The Birth of Jesus: The Evolution of Jesus in the Infancy Narratives (original) (raw)
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The New Testament does not specify when Jesus was born, and the currently accepted year is unlikely to be correct. Only two gospels --Matthew and Luke-- mention Jesus' birth. Being driven primarily by theological considerations rather than by a concern with historical accuracy, the infancy narratives contained in these two gospels not only contradict one another in almost every detail; they also run counter to logic and are completely unsupported by the historical evidence.
The Virgin Birth is unknown to Paul. The earliest Christian writings, Paul's Epistles, do not mention it. Jesus was of the seed of David according to the flesh (Rom 1:3), and Jesus was born of a woman under the law (Gal 4:4). By any natural standard, Jesus was illigitimate—her husband did not impregnate Mary so Jesus was not the son of her husband. He was therefore not a son of David as the genealogies seek to show. Nor was Jesus a son of David because he himself, according to the synoptic gospels, denied it. If Paul was right in saying, “Christ was descended from David according to the flesh”, Christians have to conclude he meant Mary’s flesh so as not deny the miraculous birth. Then the genealogies of Joseph are spurious and superfluous. Joseph is unnecessary to the story, and Mark did not mention him at all. But Christians like the idea of a Davidic descent of Jesus, and believe it, even though God as the Son denied it. The virgin birth narratives spoiled the purpose of the genealogies, so must have been needed. It was because Jesus had been called Ben Pandera, Son of the Panther, a black man. A virgin (Greek, parthenos) birth explained the rumour that Jesus was a bastard. Pandera was a slur on the word parthenos, Christians said. But Pagan demi-gods were often sons of virgins, so the pun is an unlikely invention of Pagans, though not the opposite. Even normal birth by the impure route was too ignominious for the Christian Son. It had to be spotless, or immaculate, and the mother had to remain a virgin. So, Christians quickly took Mary to be as intact as a pious nun, a perpetual virgin like Pagan goddesses, even after Jesus had been born. Yet Luke describes Jesus as Mary’s first-born, and all the gospels mention brothers of Jesus and sisters too.
The infancy narratives of the canonical Gospels, found only in Matthew and Luke, relate the stories of Jesus' birth (Luke also narrates the birth of John the Baptist). With regard to Jesus' birth, Matthew and Luke's renderings differ from each other on nearly every detail, save for a few points of agreement. These points are: Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, the virginal conception, the identity of Jesus' parents as Mary and Joseph, and the place of Jesus' rearing/home town as Nazareth. 1 The narratives present more of a theological interpretation than they do historical information. 2 They function as prologues to the main Gospels of Matthew and Luke. 3 The main theological point that both evangelists present in their infancy narratives -as relates to Jesus since he is the focus -run throughout the rest of their Gospels: Jesus was divine, and, the purpose of his life was to offer salvation to Israel and all humanity. 4 It is estimated that Matthew's Gospel was written sometime between AD 80 and 90 (plus or minus a decade in either direction), and Luke's Gospel was written circa AD 85, with a five to ten year window in both directions. 5
Jesus's Birth Story in the Talmud and New Testament Writings
The way Jesus’s birth story is depicted in the Jewish and Christian traditions undoubtedly impacts the historical and theological significance of Jesus in each of the religions’ perspective. In Christianity, Jesus, born of virgin conception is true Messiah of Davidic descent. In Judaism, Jesus, born out of wedlock to a promiscuous mother was an illegitimate Jew. Schafer’s ‘historical-contextual’ approach (2007) identified the Talmudic texts as being accounts of what caught the attention of the rabbis in their retelling of the New Testament accounts. He argued that “they [we]re literary answers to a literary text, the New Testament, given under very concrete historical circumstances.” Viewing the Talmudic material as purely a literary response to a literary text fails to take into consideration the complex processes underlying the origins of the tradition let alone account for the diversity of the Jewish perceptions of Jesus, before, during and after the New Testament writings. The study applies a literary historical analysis in conjunction with the historical-contextual approach to investigate the origins of the rabbinic and New Testament portrayals of Jesus’s conception to give a more accurate understanding of both texts. The main claim of the study is: the Talmudic representation of Jesus’s virginal conception could not have been a literary response to a literary text. Rather, the Talmudic picture of Jesus takes its origin as a pre-Gospel narrative that continued and spread in the Roman context gradually evolving with the changing nature of Jewish-Christian relations in the formative centuries of both religions to culminate into the polemical tract of the Toledot Yeshu between the fourth and seventh centuries C.E.
"'I Have Been Born Among You': Jesus, Jews, and Christians in the Second Century"
Wisdom Poured Out Like Water: Studies on Jewish and Christian Antiquity in Honor of Gabriele Boccaccini. Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies 38. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018., 2018
Recent analysis has attempted to locate the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT) in a context of developing Christian thought about Jesus’ childhood, and has suggested that the author(s) imitated a popular children’s stories genre of late antiquity. The function of this genre, when applied to the infancy of Jesus, is to embellish the status of Jesus in terms of his power, wisdom, and authority. What appears to be an earlier strand of tradition in IGT, however, suggests an ideological stance that is much less complimentary of Jesus and raises a number of questions about its original context and purpose.
35. “I Have Been Born Among You”: Jesus, Jews, and Christians in the Second Century
Wisdom Poured Out Like Water, 2018
Recent analysis has attempted to locate the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT) in a context of developing Christian thought about Jesus' childhood, and has suggested that the author(s) imitated a popular children's stories genre of late antiquity. The function of this genre, when applied to the infancy of Jesus, is to embellish the status of Jesus in terms of his power, wisdom, and authority. What appears to be an earlier strand of tradition in IGT, however, suggests an ideological stance that is much less complimentary of Jesus and raises a number of questions about its original context and purpose. Research on IGT provides us with a variety of ways of reading this document. Reidar Aasgaard has argued that IGT fits the popular childhood stories genre in antiquity and late antiquity.1 The problem, as Aasgaard admits, is that very little research has been done on childhood stories in this period, and his argument that IGT was written for children in rural village contexts, while plausible, is not entirely convincing. Ronald Hock has suggested that the author(s) of IGT possibly imitated the infancy aspects of biographies of important figures in antiquity. Hock argues that these biographies dealt with the character of ancient figures, "and that character was assumed to have been fixed from birth."2 Hock also argues that comparing