Advent to Candlemas: The History of the Gospel Narratives of the Incarnation, Nativity and Epiphany.

_{From the richness of his life,}

_{all of us have received endless kindness:}

_{God showed us what his service meant through Moses;}

_{he made his love real to us through Jesus.}

_{Nobody has ever seen God himself;}

_{the beloved son,}

_{who knows his Father’s secret thoughts,}

_{has made him plain.}

While the key title, the ‘Logos’ does not recur outside the prologue, the predicates of the Logos in it – life, light, flesh, glory, only-begotten (Son) – provide principal terms for the portrayal of Jesus in the rest of the Gospel. The two divisions of the Gospel, at ch’s 2-12 and ch’s 13-17, may be said to be explications of two statements in the prologue, He came to his own home, and his own people received him not and But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become the children of God (1: 11-12). In this way, the prologue has to be seen as an ‘overture’, which in ‘pregnant’ language places the works and words of Jesus in their widest cosmic setting as the revelation in action of the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son, between God and the creative Word. The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) produced a ‘harmonised’ version of the Gospels which emphasised this in his version of verses 13-14:

“_{Those who believed that life lies in the understanding became no longer sons of the flesh, but sons of understanding.}

“_{And the understanding of life, in the person of Jesus Christ, manifested itself in the flesh, and we understood his meaning to be that son of understanding, man in the flesh, of one nature with the Father the source of life, is such as the Father, the source of life.”}

Tolstoy’s summary of the nativity stories in the Gospel of Matthew (1: 18-25) is, by contrast, brief and to the point:

“_{The birth of Jesus Christ was thus:}

“_{His mother Mary was engaged to Joseph. But before they began to live as man and wife it appeared that Mary was pregnant. Joseph however was a good man and did not wish to shame her: he took her as his wife and had no relations with her till she had given birth to her first son and had named him Jesus.”}

Tolstoy makes no further reference to the nativity stories. He was mainly concerned, in his interpretation of the gospels, to lay emphasis on the teachings of Jesus, which are set out in the discursive form of John’s Gospel. It is perhaps surprising, however, given his radical view of Jesus’ mission and teaching in his 1882 Gospel in Brief: Announcement of Welfare by Jesus Christ the Son of God, that he also omitted Mary’s Song of Praise from Luke’s Gospel (1: 46-56), given during her three-month stay with her cousin Elizabeth in the foothills of Judaea:

_{He has stretched out his mighty arm,}

_{and scattered the proud with all their plans.}

_{He has brought down mighty}

_{kings from their thrones,}

_{and lifted up the lowly.}

_{He has filled the hungry with good things,}

_{and sent the rich away with empty hands.}

The ‘Synoptic’ Evangelists – Biographers of Jesus?:

Virtually all the material in the first three ‘synoptic’ gospels reached the writers or their sources in the form of short, separate, self-contained stories or pericopes. In reading the Gospels we must always be aware of the different practical aims which controlled the writers’ choice and arrangement of their material. This is why the gospel writers need to be regarded as evangelists, not as chroniclers or historians. Those who were concerned to preserve the ‘pericopes’ in the early church were not interested in purely picturesque, personal detail. What is absent from them must also be absent from the completed Gospels, and that means that the Gospels offered no basis for a ‘Life of Jesus’ in the sense of an accurate, ordered biography, and a tracing of the spiritual pilgrimage which accompanied and controlled the events they described.

Matthew’s Gospel begins with a theological genealogy, tracing the descent of Jesus from the father of the Jewish people, Abraham, in three periods of fourteen generations. The birth stories are written in five episodes, each of them built around the fulfilment of an Old Testament prophecy. It has been suggested that the Gospel was written for reading out loud in ‘church’ and it certainly became the most popular Gospel. The fact that so much of Matthew’s own source material is Jewish in tone and is concerned with Jewish matters, and that the author appeals so much to the Old Testament to prove his point, may well indicate that his own church had lived close to traditional Jewish communities. It may be that his message had been hammered out in the teeth of Jewish opponents who fiercely denied the early Christian claims that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, that his people were the true people of God, and that the Old Testament and the Law when interpreted by Christ, belonged to the Christians as well as to the Jews more widely. The Gospel’s dependence on Mark’s account makes it unlikely that Matthew was an apostle. Its reference to the fall of Jerusalem in 22: 7 suggests that it was written shortly after that event, which took place in A.D. 70, and there is evidence that it was known to Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch in the early years of the second century, indicating that it was written in Syria.

In Matthew’s Gospel, the impression is given that Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem, where they had a house, and that it is only later that they moved to Nazareth. The fourth day of the twelve days which traditionally make up the Christmas festival, ‘Holy Innocents’, results from one of Matthew’s ‘exclusive’ stories, told in Matt. 2: 16 f., that of the fury of Herod the Great upon hearing of the wise men had not returned to his court to report on their search for the child, born in the ‘City of David’. According to the Gospel story, Herod ordered his troops to go into Bethlehem and kill all the boy children of two years and under. Joseph and Mary, warned of this danger in a dream, hurried away across the frontier into the safe refuge of Egypt and only when they felt that the danger had passed did they return to settle in Nazareth. In Matt. 2: 22-23, we are told that it was Joseph’s intention, after their sojourn in Egypt, to return to Judaea, but he was diverted to Galilee.

Yet Biblical scholars have had difficulty in reconciling the tyrannical depiction of Herod in this story with the capable ruler described by Josephus and other Roman chroniclers. The story is not recorded anywhere apart from the Gospel of Matthew, but we know that Herod was under severe pressure resulting from his chaotic family situation. He married ten wives and had fourteen children, nine of them male, the struggle for the succession centring at first on the sons born to the first two wives. The rivalry continued throughout Herod’s reign until Antipater, one of these sons, was discovered plotting against his father and half-brothers, Archelaus and Philip. In 5 B.C., he was accused in private before Varus, the governor of Syria, and was condemned and imprisoned. By now Herod was seriously ill, both physically and mentally, suffering from severe mood swings and paranoia. It was at this time that the ‘Slaughter of the Innocents’ is thought to have taken place, at roughly the same time as the dying Herod ordered a massacre of a number of Jewish nobles.

The Gospel of Luke is constructed to a considerable extent from the same or similar kind of material as Mark and Matthew, but the result is quite different to either of them. This is partly because, unlike them, it is not a complete work in itself, but the first of a two-volume work, Luke-Acts, which was separated from its sequel in order to be brought into the Gospel section of the New Testament. Luke was the only one of the four evangelists to think and plan in this way, or to set out the origin and purpose of his work, as he does when he addresses its initial recipient, Theophilus in a preface (1: 1-4) written in the conventional literary language. As generally translated, 1: 4 gives the impression that Luke is writing to give Theophilus further instruction in his Christian faith. However, the NEB translation so as to give you authentic knowledge about the matters of which you have been informed could be taken to mean that Theophilus was not (or not yet) a Christian at the time of his initial reading of the text and that the whole two-volume work was being written to give an account of the origins of Christianity so as to commend it to the whole Greek-speaking Mediterranean world, and to defend the new faith against the charge of being treasonable to the state, a theme which is most apparent in Luke’s account of the Passion and in the second part of Acts. In any case, the style of the preface shows that Luke thought of himself as a literary person, perhaps even a Greek historian. In subsequent tradition, Luke was taken to be ‘the beloved physician’ of Colossians 4: 14; but even if this is true, he would have been anything like an eyewitness of the events he recorded. In his preface, Luke himself acknowledged this by pointing out how he had consulted widely to find out the truth about Jesus:

_{Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you … so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.}

This implies not only that he belonged to a later generation than the apostles themselves, but also that by his day a number of different written accounts were already circulating. Luke stated clearly that he intended to write ‘in an orderly manner’ (1: 3), by which he seems to imply that many of the earlier testimonies were not recorded in an orderly fashion and that, in his account, he intended the treatment of one subject at a time, with smoother transitions from one section to another, making the whole more intelligible. He wrote vividly in more than one Greek style, including that of the Greek Old Testament. This versatility, in addition to his authentic stories, written in a highly graphic character and vivid style, gives his Gospel as a whole a special appeal. In this context, the birth stories are quite different from Matthew’s. They trace the parallel births of John and Jesus; they are not written around Old Testament texts as the fulfilment of past prophecies, but in Old Testament style and to revive the prophecies themselves (the Canticles 1: 14-17, 32-34, 46-55, 68-79; 2: 29-35). There are some threads that run through the two volumes of Luke’s work and therefore affect the choice of material for the first volume and the way in which it is presented. One is the theme of the Spirit, through whose agency Jesus is conceived, which he receives at his baptism and which controls him in his temptations. The same Spirit is his gift from the Father to the disciples (24: 49; Acts 1: 8) and directs the church throughout Acts. According to tradition, Luke was Paul’s travelling companion. Among the ‘we’ mentioned in the Acts was Luke the physician, referred to in Col. 4: 14; Philemon 23 f.; II Tim. 4: 9-12. The Gospel was written, like Matthew’s Gospel, at some point after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, reflected in 21: 20, but we have few clues as to where.

In contrast to Matthew’s nativity story, Luke has Mary and Joseph beginning married life in Nazareth, from where they travel to Bethlehem for the Roman census (Lk. 2: 4-5). There is no reference to the exile in Egypt in Luke, the assumption being that the family return to Nazareth directly after the birth and the census. But Luke’s Gospel may itself have gone through more than one revision. Luke 3: 1-2 reads very much as though it was originally the beginning of the Gospel:

_{In the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judaea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, … during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.}

Wise Men or Shepherds?

Like Mark, this would then have been a Gospel opening with the work of John the Baptist and with nothing about the birth and childhood of Jesus. The birth narratives and stories of Jesus’ and John’s childhood in chapters 1-2 would then be a later addition. This may explain why, if (as many scholars now think) Luke drew directly on Matthew, his nativity stories show no points of contact with Matthew’s infancy narratives, and they are written in a quite distinct style, mimicking that of the Greek translation of the Old Testament. On this basis, some have concluded that there was a ‘proto-Luke’ that contained some stories not now in the Gospel but also omitted the birth stories, which were then added by a later revision, possibly made by a different editor or author. As Luke’s birth narratives are not referred to anywhere else in the New Testament, there is no way of knowing where or when this reviser might have worked. This critical approach has stressed that editors, or ‘redactors’ as they are often called, did not simply collect or transcribe material from the past, but actively shaped and rewrote it in the interests of their own guiding ideas. As John Barton has concluded, once we look at the Gospels in this way, we can see them as looking more like ancient biographies rather than simply assemblages of older material. For example, Luke highlights certain themes, such as Jesus’ interest in the poor and outcast and his concern for women. In the infancy narratives, it is not exotic wise men, as in Matthew 2: 1-12, but poor shepherds who are the first outside Jesus’ family to learn of his birth (Lk. 2: 8-20). Yet most Christians would not omit one in favour of the other in the Christmas stories, any more than they would omit either the shepherds or the wise men from the crib scene in their church. In the same way, Francis Watson has argued, Christians must be willing to embrace all four gospels in their canon of Jesus stories:

_{Faced with this dissonant plurality, there are just two possibilities: either to select one of the gospels as a historically reliable guide and to disregard the others or to accept that the truth of the four is not to be found at the literal-historical level. … Thus the fourfold gospel marks the end of all attempts to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus.}

Christmas may be a distinct mid-winter festival for many Christians and peoples of other faiths and none, but – in Biblical terms at least – it needs to be observed in the context of the entire season from Advent to Epiphany and on to Candlemas. Only when we arrived at Candlemas and heard from old Simeon (Lk. 2: 22-35) do we get the complete affirmation before God in the Temple of Jesus as both a light to reveal your will to the Gentiles and to bring glory to your people Israel. He told Mary that her child was chosen by God for the destruction and the salvation of many. Luke gives us yet another declaration of God breaking into human history through his Messiah. Half a century ago, the editor of The Christian Century wrote that the Incarnation broke the wall between time and eternity, temple and market, church and shop, sacred and secular. It allows no division of the Gospel into personal and social, permitting no escape for public injustice from the Gospel’s judgment. The God who assumed human flesh sought the redemption of the whole man in all his circumstances and conditions. In forgetting this, the Church ceases to be the Church of the Incarnated Christ.