Birth narratives

• Only two Gospels, Matthew & Luke, contain birth narratives.
• Matthew's focus is on Joseph and includes accounts of the Magi, the slaughter of infants and the flight to Egypt.
• Luke focuses on Mary and includes the accounts of John the Baptist’s birth, the shepherds, the inn/manger and three poems/songs of Mary, Zechariah and Simeon.
• The accounts in Matthew and Luke are similar in that they approach Jesus as a saviour who was born during the reign of Herod as a fulfilment of prophecy.
• There are many differences between these two accounts in terms of characters, locations and perspectives.
• Luke focuses heavily on the birth of John the Baptist, and later in the Gospel clarifies how John the Baptist was a forerunner to Jesus.
• Matthew focuses on Jesus’ Jewish ancestry and on him as a fulfilment of Israel’s hopes.
• One event in Matthew that could potentially have been widely known, the slaughter of infants, is not mentioned in Luke.
• Redaction criticism is the science of examining how source material has been edited (redacted) by editors to reflect their point of view.
• When we report a common story, it will inevitably reflect something of our concerns, pet issues and biases.
• Redaction critics of the birth narratives suppose that both Matthew and Luke shared a common story, but told it in ways that reflected their theological concerns and audiences.
• Redaction critics note the many references to the Hebrew scriptures in Matthew’s account inferring he was a Jewish believer writing for Jews who needed to be convinced that Jesus was the fulfilment of Jewish prophecy.
• By contrast, Luke wrote for a non-Jewish audience, thus emphasizing Jesus as a universal saviour (‘a light to lighten the gentiles’).
• The doctrine of the incarnation includes the concept of the ‘hypostatic union’: Jesus was a union of human and divine, fully God and fully human.
• One way of understanding incarnation is the substantial presence model which says that Jesus possessed all the attributes of God – that is he was omniscient, omnipotent, etc at every moment.
• A different way of understanding the incarnation is the kenotic model (Greek for ‘emptying’); in being born, Jesus surrendered some of these attributes.
• The birth narratives could be seen as kenotic in terms of the fragility of Jesus or the danger he faced.
• Or, as reflecting the ‘substantial presence’ model (the miraculous good fortune around the birth of Jesus).