectionary recognises that the story of the Lord’s life, teaching, passion and resurrection is told distinctively by each evangelist. It doesn’t work with a “Gospel-harmony”, as a combined account is traditionally known. St Augustine (in his De Consensu Evangelistarum, “On the Agreement of the Gospel-writers”) already recognised that the Gospels genuinely do differ, though he insisted that all of them still proclaim the essentials. The one Gospel, in the sense of the saving truth, shines through the differing accounts.
The evangelists don’t give us a heap of unsorted individual facts, which we are meant to combine into our own composite version of the story. That would amount to a fifth Gospel, one not corresponding with any of the existing four. No, each Gospel gives us a coherent but distinctive account of “the things concerning Jesus”. The four accounts, though manifestly about the same person, are not identical – rather as in four good biographies we would recognise the subject well enough in all, but would accept variation in the details.
It is worth reading the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke each on its own terms. In Matthew, for example, not only are there no shepherds, there is not even an annunciation to Mary. Instead, there is a revelation in a dream to Joseph, in which an angel explains that his fiancée, though still a virgin, has conceived. Nothing is said of a journey to Bethlehem. We get the impression that Mary and Joseph probably live in Bethlehem, in Judaea, already. For after the flight into Egypt, they return to the Holy Land, but settle in Nazareth because living in Judaea, as they evidently intended, would be dangerous. This doesn’t suggest that Nazareth had been their home before.
It is Luke who gives us the annunciation, the visitation, Nazareth as the family home from the beginning, the journey to Bethlehem for the census, the shepherds, and much else that we know from our traditional Christmas story. But he doesn’t mention the wise men or the flight into Egypt. And it is only Luke who tells us there was no room in the inn, resulting in the Lord’s birth in a manger. In Matthew, by contrast, the wise men visit the baby “in the house” – presumably Mary and Joseph’s own house. This again implies that they were domiciled in Bethlehem, rather than visitors to it.
There may be ways of reconciling these divergences between the two Gospels, but on the face of it they differ on almost every point of detail. Except for one. Matthew and Luke both record that Jesus’ mother was a virgin. Outside – and even sometimes inside – Christian circles, this is widely regarded as a myth. The usual theory is that it was fabricated on the strength of a misunderstanding of Isaiah 7:14. In the original Hebrew this says: “A young women is pregnant”. But the Greek translation, as quoted in Matthew 1:23, renders it: “A virgin shall conceive”. It’s argued that if Matthew hadn’t known the Old Testament in Greek, the idea of Jesus being born of a virgin would never have arisen.
But this text of Isaiah wasn’t regarded as a prediction of the birth of the Messiah in pre-Christian Judaism. No one was looking for it to be “fulfilled”. So it can surely only have been noticed by someone who already believed that Jesus had been born of a virgin. Like many of the prophecies that Matthew sees as coming true in Jesus, it was recognised as such only with hindsight, on the basis of what Jesus had turned out to be like. To put it another way, the nature of Jesus’ conception and birth was read into the book of Isaiah, or (to put it in more traditional terms) discovered to be in the book. But in that case it can’t also have been read out of it. Christians must have already believed it before the writing of Matthew, and it’s hard to see why anyone would have invented such a counter-intuitive idea. This doesn’t prove that the doctrine is true, but it strongly suggests that there was known to have been something strange about Jesus’ birth, and that from an early date this was explained in miraculous terms. The Old Testament was trawled to find texts that might show God had predicted it. Even those who are understandably sceptical about a virginal conception can’t rely on this argument about the text in Isaiah, common as it has long been.
The traditional nativity story has been woven together from the accounts in Matthew and Luke, and then embroidered down the ages with many attractive but probably unhistorical additions, often taken from early or even medieval texts. But the virginal conception of Jesus is not among the embroideries. It is a very early tradition, which must precede the writing of the Gospels, and it was as surprising to the first Christians as it is to us. Whether you believe in it or not, it can’t be dismissed casually as a mere invention.
Dr John Barton’s The Word: On the Translation of the Bible (Allen Lane/Penguin, £25) is out now
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