The Birth of Jesus

What is clearer is that the visit of the Magi came to be seen as a fulfillment of Psalm 72. "The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts," reads the Scripture. "Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him." There is no historical evidence of such a visit, but the symbolic significance is obvious: even as a baby, Jesus is inverting the very order of things, with earthly potentates bowing before a child. Matthew's detail about the specific gifts comes from Isaiah: "... all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the Lord."

To resolve the problem of Jesus' connection with both Bethlehem and Nazareth, Matthew portrays Mary and Joseph as residents of Bethlehem who were later forced to move north to Nazareth. With a keen dramatic sense, he also adds two stories evoking the memory of God's deliverance of his people from slavery in Egypt. The King of Judea, Herod, learns of the birth of this alleged messiah from the wise men, whom he asks to go find the child and return to him with the particulars. In a dream, God tells the Magi not to make their report, and then appears to Joseph. "Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt... for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him." Enraged and jealous, Herod orders a massacre of all the male children in Bethlehem--thus connecting Jesus' birth with the first Passover, when God spared Israel's sons from the same bloody decree by Pharaoh. (History records no such Herodian slaughter, though Herod was an undeniably cruel ruler.)

Luke does not mention a journey to Egypt, nor is there any other New Testament allusion to such an important event in the life of the young Jesus. Once Matthew has started this story, though, he makes the most of it, writing that Joseph's mission was undertaken "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son." (The prophet was Hosea.) The Nazareth question is then resolved rather neatly, for Matthew has Joseph and Mary move to Galilee on their return from Egypt.

Luke's conundrum is just the opposite of Matthew's: how to get Mary and Joseph, who in his Gospel were living in Nazareth in the north, down to Bethlehem in the south. Summoning the weapons of history, apparently pinpointing time, place and circumstance with epic eloquence, Luke writes: "And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph went up also from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child."

Yet almost nothing in Luke's story stands up to close historical scrutiny; Brown finds it "dubious on almost every score." Augustus conducted no global census, and no more local one makes sense in Luke's time frame. Setting Jesus' birth at a moment when the princes of this world are exerting temporal power over the people is a deft device, though, for the theological point of Jesus' arrival is that anyone who chooses to believe in him will ultimately be subject only to God. Evoking the prophet Joel in the Book of Acts, Peter says that "it shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved," and there is nothing any mortal emperor or governor can do to foreclose the promise of the kingdom Jesus said he was offering.

The power of the Nativity message--that a helpless child is in fact a heavenly king--lies in its consistent pattern of reversal, of making the weak strong, the humble mighty. The stable, the manger and the swaddling of Jesus are such theological touches. Since Matthew seems to assume that Mary and Joseph lived at Bethlehem, he is silent on these familiar details; it is Luke, the writer who put them on the road to answer the census, who adds the inn, the manger and the swaddling. The creche scene strikes three Old Testament notes. The inn could be traced to Jeremiah, who asks of the Savior: "Why are you like an alien in the land, like a traveler who stays in lodgings?" The manger's roots may lie in the very beginning of Isaiah, when he writes: "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider." And Mary's tender care of the baby is similar to a remark of Solomon's in the Book of Wisdom: "I was carefully swaddled and nursed, for no king has any other way to begin at birth."