by The Great Christ Comet- Revealing the True Star of Bethlehem (retail) (epub)
2
“We Beheld
(It Is No Fable)”
The Testimony of Matthew’s Gospel
Before we examine closely the well-known account of the Star of Bethlehem (in the following chapter), it is important to introduce the source in which the story is found, the Gospel of Matthew.
Matthew’s Gospel is a beautifully written and structured theological narrative about Jesus’s life and ministry—particularly his words and deeds—and his death and resurrection. It is this Gospel that has given us the most familiar versions of the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes (“Blessed are . . . , for they shall be . . .”).
Authorship
Although the author of Matthew’s Gospel is technically anonymous, early church tradition (most notably the early second-century AD church father Papias) unanimously attributed it to Jesus’s disciple, the former tax collector, Matthew. The attribution seems reasonably secure: if Matthew did not pen the Gospel, it is difficult to imagine how it came to be associated with him. He was, after all, it would seem, a relatively obscure member of the early Christian movement.
Date
Matthew wrote his Gospel around the year AD 70, most likely shortly before or after that year. Certainly Matthew was noticeably interested in including sayings of Jesus that foretold the destruction of Jerusalem (which occurred at the hands of the Romans in AD 70) (Matt. 22:7; 24:15). That he did not write much before AD 70 is suggested by Matthew’s heavy use of Mark’s Gospel, which is probably dated to the mid-60s AD, during Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome. Accordingly, it seems that Matthew penned his Gospel about three or four decades after Jesus’s ministry in Galilee and Judea and about seven or eight decades after Jesus’s birth.
Sources
The disciple made extensive use of sources, not just Mark’s Gospel (which, according to the early church fathers, consists of traditions proclaimed by the apostle Peter), but other materials too, some of which were also used by Luke and others of which were not. With respect to chapters 1–2, Matthew evidently was drawing largely upon stories preserved by the family of Jesus, most naturally Mary, and subsequently safeguarded by the apostles.
Jewish Nature
The Gospel is strongly Jewish in nature, emphasizing that Jesus was the son of David, the Messiah who fulfilled the Hebrew Scriptures and was engaged in ministry to the “lost sheep” of Israel (Matt. 10:6; 15:24). Matthew wrote as a Christian Jew strongly critical of his fellow Jews who had rejected Jesus as their Messiah.
Key Emphases
The Gentiles
At the same time, Matthew’s Gospel emphasizes that the invitation to enjoy the salvation secured by the Messiah has been extended to the Gentiles. The Gospel climaxes with Jesus sending the disciples to preach the good news to all the nations (Matt. 28:18–20). It also records Jesus’s healing of a Roman centurion’s servant (8:5–13) and the exorcism-at-a-distance of a Gentile woman’s demonized daughter (15:21–28). Matthew’s mention of Jesus’s high praise of this soldier and woman is striking. The Gospel’s inclusion of the story of the Magi’s journey to see the baby Messiah fits with this editorial emphasis.
Fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures
Matthew emphasizes that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures. Not only does his Gospel associate Jesus with Abraham and David by means of the genealogy (Matt. 1:1–17), but it also portrays Jesus as reenacting the exodus (2:15), and presents him in terms of the temple (12:6), Israel in the wilderness (4:1–11), Moses (2:20; 5:21–22), David (12:3–5), Solomon (12:42), and Jonah (12:40–41). More importantly for our purposes, Matthew commonly claims that particular Old Testament texts have been fulfilled. The Gospel often uses one somewhat formulaic phrase: “This took place to fulfill what was spoken. . . .” We see this in Matthew 1:22–23, which declares that Mary’s conception of the Messiah through the intervention of the Holy Spirit occurred in fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14:
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
“Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”
(which means, God with us).
But the Gospel also introduces Old Testament quotations in other ways. For example, when the Magi visit Jerusalem, seeking the King of the Jews, Herod the Great inquires of the chief priests and scribes concerning the location of the Messiah’s birth. Their answer becomes the means by which Matthew makes the point that Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem was a direct fulfillment of an oracle by the prophet Micah, in Micah 5:2.
Genre
One key concern for those engaged in the quest for the historical Star is the genre of Matthew and the attendant matter of the Gospel’s historical reliability.
The Gospels are biographies of Jesus. In that the Gospels are written about a single individual, this may seem to be stating the obvious. And so it was, until the early twentieth century. At that time many Bible scholars abandoned this approach in favor of the view that the Gospels were more like popular folk literature based on oral traditions, and so had little historical value as regards the life of the historical Jesus. However, the works of David Aune1 and Richard Burridge2 in the last three decades of the twentieth century caused most New Testament scholars to return to the view that the Gospels are biographies—not modern biographies, but ancient Greco-Roman biographies or bioi, like Plutarch’s Lives.3 We may speak of the Gospels as historical biographies with theological agenda.
Burridge pointed out that, with respect to their opening, size, narrow central focus, and essential chronological structure; coverage of ancestry, great deeds, virtues, and death; and respectful tone, emphasis on the final years, continuous prose narrative, combination of different subgenres, use of different sources, display of the subject’s character, apologetic and polemical nature, and goal of preserving the memory of the subject, the Gospels are all strongly reminiscent of ancient bioi.4 The similarity is strongest between the Gospels and the biographies from the same general period, like those of Plutarch (late first century AD) and Suetonius (early second century AD).5
Ancient Greco-Roman biographies, like ancient Greco-Roman histories6 and indeed modern biographies and histories, could vary in their historical reliability.7 However, “Biographies were normally essentially historical works.”8 While ancient biographies tended to be one-sided in their assessment of their subjects, they were “still firmly rooted in historical fact rather than literary fiction. Thus, while the Evangelists clearly had an important theological agenda, the very fact that they chose to adapt Greco-Roman biographical conventions to tell the story of Jesus indicates that they were centrally concerned to communicate what they thought really happened.”9
Biographies written about subjects who lived in the recent past, relative to the time of writing (e.g., those by Tacitus and Suetonius), especially those penned in the early empire, were generally marked by a greater concern for factual accuracy.10 In such cases, biographers were expected to reject implausibilities and to seek to write what was true. The Gospels, penned within fifty years or so of Jesus’s ministry, fall into this category.
That the Gospel writers were determined to produce an accurate account of Jesus’s life is especially clear in the opening of one of them, the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1:1–4). This prologue is very much in the mold of Thucydides, Polybius, and Josephus. Luke clearly claims to be writing history conforming to the highest standards of Greco-Roman historiography: he depended on eyewitnesses, personally investigated everything from the beginning, and strove for historical accuracy. The very nature of early Christianity, founded on the historical claim that Jesus rose from the dead, explains why the Gospel writers were so committed to restricting themselves to traditions that they were convinced were historically accurate.
Most Biblical scholars today would agree that the Gospel writers believed that what they were writing was historically accurate and worthy of acceptance, and that the first readers of these liter
ary works would have approached them with the expectation that they were describing what had actually taken place in history.11
The production of literary Gospels was obviously intended to ensure that the testimony of the eyewitnesses was not lost to the Christian movement or susceptible to contamination in the aftermath of the disciples’ deaths.
That the Gospels are Greco-Roman biographies that present the testimony of the authorized eyewitnesses who preserved the Jesus tradition has recently been powerfully argued by Richard Bauckham in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. He writes, “The kind of historiography they are is testimony,” which, he goes on to say, is “a form of human utterance that . . . asks to be trusted.”12 The natural question to ask is whether the traditions recorded by the Gospel writers merit this trust. In other words, were the writers of the Gospels correct in their claim that what they wrote was historically accurate?
Historical Reliability
Contrary to what many have claimed, we have every reason to believe that the stories about and sayings of Jesus that we find in the Gospels were stably transmitted and not embellished or corrupted over the decades. The key factor is that, up until the time when the Gospels were written, the traditions were preserved and guarded by a circle of eyewitnesses,13 chief among whom were the apostles.14 That the traditions were passed on faithfully, without contamination or innovation, is strongly suggested by the fact that the Jesus tradition preserved in the Gospels is not what we would have expected had it been shaped in the early decades of the Christian movement. For example, it is remarkable that in the Gospels there is no saying attributed to Jesus regarding circumcision, and that the main title employed by Jesus for himself is “Son of Man,” which was not popular among the first Christians. Writing in AD 50–54, Paul cites from the Jesus tradition in letters to his churches (1 Thess. 4:15–17a; 1 Corinthians 7, 11–12, 15), revealing that by that time he had in his possession a written collection of Jesus material that he wholeheartedly trusted. That the stories about and teachings of Jesus were quickly committed to writing is hardly surprising in view of the fact that Jesus’s followers esteemed him as Messiah and Lord and would obviously therefore have been eager to conserve and safeguard what they knew and remembered about him.
Bauckham draws on psychology of memory research to assess whether the Gospel traditions were the kind that would tend to be accurately preserved in the memories of the eyewitnesses.15 He points out that the stories were related to unusual, indeed often unique, events, and that they were vivid and extraordinarily consequential for the eyewitnesses, and that they would have been profoundly emotional for them and frequently rehearsed by them, beginning very shortly after the events.16 On this basis, he concludes that “the memories of eyewitnesses of the history of Jesus score highly by the criteria for likely reliability that have been established by the psychological study of recollective memory.”17
An Appropriate Approach to the Gospel of Matthew
What, then, should be our attitude to the testimony of the Gospels? Bauckham points out that “Trusting testimony is indispensable to historiography. This trust need not be blind faith. In the ‘critical realist’ historian’s reception and use of testimony there is a dialectic of trust and critical assessment. . . . For most purposes, testimony is all we have.”18 The reader is therefore put in the position of having to judge whether to trust or distrust the testimony offered by the eyewitnesses. The correct way to read the Gospels as Greco-Roman biographies is therefore to approach them not with a radically suspicious mind-set that assumes that every story or saying is unreliable unless proven otherwise, but rather to approach them with a sensitivity to their historiographical claim to be testimonies, with an appropriate level of trust in the credibility of the witnesses. The judgment of whether particular testimonies are to be trusted or not must be based on “internal consistency and coherence, and consistency and coherence with whatever other relevant historical evidence we have and whatever else we know about the historical context.”19
Many stumble over the extraordinary nature of the events described in the Gospels. Many stories in the Gospels are rejected as unhistorical by critics because they have exceptional elements in them. However, as Bauckham writes, “We must beware of a historical methodology that prejudices inquiry against exceptionality in history and is biased toward the leveling down of the extraordinary to the ordinary.”20 As for the charge that the fact that those making such extraordinary claims were biased undermines their credibility, in truth their bias should engender confidence in their testimony:
The testimony of involved participants is especially valuable in the case of exceptional events. . . . The degree of commitment to their testimony such witnesses usually have should not in itself arouse our suspicions; in more ordinary cases we usually take such commitment as a reason for taking especially seriously what a witness has to say. It is by no means irrational to take the risk of crediting the testimony of involved and committed participants to the extraordinary and the exceptional in history.21
All in all, we should therefore approach the Gospel narratives, including Matthew, with due sympathy and respect, aware of their theological agenda but not disregarding their implicit claim to be historically trustworthy. The testimony presented is simultaneously both theological and historical. This indeed is one major aspect of their magnificence—theology and history do not vie against but rather complement each other.22 For example, Matthew wrote to demonstrate that Jesus was the messianic King promised by the Prophets, and to unveil the nature of the kingdom that he inaugurated during his ministry. Matthew accomplished this not by freely mixing the unhistorical with the historical, but by basing his narrative on historically reliable records and reports.
3
“They Looked Up and Saw a Star”
The Story of the Star
We turn now to devote our attention to Matthew’s account of the Magi and the Star, which is found in Matthew 2:1–18.
The Historical Reliability of Matthew’s Account of the Star
Matthew’s Belief
Can we trust Matthew’s narrative concerning the Star, which purports to document an event that occurred some three decades before Jesus began his ministry? Clearly, Matthew believed that his source for this episode was reliable, and he was convinced that the account was historically accurate.1 The very fact that he includes the episode and suggests that what happened fulfilled the Scriptures demonstrates this.
Historical Plausibility
But was Matthew right to judge that the story was historically accurate? There are a number of elements in the story that are striking for their historical plausibility.
For one thing, we know from Josephus that Herod the Great in his final years was extraordinarily cruel and capable of the most terrible atrocities.2 Therefore the Massacre of the Innocents recorded by Matthew in this passage fits perfectly into the framework of the historical period.
Second, what the Magi did in undertaking a long journey westward to greet a king is not implausible, but, as we shall see, is very similar to what other magi did about seven decades later, in the time of Nero.
Third, most devout Jews and Christians despised astrologers and would not normally have been inclined to trust their testimony. Therefore you would not have expected someone fabricating a nativity narrative to choose astrologers as among the first to welcome the newborn Messiah into the world. A fabricator would most likely have stayed away from any elements that seemed theologically suspect and risked offending the intended readership.
Fourth, the fact that the Star is said to have first appeared at least a year before the Massacre of the Innocents, and that Herod determined the age of the infants to be killed based on this information, speaks strongly for historicity, since it is difficult to explain otherwise.3
“The main outline of the story” is, as W. C. Allen put it, “noteworthy for its historical probability.”4
In addition, key features of th
e Matthean account are corroborated by another first-century writer, Luke, who makes much of his credentials as a historian (Luke 1:1–4). In particular, Luke authenticates Jesus’s birth to Mary in Bethlehem (2:1–7) and the unusual circumstances surrounding his conception (2:26–38). Luke may also quietly attest to the historicity of the Star (1:78–79).
Moreover, if the story of the Star is not rooted in history, then in what is it rooted? No plausible alternative explanation of the story’s origin has ever been offered.5
Furthermore, recent psychology of memory research supports the claim of Matthew 2 to be considered historical. A natural source for much of Matthew 2 is the family of Jesus, in particular Mary. Joseph was probably deceased by the time Jesus began his ministry, whereas Mary lived to witness Jesus’s crucifixion and evidently for some considerable time afterwards, looked after by John (John 19:25–27). It would have been surprising if the early Christians, including Matthew, did not inquire of her concerning the circumstances of Jesus’s conception and birth. Therefore, when we read the account of the Magi and the Star in Matthew 2, we are almost certainly coming into close contact with the precious memories of the historical Mary. Consequently, as we read the story, we are put in the position of having to respond to her indirect testimony about the extraordinary events that surrounded the birth of Jesus. According to recent studies in the psychology of memory to which we have already referred,6 the Magi’s visit was for Mary the kind of event that tends to be remembered accurately by eyewitnesses. It was a very memorable and vivid unique occasion, an important and deeply emotional moment, relating to the birth of her special eldest son, and it would undoubtedly have been something she would have frequently rehearsed mentally and orally, beginning immediately afterwards and continuing on until her death. Luke appears to confirm that Mary did indeed frequently mentally rehearse unusual events relating to Jesus: speaking of what happened in the wake of Passover when Jesus was twelve years old, Luke says that Mary “treasured up all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51).
