Jesus’ birth story is only found in Matthew and Luke, and the two stories are quite different.
Matthew has no shepherds, no manger, and no angelic announcement to Mary. Luke has no wise men, and no angry Herod. Actually there isn’t much in common at all between them, except the most basic points like the characters’ names, the virginity of Mary, and the location of the birth in Bethlehem.
But do they contradict each other?
Yesterday I listened to Alex O’Connor’s interview with New Testament scholar and skeptic Bart Ehrman. Around the 35 minute mark, they start talking about the infancy narratives. Ehrman (who teaches at UNC Chapel Hill) explains how he has his students go through each story writing down what happens, and looking for any instance of story elements that cannot be harmonized between them. When asked for an example, Ehrman goes to one that he asserts is irreconcilable.
What is it?
In Luke, Jesus is born, and his parents have him circumcised on the 8th day, and then after thirty-two more Mary makes an offering at the temple for her purification, and then they go straight back to Nazareth where they live. Bethlehem is very near Jerusalem and the temple, so Luke has it that Jesus and his parents are in the Jerusalem/Bethlehem vicinity for at least a month and half before heading way back up north to their home.
In Matthew, after Jesus is born and the Magi show up in Jerusalem, Joseph is warned in a dream that Herod will try to kill him, so Joseph and the family flee to Egypt where they live until Herod dies, eventually trying to go back to Bethlehem but ultimately settling in Nazareth.
The alleged contradiction is that Luke’s version of events doesn’t allow for a multi-year excursion to Egypt before the family settles at Nazareth.
Here is Luke 2:38-39 and the jump from Jesus at the Jerusalem temple to the family’s return home:
”And coming up at that very hour [Anna] began to give thanks to God and to speak of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem. And when they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.”
You do get the impression from this that the family did their duties at the temple, packed up, and went home—no night escape to spend years in Egypt first.
In the interview, Alex sees the tension, and asks Ehrman how Christian scholars reconcile this. Ehrman replies with an over-the-top “I don’t know!” but when pressed, says they’d have to come up with some complicated back-and-forth scenario where Mary and Joseph are going back and forth from one place to the other.
But on the face of it, this is simply not an irreconcilable contradiction.
Ehrman’s accusation hinges on the idea that Luke positively asserts no significant events between the end of Mary’s purification at the temple and the family’s settling in Nazareth.
Ehrman asks how Luke can be right that they “immediately” returned to Nazareth if Matthew is right that they fled to Egypt.
But that “immediately” is not in the text. All Luke really claims is that sometime after the temple duties, the family returned to Galilee/Nazareth. Luke’s next story shows us Jesus at 12 years old, back in Jerusalem for Passover.
Now in Matthew, when the Magi come to Jerusalem seeking the King of the Jews, this is after Jesus has been born (Matthew 2:1), and in fact when Herod orders the male babies to be slaughtered the order is for those two years old and under, “according to the time he had learned from the Magi” (2:16). The implication would seem to be that Mary and Joseph had been staying in the Bethlehem/Jerusalem vicinity for probably a bit over a year by the time this happens, and it’s only then that they flee to Egypt for another year or two until Herod dies.
In other words, Matthew’s version of events allows for everything Luke narrates about Jesus’s presentation in the temple and Mary’s purification over the course of forty days, but Luke then simply jumps to the family’s ultimate settling in Nazareth because he’s skipping ahead to that point. Granted, you would never suspect the Magi/Herod/Egypt episode from Luke’s telling, but Luke says nothing about that time period except that at some point after it the family moved to Nazareth, which is exactly what Matthew tells us they did.
The order of events would be this:
1) Jesus is born in Bethlehem
2) Jesus circumcised at the temple
3) Mary’s purification taking place over the next 32 days
4) Simeon and Anna recognize Jesus at the temple
5) The Magi show up asking about him
6) By this point, Herod and “all Jerusalem” are disturbed
7) Magi present their gifts and leave
8) Joseph is warned and flees to Egypt
9) Babies slaughtered
10) Herod himself dies
11) Family returns to Israel and settles in Galilee
Matthew alone tells us about #5-10, and Luke alone tells us about #2-4, but Luke’s version, which skips ahead to #11, does leave room for Matthew’s Magi story just as Matthew tells it despite Ehrman’s claim. That is, unless you assume that Luke 2:39 means us to believe that Joseph’s family went straight from Jerusalem to Nazareth immediately after the temple duties, and nothing of importance happened before Nazareth was ultimately reached.
But Luke just doesn’t say that. He is giving a condensed one-verse summary of a twelve-year period of time.
I don’t know if Ehrman has actually checked what conservative scholars say about this supposed problem, but it seems Ehrman has just created an irreconcilable contradiction where none exists. The answer is clear enough already.
Three concluding points:
1) Taking both accounts together does add an interesting perspective on the magi’s arrival in Jerusalem, in that we know from Luke that Anna, the prophetess at the temple, has been hanging out there speaking of Jesus to everyone (Luke 2:38). It may be that most people (including Herod) dismissed her as an old crazy, but only took it seriously when the magi arrived asking about the new king. Herod and the Jerusalem leaders may already have been well aware of what Anna had been saying, but now suspecting maybe she was on to something.
2) The Matthew and Luke stories are quite different, and they are making different points, emphasizing different things, and telling things in such a way as to draw the connections they want to draw with the Old Testament and with the themes they want to highlight. Neither says everything, and each does have an agenda. If the concern is biblical infallibility, none of that is cause for concern.
3) I do like Alex O’Connor as an interviewer. He is a skeptic himself, but I’ve listened to him enough to think that he genuinely tries to understand and steel-man the other side.