The weary world rejoices

I don't need to tell you that the world is weary. And anybody who has been reading my posts here and on Facebook can figure out some of the reasons why I think the world is weary. There are, of course, plenty more. I don't need to start listing all the evils of the world, some of which you can agree with me about even if we disagree about others.

Those of us who are Christians and also "literary types" know of a certain kind of literature in which the characters have big epiphanies about the eternal import of their smallest actions. You might call this the Charles Williams trope. Williams has a scene where a woman is being annoying and a guard announcing the trains at a train station is entirely polite to her. Williams goes into rather purple rhapsodies about the eternal value of his two words, "Yes, lady." Similarly, in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, Mark Studdock is ordered to desecrate a crucifix. He's an agnostic, so the symbol means nothing to him, and he can't figure out why he's being told to do it. His wicked employer Frost tells him that they have found this to be necessary to the training of people in their organization. Studdock finally says, "It's all nonsense, and I'm damned if I'll do any such thing." Lewis, of course, means the reader to realize that Studdock's words have far more literal meaning than he intends. Like Caiaphas, we all sometimes speak prophecy without knowing it, and everything means more than we can possibly realize.

But this creates a bit of a problem in its own right for imaginative types.

For if all the good things and all the bad things have vast, eternal meaning, what happens if there are more bad things going on in the world than good things? What right have I to comfort myself with the thought of that one smile exchanged between neighbors on the street (and perhaps now more than ever when it is almost a subversive act to let one's smile show when passing one's neighbor), that one eternal flower that blooms forever in the mind of God, the one evergreen act of courage, while not offsetting it with the thought of many acts of torture and destruction, the vast amounts of filth on the Internet, the souls hunted down, corrupted, and devoured, the suicides, the insane, the injustice? If they are also of infinite importance (and surely in one sense they are), who is to say which outweighs which in the eternal scales? What is the weight of my one little act of charity when there is so much bad in the world? And on this thought, the mind bows down, crushed with the weight of too much knowledge, the thought of too much darkness.

But then I remember St. Paul's statement that the sufferings of this present world are not to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us. And I remember, too, that evil is a privation. And I remember that God is glorious beyond all the evil that man can do.

C.S. Lewis seems to have wrestled with this notion of "too much darkness" in his fiction. In Perelandra the Un-man tries to tell Ransom that the "real world" is the world of filth and darkness and that the courage of the saints and the innocence of children is as nothing in comparison. The scene is creepy, and one can tell that Lewis has really confronted this possibility. But the whole point is that the Un-man is a damned soul and is uttering the falsehoods of Satan. Why? Because ultimately, it just isn't true that that is a "greater reality." It's not, of course, that our sense of something wrong is an illusion. Rather, it's that the "something wrong" is a twisting of what is good, and what is good, the Good Himself, is over and above all the evil. This is true no matter how much evil rational creatures do and suffer. So in The Great Divorce, George McDonald tells Lewis (as a character in his own book) that one glorious, redeemed soul could not fit into Hell:

All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swalled all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste....All loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell's miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.

Now there's a man who has truly rejected the dualism of two equal and opposite Powers (good and evil), ever-contending. But he has not rejected it without feeling its pull and the despair to which it leads. If God is just the "light side of the Force," we're all doomed. Thank God He isn't.

And so at the tag end of this dark year, I offer you a thrill of hope. No, it's not a vaccine. No, it's not anything of earth at all. And yet it affirms the flesh and promises a new heaven and a new earth. He makes all things new. There we shall see him, and each other, face to face. This is possible because the Word was made flesh, and the Virgin bore to men a Savior when half-spent was the night.

Merry Christmas!

(Cross-posted at What's Wrong With the World)

Some more notes on the census in Luke

The census in Luke 2 is a gigantic topic on which much ink has been spilled. I certainly had to deal with it in my series on the Virgin Birth, but I'm trying not to write a treatise! This post contains some extra notes on the subject that I didn't include in my recent video, in the interests of keeping the video streamlined and digestible. Here also is my recent debate with atheist Jonathan Pearce on the Unbelievable show.

In my Youtube  video about the census I make the following points:

1) Luke is an historical source in himself, at least as credible (based on track record) as Josephus. The fact that we have no other source for a census in Judea at this time is thus the merest argument from silence, and an especially poor one. Luke is giving us information. There is nothing about Luke's being a Christian author that makes him likely to be unreliable about a boring historical matter like a census. This point goes beyond saying that we should "give Luke the benefit of the doubt" based on his track record elsewhere, though that's true as well. The mere absence of a census in this time and place in the relatively meager set of non-biblical historical literature that we have for that time period does not constitute a strike of any significance against Luke. We can learn about this census from Luke.

2) It's outright false that Luke and Matthew contradict each other about when Jesus' birth took place, with only Matthew placing his birth at the time of Herod the Great. Luke says the same thing. (Luke 1:5)

3) Skeptics will say that Luke's census is improbable to the point of being historically impossible, even on its own terms. They are wrong about that, and they get there by insisting on an overly wooden reading of Luke and an exaggerated idea of what the census would have involved.

4) Skeptics will say that there is only one possible meaning of Luke's reference to Quirinius in connection with the census and that all other suggested translations are attempts by Christian apologists to wriggle out of admitting that Luke was wrong. They're wrong about that, too. What Luke says about Quirinius and "the first census" is genuinely difficult to translate and interpret, which is why there is legitimate scholarly debate about it.

Here I want to add a couple of points to #3 and #4.

Concerning #3, one claim that you will here is that Rome would never order a census (either for purposes of counting or for purposes of taxation) under a client king such as Herod the Great. This is a really strong claim, and there is little to back it up. It's mostly just an assertion, based on the fact that client kingdoms did have some measure of independence. But it's not as though we have a contemporary statement anywhere that the Romans would never meddle in taxation in a client kingdom or would never order a tally of the people in a client kingdom.

On the contrary, here is some evidence that Rome would sometimes do so: In the 30s A.D., as Tacitus tells us (Annals, Book VI, 41.1), a rather war-like tribe (the Clitae) residing in the Roman client kingdom of Cilicia was "pressed to conform with Roman usage by making a return of their property and submitting to a tribute." They were originally from the mountainous region of Cappadocia, and they retreated there and fought. The client king, named Archelaus, required the help of the Roman legions to defeat them. 

As it turns out, there were several rulers about in the 1st century B.C. and 1st century A.D. named "Archelaus." This one (whom Tacitus calls "Archelaus of Cappadocia") was not the same person as the Archelaus, the son of Herod the Great, whom I've mentioned elsewhere (see Matt. 2:22). Making things more confusing, the Archelaus ruling the client kingdom of Cilicia, mentioned by Tacitus, was also not the "Archelaus of Cappadocia" who had died about 17 years previously. That was his father, who actually did rule Cappadocia. (Are you confused yet?) I bring all this up because the atheist blogger Jonathan Pearce (who debated me on the Nativity) has claimed that the Biblical Archaeology Report has blundered horribly by mentioning this tribute/census of the Clitae as evidence that you could have Roman censuses in client kingdoms. Pearce assumes that they are referring to a census made in Cappadocia after it was no longer a client kingdom, when Archelaus of Cappadocia had already been dead for years. But he's mistaken. The requirement to "conform to Roman usage" was indeed made within a client kingdom, in the year A.D. 36, when that client kingdom was ruled over by a different "Archelaus of Cappadocia," the son of the one Pearce is thinking of, and (to make matters more confusing) the client kingdom in question was actually Cilicia rather than Cappadocia! The confusion over this obscure fact partly arose because the Biblical Archaeology Report cited a secondary source rather than citing Tacitus directly. I was lucky enough to find the Tacitus reference in this really fascinating article about the census by John Thorley (hat tip to Jason Engwer for recommending it), and I chased it down from there. (Note: You can get a free on-line account with JSTOR for independent scholars that lets you read up to 100 articles per month.)

This is a cautionary tale in a lot of ways: It illustrates the complexity of historical reality (always something skeptics and some Christian biblical scholars need to be reminded of). It illustrates the plausibility of theories that there were multiple people by the same name. (This comes up in discussing other supposed Gospel "errors.") In this case, Wikipedia even calls the Clitae a "Cappadocian tribe," which is confusing and interesting. How could there be a Cappadocian tribe in Cilicia? Well, you know, history is complicated! Anyway, all of this also illustrates the value of tracing things back to original sources.

And bringing us back to the argumentative point: We absolutely should not be doing a priori history about what "wouldn't ever happen" in a client kingdom. We should discover what it meant to be a "client kingdom" in regards to tribute, census, taxation, etc., by reading historical sources (including Luke). The phrase "client kingdom" isn't some kind of talisman that automatically entails the conclusion the skeptic is going for. That's not how history is done. So...yes, Rome under Augustus could certainly have ordered that a client kingdom (or maybe even several of them) must count their people, or their property-owning people. Herod would have had to agree to carry this out or to allow a designated Roman authority to carry it out. As Biblical Archaeology Report notes, Augustus ordered after Herod's death that Samaria didn't have to pay as much tax to Archelaus, Herod's son, because they hadn't joined in a revolt. Even though Archelaus was confirmed as a ruler under Rome and was supposed to have the tribute from the Samaritans himself, Caesar altered the amount. This is indirectly relevant in that it shows how Rome tweaked taxation under client rulers.

In fact, Thorley suggests that that is what Luke is saying when he says that "in those days there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed [registered]." Thorley's idea is that this means that at that general time period Augustus decided to tell the various provinces on the edge of the Roman empire to register/count their inhabitants, this extension of census-taking to all parts of the Roman world being a new practice. Of course, there could be plenty of reasons for this. It would be useful for taxation, for one thing, even if some part of the tax went to the local client king. (Miller, link below, mentions the suggestion that Rome might have wanted to assess the region when a client king was getting older.) The story of the Clitae in Cilicia shows that this is not merely theoretical. A tribe in a client kingdom was required to make a tribute of a portion of their property according to Roman usage, which would have required that the property be counted, and the client ruler had to attempt to carry out this order. While Tacitus doesn't say whose idea this census was (it could in theory have been the idea of Archelaus II himself), he certainly doesn't say that it was not Rome's own idea, and the fact that the legions helped to enforce it certainly shows their involvement. For more on this tribe see Glenn Miller's extensive discussion here. I haven't even had time to read it all and therefore am not endorsing everything he says, but it contains a lot of information. (HT to Jason Engwer for the link.)

It's also worth pointing out that Herod's relationship with Augustus as a client king was not always strewn with hearts and flowers. Some time between 12 and 9 B.C., Herod fell into significant disgrace with Augustus over his treatment of the Nabateans. While he was supposedly reconciled to Augustus, such a reconciliation wouldn't have meant that they both forgot the recent unpleasantness, even if they were formally friends again by the time of Jesus' birth, Augustus had made it quite clear recently that he considered himself fully empowered to interfere in Herod's management of his affairs.

Rome had a passion for counting people, not to mention taxing them. Augustus proudly talks about several lustrum censuses he did, including one beginning in 8 B.C., and how many Roman citizens he counted in those censuses. I should clarify here something that I was not clear enough about in my debate with Pearce: In itself, a lustrum census was for purposes of counting Roman citizens, not all inhabitants per se. There doubtless were Roman citizens in Judea, but if the census at the time of Jesus' birth was related to the 8 B.C. lustrum as it came around to Syria, that would be an extension of its independently known purpose, since Joseph was probably not a Roman citizen. But as Thorley points out, that isn't in itself implausible.

Concerning #4, here are a couple more points (which may or may not have been covered in the video):

Skeptics insist that Luke must be saying that this census took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria and that, moreover, he is saying that it was the 6 A. D. census. So there you go! Luke was wrong! Because Jesus wasn't born in 6 A.D.!

But that claim has all sorts of problems of its own. It runs afoul of Luke's clear assertion that John the Baptist was conceived during the time of Herod the Great (Luke 1:5). It runs afoul of Luke's clear knowledge of the 6 A.D. census at its own time period (Acts 5:37). It runs afoul of the fact that Luke has all kinds of definite indicators of the time of the beginning of John the Baptist's ministry and hence Jesus' ministry (Luke 3:1, 3:23), and that on these indicators Jesus would be much too young if Luke thought he was born in 6 A.D. In other words, it just doesn't make sense within Luke's own corpus as an interpretation of what Luke is saying about Quirinius and the census in 2:2. Whatever else is going on, that isn't what's going on. Even if one thinks Luke is incorrect here in some way, that isn't what he's saying just as a matter of interpretation of Luke.

Moreover, the skeptical interpretation leaves out the meaning of the word "first" in Luke 2:2. If all that Luke meant to say was that this was the census taken under Quirinius, the one and only, why didn't he just say, "This was the census made when Quirinius was governor of Syria," full stop? Why include that pesky word "first" (or whatever it should be translated as)? The skeptics apparently think it means "the first census in Judea," but that is far from being the only reasonable interpretation, even if we take "first" to be just an ordinary adjective modifying "census."

Let me also add: In order for us to be justified in thinking that Luke is accurate about the census (in particular), it isn't necessary for any one specific possibility to be probable. What is needed is for the disjunction to be probable--A or B or C. And given that each of these ideas does have some real plausibility (it isn't just barely logically possible), the probability of that disjunction is reasonably high. If one allows for Luke to be right that Jesus was born during a census or registration but wrong about the specific Roman governor/hegemon, through confusing two Roman names (see below), a minor error, then the probability of the disjunction is higher still. So when I mention in the video that this or that is possible, I am not saying either a) that being possible means being probable or b) that these are individually just barely possible. In fact, common sense shows us that many of these ideas that I've suggested about the nativity (such as Joseph's having a connection to Bethlehem stronger than just being descended from David) are entirely plausible, and they are the kind of thing that we invoke in ordinary life all the time to explain what someone says when we have incomplete information. Jonathan Pearce, my atheist opponent in my recent debate, repeatedly states that "apologists" invoke the idea that to be possible is to be probable. This misunderstands the entire point. Moreover, it's particularly ironic that he should repeat this criticism so often, since he himself invokes, and treats as highly probable, extremely implausible theories, such as the idea that Luke 1-2 were added to the Gospel later on or the idea that Luke is secretly trying to make a reference to Psalm 87:6 by making up/moving the census.

Thorley's suggestion, which I'm inclined to endorse as my "first line" of translation, is that Luke is saying that this was the first census (of two) made when Quirinius was "hegemon" of Syria. Again, that "first" has to mean something. We can't just leave it untranslated. Luke is trying to communicate something. I add, which Thorley doesn't talk about, that "hegemon" doesn't have to mean "governor" in the technical sense and that Quirinius could have been in charge of a census in Syria without being governor in the sense that Josephus talks about when he lists the governors. But Thorley, (refreshingly) taking Luke to be an historical source, also says that for all we know Luke is more accurate than Josephus here and knew of a short, earlier governorship of Quirinius wedged between those listed by Josephus, which is also possible.

There is some controversy over the suggested translation, "This census was made before Quirinius was governor of Syria," though it would certainly be a simple way to fit all the data together (always a good thing in an historical hypothesis). I find its simplicity attractive. That translation, by the way, would mean that Luke is particularly accurate here. Here is Daniel Wallace making a case against it. But N. T. Wright endorses it (Who Was Jesus? p. 89). (So did a whole roster of other scholars who were no slouches in Greek, including T.R. Birks. I owe this reference to Tim McGrew.) Maybe we should let Wallace and Wright duke it out on this one. In any event, the contemptuous skeptical dismissal of the "before" translation as a desperate apologetic expedient is unwarranted. It deserves consideration.

Another worthy contender is, "This enrollment was first completed (i.e., used) when Quirinius was governor of Syria."  This is Calvin’s suggestion, endorsed by Beard, Rawlinson, Edersheim, and numerous other scholars. As Paul Maier points out, it took forty years to complete a census in Gaul around this time, so it could well be that a count was made or begun in Judea before the death of Herod and that Quirinius only made use of it to collect tax in A.D. 6 when he came to clean up the mess after the death of Herod the Great's son, the tetrarch Archelaus. Luke 11:28, referring to a famine that at that time was merely predicted, uses the same Greek term (egeneto). Agabus predicts the famine, and Luke comments that it happened, came to pass, etc., under Claudius, in a future time. Similarly, Luke could be saying that this census came fully to fruition when Quirinius was governor of Syria, later on. (I owe information about this option to Tim McGrew.) It occurs to me that this could explain why there was a revolt later in A.D. 6 but not at this time, if this was the count and that was the taxation based on the count. This is just a conjecture but is worth throwing into the mix.

Thorley suggests that Luke may have been mistaken, but only in a narrow sense. Luke may indeed have said, "This was the first [of two] censuses made when Quirinius was governor of Syria," thinking that Quirinius was hegemon of Syria twice, based upon a mistaken memory or reading of the name Quinctilius, since the hapless P. Quinctilius Varus was, according to Josephus, governor of Syria around this time. That would indeed be an error on Luke's part, but a very limited and to some extent understandable one, and it certainly wouldn't at all mean that Luke invented the census. Indeed, Luke's very attempt to nail down the relationship of this census to the one that he knows about later under Quirinius shows an extremely Lukan concern for literal history.

In fact, the whole idea that Luke made up the census (or moved Jesus' birth to much later), as I point out in the video, is fairly absurd. It is using a steamroller to crack a nut. All that Luke had to do, if he wanted to "make" Jesus be born in Bethlehem contrary to fact, was to have Mary and Joseph start out in Bethlehem and later travel to Nazareth. There was no need for him to invent the idea that Mary was from Nazareth and that they had to travel from there, while she was pregnant, down to Bethlehem and then back to Nazareth. And to invent a Roman census for such a purpose would be a wildly exaggerated plot device. Luke's deliberately connecting it falsely with Quirinius and placing it at a date that is in great tension with all of Luke's own other date indicators is overwhelmingly implausible. Why do a thing like that? Luke didn't have to mention Quirinius at all if he was inventing a census out of thin air.

Luke shows not the slightest awareness of any Old Testament passage that is fulfilled by Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. He may or may not have known of Micah 5:2. I think it's a good principle not to attribute theological motives to the evangelists that they say nothing about. They generally aren't shy about mentioning OT parallels or fulfillments of prophecy, so why invent private intentions for which we have no textual evidence?

All of our evidence points to the conclusion that Luke sincerely believed what he said in Luke 2:1-2. And there are plenty of reasons to think that, as a reliable historian, Luke is telling us about a real census that really took place in Judea at the time, whether or not Quirinius was in charge of it. To say that we wouldn't think there had been such a census if it weren't for Luke is no real criticism. There are plenty of historical events that we wouldn't think happened if it weren't for the historical document (sometimes a single document) that mentions them! That's how history works.

Have a look at the video, and be sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel if you haven't already!

Aphorism for the day

 The legitimacy of historical harmonization rests on the observed complexity of reality.

Apropos of which, here's a Youtube video on reconcilable variation in the nativity stories.

What I'm up to this Advent

 Sorry that there haven't been new posts here recently. I've begun occasionally posting again at What's Wrong With the World. Also, if you follow my public content on Facebook, you will see more of my links and thoughts. The one annoying thing is that Facebook now seems to be changing its algorithms, so even "following" may not be enough to see everything. You may need to "favorite" me as well to be sure not to miss anything.

I've gotten pulled into quite a bit of conversation about the Virgin Birth this Advent season. I've just started a Youtube series about the Virgin Birth, and the first video of that is out, here. Please consider subscribing to my Youtube channel and hitting the bell so that you get notifications. 

Recording on it may be somewhat slow, though, because I've agreed to a debate on the Virgin Birth and infancy narratives (I usually refuse debates), which will be recorded on December 11. Plus I'm indexing The Eye of the Beholder--a huge and rather boring task. I did an interview yesterday about some objections to the birth narratives. That link is here.

Triablogue has a roundup of some great resources on the veracity of the infancy accounts and the Virgin Birth. See that link roundup here. Jason Engwer has done some stalwart work there. Theological blogger Steve Hays of Triablogue passed away from cancer during 2020. He was a great soldier for the faith and is missed.

So a blessed Advent to everyone, and if you don't hear from me again for a while, a Merry Christmas.

By the way, I heard a new Gospel Christmas song on the radio yesterday that Mr. Google does not seem to know about. It was mostly about the lost sheep. Here, from memory, are a few fragments of the words:

"Mary gave birth to light." "...the darkness we mistook for the light." 

Chorus

O what love the Good Shepherd has shown

To leave the ninety and nine

To go back for that one sheep, lost and alone.

I'm the one he came back to find.

Tidings of comfort and...wellll...hmmmm

 

Tidings of comfort and...wellll...hmmmm

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

As we move toward the Christmas season (at the moment it's technically Advent) and start thinking about the star, the wise men, the shepherds, and the manger, I decided to talk once more about the way fictionalization theories of the New Testament ruin everything.

Even Christmas.

Here's a lengthy quotation from Dr. Michael Licona in response to Bart Ehrman's challenges to the infancy stories about Jesus. (In other words, the Christmas stories in Luke and Matthew.) This quotation occurred in the course of a written debate in 2016.

Bart provides the example of the differences between the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke. In my opinion, those narratives include the most difficult and profound differences in the Gospels. As my friend Jonathan Pennington writes,

Despite our conflation of all these events at the annual church Christmas pageant, these stories do not in fact overlap at all. If Jesus did not appear as the named figure in both of these accounts, one would never suspect they were stories about the same person.

Here I must acknowledge that I don't know what's going on and have no detailed explanations for these differences. I think one can provide some plausible solutions. But I admit they are speculative. In my research pertaining to the most basic compositional devices in ancient historical/biographical literature, I did not observe any devices that readily shed light on the differences between the infancy narratives.

However — even though, as I say, I don't know what's going on here to cause the differences — let's just speculate for a moment and consider the following scenario. Matthew and Luke both agree that a Jewish virgin named Mary who was engaged to a Jewish man named Joseph gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem. The early Christians all knew this much. However, little else was remembered about this event. So, Matthew and Luke added details to their account to create a more interesting narrative of Jesus's birth, a type of midrash. I'm not saying this is what Matthew and Luke did. I don't know what's going on with the infancy narratives. However, if this occurred, we would have to take the matter of genre — midrash — into consideration and recognize that the historicity of the details outside of the story's core would be questionable, while the core itself could stand. After all, with such differences between the accounts in Matthew and Luke, one could reasonably argue that the core is attested by multiple independent sources.

So many errors to point out, so little time. Let's start by clearing one thing out of the way: "Licona's friend," Jonathan Pennington, is not to be blamed for any of this. I looked up the quotation Licona gives in context, and it is taken out of context as used here. Pennington merely makes that statement to "set up" the alleged tensions between the infancy narratives, to make it sound rhetorically like there might be a problem (as a writer will sometimes briefly do), but he eventually says quite calmly that reasonable harmonization fits the infancy narratives together just fine! His approach is thus very different from Licona's repeated, "I don't know what's going on" and "these are among the most difficult differences in the Gospels" statements.

The comment that Licona attributes to him as if it is a serious criticism (though Pennington doesn't intend it that way) would be, if serious, a particularly poor method for criticizing any historical documents. You can take the biography of many a man and chop it up in such a way that you could say that you would never guess that these events all happened to the same person. This tells us absolutely nothing whatsoever about probable historicity.

Next, let's look at Licona's very confused and confusing use of the term "midrash." It's astonishing that he makes not the slightest attempt to argue on independent grounds that Luke or Matthew (especially Luke, of all authors) is "using midrash" in the infancy narratives. Perhaps he thinks that Robert Gundry did all of that work back in the 1980s when Gundry wrote an (in)famous commentary on Matthew stating that Matthew is heavily fictionalized and called this "midrash." Well, Gundry's commentary was a walking disaster in almost every possible way, and it was well refuted at the time, but he did not apply his claims to Luke. In fact, just the contrary. According to Gundry's personal (bizarre) theory, Luke's infancy narrative was part of an "expanded Q" that was available to Matthew and that was intended historically, and Matthew's was largely made up as a "midrash" on Luke's. So I have no idea where Licona is getting the idea that Luke's infancy narrative even might be a fictionalized "midrash," but certainly not from Gundry, the evangelical king of saying-stuff-is-midrash. Licona grabs this use of "midrash" to mean "largely invented" and then slaps it onto Luke (who is otherwise well-known for his meticulous historical investigation) with nothing whatsoever in the way of independent indication other than the differences between the stories themselves (which are almost entirely non-contradictory anyway, as I'll discuss more below).

This is a highly irresponsible suggestion, especially since he then goes on solemnly to tell us that we "would have to take the matter of genre--midrash--into consideration." So wait: You just get to make up a genre designation out of whole cloth without any evidence and then tell us that if this were true we would have to take this made-up idea "into consideration" when thinking about the historicity of the passages? Why should anyone go along with such evidence-free theorizing?

Then there is the fact that no less a scholar than N.T. Wright says that this isn't what midrash even is.

Fourth, midrash never included the invention of stories which were clearly seen as non-literal in intent, and merely designed to evoke awe and wonder. It was no part of Jewish midrash, or any other Jewish writing-genre in the first century, to invent all kinds of new episodes about recent history in order to advance the claim that the Scriptures had been fulfilled. (Who Was Jesus, p. 73)

Wright quotes P.S. Alexander as follows:

[L]abelling a piece of Bible exegesis 'midrash' appears to set it in a definite historical and cultural context, to hint at well-known, technical parallels. But all this may be entirely bogus. (Quoted in Wright, p. 73)

It's actually rather depressing (if one cares about this type of thing) to see Licona stating openly that, even with all the many "compositional devices" he thinks he has found in ancient Greco-Roman literature, he couldn't find any labels to place onto the infancy narratives, and so he just leaps instantly to grabbing a Jewish-sounding label to slap on them in a "speculation," a label that he uses to mean "making up a lot of stuff." This brings one to the rather unsettling conclusion that all of this genre talk is not driven by objective scholarly indications of genre at all but rather by the strained desire to find some sort of label that one can call a "genre," thereby simultaneously suggesting fictionalization and also claiming that somehow it doesn't really matter. If a Greco-Roman label can't be found, a Hebrew one will be found.

Next is Licona's very, very confused use of the notion of a "core" and "details." As Licona uses the word "core" in this passage, the "core" is what Matthew and Luke both agree on--the overlap between their stories. Now, that's a very odd concept of the "core." Most of us would say, just reading Luke, that the shepherds are part of the "core" of his story. They are certainly very prominent in Luke, even though they aren't mentioned in Matthew. You can't identify the "core" and "details" of two accounts simply by noting their overlap.

Licona's "speculation" would make everything "outside of the core"--that is, all the non-overlap--into mere "details" which would be "questionable." But that means an awful lot of material! The star, the Magi, the slaughter of the innocent, the flight to Egypt, the angels, the shepherds, the manger, the journey to Bethlehem, and the presentation in the Temple. In other words, most of what we would call the Christmas story.

Nor would anyone who was not using some kind of New Testament scholar code-talk normally call these "details." These are obviously entire incidents. If this is how Licona is willing to use the word "details," this should lead to great caution when one hears a literary device theorist talk about Gospel authors changing or inventing "details" rather than the "core" of a narrative.

Next there is the rather delicate question of what degree of credibility Licona is attributing to this "speculation." He is careful to say that he is not "saying that this is what Matthew and Luke did" and that he doesn't "know what is going on with the infancy narratives." But at the same time, he sets the entire speculation up by implying a very large problem with the infancy narratives. He thinks their differences "include the most difficult and profound differences in the Gospels," which is presumably what causes him not to "know what is going on."

He also says that he thinks "one can provide some plausible solutions" but that they are "speculative" and then invites the reader to "just speculate for a moment and consider the following scenario"--that scenario being the wholesale invention by Matthew and Luke of the bulk of the Christmas stories. It is hardly far-fetched to read this as meaning that this scenario is at least one of the "plausible solutions" that he thinks one "can provide," especially since he gives nothing else whatsoever as an example of such a "plausible solution." Not a single one. In response to skeptic Bart Ehrman on the infancy narratives.

Given all of the "I don't know what's going on" and "these differences are so difficult" statements, it is at least fair to say that Licona appears agnostic concerning the "details" that are not part of the "core" (i.e., the propositional overlap) of the infancy narratives. Er, that would be the star, the wise men, the shepherds, the flight to Egypt, and so on and so forth.

It's important to remember that words like "perhaps," "maybe," "conjecture," and so forth are not get-out-of-criticism-free cards, as though one can bring forward any theory and then slip aside when criticized for seeming to suggest it seriously by saying, "Didn't you see the word 'perhaps'?" Or "Didn't you see where I said that I don't know if this is true?" Yes, we saw it. But scholars do not seriously discuss theories that they think are completely and totally crazy and incorrect, as if they are plausible, without giving any indication that they think the theories are completely and totally incorrect, unless those scholars are playing some kind of strange "guess-what-I-really-think" game. Which is not a good way to do scholarship. Generally a scholar discusses a theory he thinks is crazy only in order to refute it (if it is popular), not to bring it forward as the only suggestion presented in the immediate context where he has said that he thinks there are some "plausible solutions" to some major problem. When a scholar does that, it is hardly going too far to conclude that he thinks the theory in question is at least plausible.

Moving on from the question of just how credible Licona thinks this theory is, consider the methodological statement that, if it were true, it would not affect the credibility of what he calls the "core," meaning the overlap between the two accounts.

That claim is also completely and utterly wrong. I will be discussing this further in a forthcoming article that has been accepted in the biblical studies journal Themelios. Without giving that entire article here, let me say briefly that "multiple attestation" is misused from a probabilistic perspective when one hypothesizes some common tradition (as Licona does here when he suggests that only the overlap between Matthew and Luke was held by Christians at the time) and that two authors have fictionally embellished this common tradition to make their stories more interesting. In that case, we do not have multiple, independent attestation to the facts of what happened. The differences between the accounts merely attest to the differences in two authors' imaginations, not to their having separate access to the events. In contrast, when we have variation between witness accounts of an event--e.g., one mentions the color of a bank robber's shirt while the other mentions that he walked with a limp--we guess that these two people actually have separate access to what happened, are trying to get it right, but are telling some different aspects of the truth. One cannot use that sort of reasoning to bolster the overlap between two accounts while simultaneously hypothesizing that the overlap comes from some free-floating tradition and that all of the non-overlap is the result of pure imaginative elaboration. That's just probabilistically wrong.

Moreover, according to the speculation Licona gives, Matthew and Luke would have been unlikely to have either the motivation or the ability to check out their overlapping facts. The speculation says that "little else was known" besides the overlap. So how would Matthew and Luke have done any investigation to find out if that overlap itself was true? And if they thought nothing of making up entire fairy tales about stars, angels, and wise men in order to make their stories more interesting, why would they have bothered to try to fact-check the tradition they had heard in the Christian community?

But be of good cheer. There are real tidings of comfort and joy: This sort of despairing theorizing is all wrong. The various differences between the Christmas stories are not particularly difficult. The two authors are simply telling different aspects of the story as they became known to them. We don't, of course, know how Matthew came to know about the flight to Egypt and Joseph's dream, but the emphasis upon Joseph's private experience may mean that Matthew had access to Joseph or (since Joseph was probably dead by the start of Jesus' ministry) someone who had spoken with Joseph. (Perhaps Jesus himself told Matthew about this part of his childhood, as told to him by his guardian Joseph.) Luke's emphasis upon Mary's experience, along with the distinctive Hebraic features of style of his Christmas story, may mean that in this particular case there really was a source document, possibly preserved by Mary's family, of some of her unique experiences and knowledge at the time of Jesus' birth and in the life of her cousin Elizabeth.

Of all of the variations between the accounts, only one amounts even to an apparent contradiction as opposed to mere difference in information. That's a pretty good track record--only one apparent contradiction in the accounts. That apparent discrepancy concerns Luke 2:39, right after the purification of Mary in the Temple:

When they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own city of Nazareth.

This must refer to a time before the coming of the Magi to the house in Bethlehem. But here one would guess from a reading of Luke alone that they returned immediately to Galilee after completing the rites required by the law in Jerusalem. Luke does not precisely say that, but it is a natural reading of the verse. Of course, it is not the case that they returned immediately, and we can tell that when we harmonize with Matthew. They apparently settled in Bethlehem for a time, for the Magi find them in a house some unspecified time after the birth of Jesus. Then there is the flight to Egypt and the residence there until the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C., at which point (according to Matthew) they returned to Israel and decided to settle in Galilee rather than Judea after hearing of Archelaus's being made tetrarch in Judea (Matt. 2:22).

So if we read Luke 2:39 most naturally and harmonize the account overall as much as possible with Matthew, we would have a contradiction on the question of whether they returned immediately to Nazareth after the purification of Mary.

That's it. That's the only apparent contradiction between them. What it probably means is that either Luke was not aware of the flight to Egypt (meaning that he didn't yet have Matthew's Gospel at the time when he was writing this part of his own Gospel) or that he chose to hew fairly closely to a written source that for some reason--perhaps a political reason--left out the visit of the Magi and the events with which it is bound up, the slaughter of the innocents and the flight to Egypt.

These are by no means "profound and difficult" differences between the accounts.

Moreover, more tidings of comfort and joy: The behavior of Archelaus shortly after the death of Herod the Great, independently attested by Josephus, indirectly confirms Matthew's account. For the disturbance in Jerusalem in which Archelaus had Roman soldiers slaughter several thousand Jews (after a riot), if it came to Joseph's ears, might very well have made him afraid to settle in Judea under Archelaus and to prefer to settle under the tetrarchy of Herod Antipas in Galilee, where they had been before Jesus was born. See Esteemed Husband's discussion here. If Matthew made up the entire flight to Egypt, it's rather a strange coincidence that this little note about Joseph's thoughts about Archelaus fits so well with other things we know about Archelaus.

A brief word about the census mentioned in Luke 2. Licona may be rolling that together with the differences between Luke and Matthew, especially since it is a favorite hobby horse of Ehrman's and was brought up by Ehrman in the debate. If so, Licona is speaking confusingly, since the mere presence of the census in Luke 2 does not create a "profound and difficult" difference with Matthew. It does not even create a prima facie contradiction. Matthew simply does not narrate how it came about that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. He begins with the birth in Bethlehem as a fact (Matt. 2:1). Ehrman may want to make a contradiction with Luke out of that, but that's a typically desperate Ehrmanesque artificial contradiction.

What is more frequently pushed against Luke is the mere fact that we have difficulty identifying the census at the time of Jesus' birth from external sources and its relation to Quirinius, mentioned by Luke, causing some skeptical commentators to conclude that Luke confused the time of Jesus' birth with the census taken under Quirinius in A.D. 6. Oceans of ink have been spilled on this question, and I don't propose to spill another ocean here. Several quite legitimate possible solutions to the issue have been proposed, and even if one doesn't have a favorite, one should remember that it's the disjunction that has to be true in order for Luke to be right--that is, that either this or this or that was the case. (See several different discussions here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

A couple of big-picture points are more important than picking a favorite theory: The fact that Luke so carefully notes the census at all is extremely strong evidence for the historical nature of his genre. It is almost laughable that anyone would so much as bring up the idea that Luke is fabricating out of his hat, using a "genre" of "midrash" which "must be taken into consideration," in the very passage where Luke is so carefully historical as to refer to the Roman governor Quirinius. Luke goes out of his way to include an aside about when the census under Quirinius was first made or first completed or when the first census under him was made--depending on how you translate the verse. This is the mark of intentionally historical writing! The very verse that allegedly creates an historical difficulty for Luke is the verse that shouts Luke's historical genre from the rooftops.

Moreover, Luke's care as an historian is massively documented in other ways, earning him a great deal of credit at this point. Even here, it is not that other sources contradict Luke, saying, "There was no census in Palestine at such-and-such a point." And Luke's obviously greater knowledge of the time period and closeness to the time period, and our own comparatively fragmentary information, should give pause before saying that he is incorrect about (say) Quirinius. Colin Hemer, who has done a great deal in his magisterial Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History to corroborate the historicity of Acts, makes the following comment apropos of a different passage, but it applies at least as well to the census:

The fact that Luke's background information can so often be corroborated may suggest that it is wiser to leave this particular matter open rather than to condemn Luke of a blunder. p. 163

Far from being an embarrassment to the historicity of the Gospels, the infancy stories provide us with fascinating "inside information" about the life of Jesus, information that the Gospel authors included not because they thought it was legitimate to make things up to "make the story more interesting" but because the factual data they had was intrinsically interesting, and they wanted to make it available to the world.

For far too long, Christian apologists have played the game of "retreat and retrench," continually counting on "multiple attestation" to save them. This has given rise to ridiculous statements such as this: That it would not make any difference to the reliability of the Gospels if the infancy narratives were massively invented. That it wouldn't make any difference to the "reliability" (redefined) of the overlap between the infancy stories if they were otherwise invented. That we can do without John and still argue just as robustly that Jesus claimed to be God. That we don't need the details of the resurrection narratives to defend the resurrection of Jesus. And so on and so forth. Increasingly, literary device theorists are playing these cards more and more aggressively, implying that as a matter of fact such quantities and types of material were really invented by the Gospel authors.

This is a game that should have been abandoned long ago.

The good news is not that we can abandon the Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke and still have Christmas. The good news is that we don't have to. The Christmas stories can stand on their own just fine!

Posted by Lydia McGrew on December 17, 2018 7:13 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Christmas) (Licona) (New Testament)

Christmas: The day as an icon

 

Christmas: The day as an icon

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

 As secularists and neo-Puritans alike delight in pointing out, there is no strong reason to believe that Jesus was born "in the cold midwinter." Those silly traditional Christians, celebrating a holy day that is nowhere commanded to be celebrated in the Bible, probably has been attached by mere human convention to the historically incorrect time of year, and wasn't even recognized by the early church until, what?, 200 to 300 years after the time of Christ.

Yet, surprising as it may seem, God actually does care about human conventions. Does God care what you do with your wedding ring? Indeed, he does. For God knows that human beings, being made in his image, are by nature iconographers. We cannot help it. We habitually, irresistibly surround ourselves with symbols and images. We need symbols to remind, to prompt, and to move us. And the visible symbols make a difference to our bodies, our minds, and our souls.

This, presumably, is why God, repeatedly throughout Scripture, tries to harness the human tendency to make symbols. He tells his people to do physical, temporal things for remembrance. Set up these stones. Eat this feast on this day of this month. When your children ask you, "Why do you do these things?" be ready to tell them of the great things God has done, of which these are the markers. In the New Testament, God is still at it, now bringing symbol into the realm of Sacrament: Do this in remembrance of me. And the apostles and their followers begin, almost instantly after the Day of Pentecost, to meet and break bread on the first day of the week, when the Son burst forth from the darkness of the tomb. We find no record that God explicitly revealed to the Apostles that they should begin to worship on Sunday, but they did so naturally, as a matter of course, in celebration of the resurrection.

For man is a creature of the body and of the rhythms of the body, the seasons, and the years. And the God who made the body knows that we need to be reminded, reminded, reminded, in the cycles of the year, like the beats of the heart.

If we do not remember Christ's birth on some one day, we will not remember it on any day. Conscious remembrance and thanksgiving, for a time-bound creature, are activities that must occur at a particular place and time.

Would it be nice to know on what day, or at least in what time of the year, Our Lord was born and to connect our festival with those known seasonal facts, as we do with Easter? Certainly. To someone as historically and evidentially minded as I, it would be very nice. It would be highly satisfying to have the kind of solid historical evidence for the season of Christ's birth that we have for the Passover season of his death and resurrection.

But even though we don't have that knowledge, it does not follow that what the Gospels tell about the circumstances of Jesus' birth is a tissue of pious embellishment. Far from it. St. Luke's reference to the census is perhaps the most famous, and contentious, historical tie-down, but whatever final conclusion you come to concerning the nature of the census and the meaning of Luke's terminology, there is no question that Luke himself intended it to be a literal, historical explanation of the presence of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. Luke's love of such specificity is one of his most salient qualities. Compare chapter 3:1-2; the convergence of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod and Lysanias, and Annas and Caiaphas has been independently confirmed. And buried in the midst of Matthew's account of the flight to Egypt, complete as it is with a very Jewish typological reference to "out of Egypt have I called my Son," is this one little detail--that Joseph was afraid to return to Bethlehem when he learned that Archelaus was now ruling Judea. As pointed out by Esteemed Husband, the report of Joseph's qualms about settling in Bethlehem fits perfectly with what we know of Archelaus independently.

Thus the omission of indications of the time of year is just part and parcel of the normal messiness of literal, recorded history. Some things get mentioned; some things don't.

In the absence of specific information on that point, Christendom has made a season of days in the deep of winter into an icon of this literal, historical event: The birth of Jesus Christ to a Virgin, who laid him in a particular manger, at a particular time, because there was no room for them in a particular inn.

With the church throughout all the world, let us adore him together.

Merry Christmas to my colleagues and readers at W4!

Posted by Lydia McGrew on December 24, 2017 1:46 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Christmas)