cybershark5886,
That must be why there is a geneology of Jesus to show his lineage legally, and yet why Jesus implied that he could not possibly be the Son of David physically and why the Jews spread a rumor about him that he was born illegitimately. It is clear that the circumstances of Jesus' birth were quite unique.
You are making the assumption that everything Jesus says in the gospel reflects the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. It is certainly your prerogative to believe this on faith, but historical analysis reveals inconsistencies that point towards obvious insertions into the mouth of Jesus to reflect the beliefs of the Christian community at that time. This was nowhere near unusual in the ancient world.
Just because the gospel writers attempt to make their works look historical does not mean that they actually are. Because Luke records dates and historical names doesn’t mean that he is actually writing historical material. People write fictitious history all the time and utilize the techniques of historians to make it look authentic. This is an entire genre of literature and isn’t conniving, but a mode of literary expression. Secondly, the standards of historians today are very different from ancient times.
From a historians point of view, the virgin birth narratives clearly do not reflect actual historical material, but rather are literary embellishments for the sake of making a certain point about Jesus’ nature. Virgin births were a common pagan mode of elevating someone’s character. The Jewish author Matthew utilizes this in a Jewish context. A common Rabbinic technique within the Jewish world was called midrash, a kind of biblical commentary in which the Rabbi would take quotes from scripture, ignore their context and use them to support new ideas. This is clearly the case of Matthew where he takes countless quotes from the Hebrew Bible and inserts them throughout his narrative as though they were intended to be prophecies. The virgin birth is a clear literary technique, on Matthew’s part, to link Jesus with two key biblical figures; Moses and David. As the Messiah, Matthew needs to link Jesus with David and so places him in Bethlehem. The problem is that Jesus was a Nazarene, so he needs to think of a way to get Jesus to Nazareth, he uses Herod to accomplish this. Matthew links Jesus to Moses by having him escape the “slaughter of the innocent†as Moses did as a child and then has Jesus retreat to Egypt, the place of Moses’ birth. Already the reader will see these parallels. This is continued in Jesus’ “sermon on the mountâ€Â. Of course, there was no actual mountain in the region. Luke calls it “the Sermon on the Plainâ€Â. Why does Matthew call it a mountain? The obvious imagery is that Jesus, delivering the beatitudes on this “mountainâ€Â, is “the new Moses delivering the new lawâ€Â.
This is a clear manipulation of material for the sake of making parallels to Jewish tradition and therefore underscoring legitmicay. The technique is a clever blending of fact and imagination to sublimely comment on the significance of Jesus’ life.
Not at all. Jesus was born under the auspices of the law yet found to be blameless, and Jesus came that he should fulfill the law thus had to be under the law. Though he did excercise his right as lord.
The essential point remains,
Mark and Paul, the earliest sources of Jesus’ life show no awareness of the virgin birth story. You can't explain everything by "difference of perspective" and the notion that each author was writing to a different commnity. The differences bewteen the gospels of which we are examining are to consistent to be random. It reflects an evolution of Christian thought and tradition as opposed to arbitrary omissions on the basis of audience or perspective. This, at the very least, points to the possibility that it was a later tradition added to the growing traditions surrounding Jesus.
I’m asking you to really to think about the census issue. If you take an administration as developed as the Roman one, and wanted to take a census,
does it make sense to force everyone in a territory to trace their genealogy some ten or fifteen generations to a town that could be on the other side of the country and make them travel to it so that the Romans can then take a census there?
Now, the fact that this
highly irregular and nonsensical method just happens to place Jesus in the town of Bethlehem, the city of David’s birth, which gives him an obvious messianic legitimacy, is just a co-incidence? The author has a very specific intention in this gospel, to preach the gospel that Jesus is the messiah and convert people to his movement. Which is more likely? That this extremely strange and unaccounted for census practice just happens to be a historical fluke? Or that Luke was using a literary technique to symbolically link Jesus to Bethlehem?
How in your reasoning are those two things even connected? How was Rome not even able to control one of their own Prefects, Pontius Pilate, from attacking a large group of unarmed Samaritans at Mt. Gerizim (as Josephus records)? Yet he did.
There’s a difference between a Roman prefect with a real job and someone that the Roman government just allows to exist out of its benevolence. Herod had no real power compared to Rome. He would have had good reasons to fear them. If Rome was trying to take a census and the local king started massacring people they probably would have done something for the sake of “Pax Romanaâ€Â.
Oh and what reason would that be? That John the Baptist was embarrassed to be around Jesus?
As I said, the gospels were trying to make John look secondary to Jesus as they tied to diminish the fact that Jesus, at one point, had been his follower. Luke does this by making Jesus the “cousin of the Son of God†to explain their interaction.
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