Herod and Christ - A look at Matthew and Luke

[Digital_Savior]

CLAIM: The infancy narratives regarding Jesus contradict. According to Luke 2:21-39, Jesus was taken to the Temple in Jerusalem eight days after his birth, and then the family go up to Nazareth. In Matthew 2:14-23, after being born the family flee into Egypt and stay there until Herod dies, even on returning, they avoid Judea and go up to Nazareth.

ANSWER: Jesus was not taken to the Temple eight days after His birth. He was circumcised eight days after His birth.

Luke 2:21 - On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise him, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he had been conceived.

He was not taken to the Temple until the days of purification were complete for Mary.

Leviticus 12:1-4 - The LORD said to Moses, 2 "Say to the Israelites: 'A woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son will be ceremonially unclean for seven days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period. 3 On the eighth day the boy is to be circumcised. 4 Then the woman must wait thirty-three days to be purified from her bleeding. She must not touch anything sacred or go to the sanctuary until the days of her purification are over.

As you can see above, this would have been forty days after His birth. When Joseph and Mary "...had performed all things according to the law of the Lord", they returned to Nazareth.

Jesus was born in a manger, for there was nowhere else for them to stay.

Luke 2:4-6 - So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

That same night, shepherds were told of the miraculous birth, and made haste to go see the Child.

Luke 2:15-18 - When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."

16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.

On the eighth day, Jesus was circumcised (Lk 2:21), and after forty days, he was brought to the Temple (Lk 2:22; Lev 12:1-4). After the sacrifices were completed, they returned to Nazareth (Lk 2:39).

Luke 2:21 - On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise him, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he had been conceived.

Luke 2:22 - When the time of their purification according to the Law of Moses had been completed, Joseph and Mary took Jesus to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.

Leviticus 12:1-4 - The LORD said to Moses, 2 "Say to the Israelites: 'A woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son will be ceremonially unclean for seven days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period. 3 On the eighth day the boy is to be circumcised. 4 Then the woman must wait thirty-three days to be purified from her bleeding. She must not touch anything sacred or go to the sanctuary until the days of her purification are over.

Luke 2:39 - When Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth.

After Jesus had been born (notice, Matthew doesn't specify how long after), the wise men came to Jerusalem following a star which they had seen in the East.

Matthew 2:1-2 - After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 2 and asked, "Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him."

Herod was curious about the time of the star's appearing.

Matthew 2:7 - Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared.

The wise men were sent to Bethlehem, which was the birthplace of the Child.

Matthew 2:8 - He (Herod) sent them to Bethlehem and said, "Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him."

It is assumed by many that they found Jesus there, but the text does not indicate such. We again read of the star, that it directed them to where He was. One should not think they needed the star to guide them on the five mile walk from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.

Taking into account what Luke reveals about the brief time Joseph and Mary spent in Bethlehem, it is logical to conclude that the star guided the wise men to Nazareth, where Jesus was found in a "house", not a manger.

Matthew 2:11 - On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh.

Recall, while in Bethlehem, they were not at a house, but rather at an inn, and more specifically, in the barn of the inn.

Having worshipped Jesus, the wise men departed, but were instructed not to return to Herod.

Matthew 2:12 - And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

Likewise, Joseph was instructed to flee to Egypt with Mary and the Child, for Herod would seek His life.

Matthew 2:13 - When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him."

Herod, realizing he had been deceived by the wise men, decreed that all male children, age 2 and under in Bethlehem and its districts should be put to death.

Matthew 2:16 - When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

Herod used the timing of the star spoken of by the wise men to determine the age of the Child. It was possible that He was up to two years of age at the time of this evil decree.

Furthermore, Herod understood that the Child was perhaps not in Bethlehem any longer, extending the scope of the decree to include regions around Bethlehem also.

Having left Nazareth (not Bethlehem), Joseph, Mary and Jesus remained in Egypt until word came from an angel of the Lord that Herod was dead.

Matthew 2:19-20 - After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt 20 and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child's life are dead."

It appears that Joseph had originally thought they might settle in Judea, but knowing that Archelaus, Herod's son was reigning, and receiving a warning in a dream, he changed his mind and returned to Nazareth, in Galilee. Thus, Jesus would be known as a Nazarene, for Nazareth would be His home town.

Matthew 2:23 - ...and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: "He will be called a Nazarene.

Forty days after His birth, Luke says Jesus was taken home to Nazareth. Perhaps as much as two years after His birth, Joseph was commanded to flee with the Child to Egypt.

When the common errors that have been assumed by many are maintained (ie. that the shepherds and wise men were all at the manger scene on the night Jesus was born; that the wise men found Jesus in Bethlehem; etc.), then there appears to be contradiction.

However, the two accounts provide different information about different parts of Jesus' infancy. When understood correctly, the accounts agree and compliment one another.

There is no contradiction.

[Apoxyus]

No one wants to read through all that fiction to have 1 contradiction corrected ever so slightly.

Also, What faith are you exactly? Christian, cause I know Jehovah Witnesse's that are better about knowing the bible than you. Everything you post is someone else's view of those words(Your Pastor Probably). It's pathetic that you even try.

[Digital_Savior]

Then kindly keep your affliction, diarrhea of the fingers, out of my thread.

Thank you.

[Elephantitis Man]

And you don't find it peculiar to all the books but Matthew left out the infanticide???

What about the fact that Josephus, who wrote down all of Herod's other wrong doings (including the execution of 2 of his own sons) somehow missed this???

The earliest independent source of the infanticide didn't pop up until 300 years later!

And you say the 3 wise men went to Joseph's house in Nazareth? Then why do so many church Christmas plays and nativity scenes portray the wise men as there, that night, at the manger?! Is this misleading? A church misleading its followers?



This isn't the only problem between the birth stories in Matt and Luke. We totally skipped over Luke mentioning that Joseph went to Bethlehem for the first census that took place while Quirinus was governor of Syria (before Jesus was born), while Quirinus didn't even come into power to conduct the census until after Herod the Great was dead.

And I've seen the apologetic for this too. Oh, and there's the discrepency between the family lines in Matthew and Luke. And the apologetic for that too.

That's what? 3 apologetics necessary in the first 2 chapters of Matthew and Luke?

It's almost like a puzzle that doesn't fit together so it's duct taped together by layer after layer of apologetics. You'd think the divinely inspired word of God would be a little more clear, wouldn't you?

Of course not!

God works in mysterious ways!

[Digital_Savior]

quote:Originally posted by Elephantitis Man:

And you don't find it peculiar to all the books but Matthew left out the infanticide???

This thread isn't about infanticide.

It's about contradictions regarding Jesus' whereabouts at certain ages.

I have refuted the claim that Matthew and Luke contradict each other, which was the purpose of this thread.

Also, Matthew 2:16 describes Herod's orders to kill the children.

It was Luke that didn't mention it.

quote:What about the fact that Josephus, who wrote down all of Herod's other wrong doings (including the execution of 2 of his own sons) somehow missed this???

The earliest independent source of the infanticide didn't pop up until 300 years later!

Why didn't Luke mention it ?

Luke had urgent and compelling reasons for carefully avoiding the whole subject of Herod and the Magi.

The Magi were Parthians. The Romans had made repeated but unsuccessful efforts to conquer Parthia (Persia), and the Parthians fought back aggressively (capturing Jerusalem in the fifth century AD).

Even when the two empires were not fighting, they were constantly maneuvering, seeking allies and buffer states and spheres of influence, and trying to put rulers favorable to themselves on the thrones of the various minor principalities of the Middle East.

In the closing years of Nero's reign, the Parthians put a pro-Parthian king, Tiridates, on the throne of Armenia, thereby causing an international crisis, which was finally resolved by allowing Tiridates to keep his throne on condition that he come to Rome and do homage to Nero for it.

Luke, who may have been writing his gospel at the very time of the Tiridates affair, was not ignorant of Imperial politics. He had accompanied Paul when Paul went to Rome to be tried before Nero, and he knew that Christianity was in danger of being declared treasonable. That its founder had been executed by a Roman governor on a charge of claiming to be King of the Jews was, to put it mildly, awkward.

The story of the Magi would have been understood to mean that when he was born a group of Parthians had acknowledged his claim to be King of the Jews, and had supported that claim against the rival claim of Herod, the pro-Roman king. It was bad enough to have Christians suspected of being part of a Jewish National Liberation Front. To have them suspected of Parthian connections would have been ten times worse.

Luke was no fool. Whatever he knew about the Magi he kept to himself.

Why didn't Josephus record this horrific decree ?

This sort of argument from silence is, to say the least, precarious. Let us consider a modern parallel.

In 1942, "Butcher" Heydrich, the head of the Nazi occupation forces in Czechoslovakia, was assassinated near the village of Lidice. Hitler ordered the village destroyed. All the men in the village were shot, the women sent off to die in concentration camps, and the very young children (too young to remember their origins when they grew up) put in orphanages. The idea was to blot out the village and all memory of it.

It was a far more drastic action than the killing of at most thirty babies. Yet, dropping in at my neighborhood library and checking the shelves, I find seven biographies of Hitler, five of which make no mention of Lidice, whatsoever. Yet they are written by anti-Hitler writers, who would be eager to list his atrocities.

Those who infer from the silence of Josephus that the Bethlehem Masssacre never occurred ought to infer by the same sort of reasoning that the Lidice Massacre never occurred either. That Josephus does not mention something proves very little.

His history covers the period of Hillel, one of the half-dozen greatest rabbis of all time. (The Jewish student center at any non-Jewish college or university is normally called the Hillel House.) But Josephus never mentions Hillel.

Josephus was born more than forty years after Christ and wrote his histories at least eighty years afterwards. He is relying on the testimony of others and not on his own memory or personal knowledge of events. It is perfectly possible that he knew nothing of the Bethlehem Massacre. (It is NOT possible that he knew nothing of Hillel.)

We note that in Josephus' account of the reign of Herod, he gives dates for the first part of the reign but not for the last part. (This is why not everyone agrees that Herod died in 4 BC.) The simplest explanation of this is that he got most or all of his information about Herod's earlier years from a single source that gave dates, and that when this document ran out he had to fall back on others -- very probably one other -- that did not give dates.

If his source(s) did not mention the Massacre of the Innocents, then Josephus would not have known about it. He has not done extensive research into Herod's reign, consulting many sources. If he had, he would know the dates.

Assuming that he did know of the Massacre, might he have had any reason for not mentioning it? Yes, and the the same reason would account for his not mentioning Hillel. Hillel, like Jesus, was a descendant of David, was of the traditional royal line of the Jews. Josephus had two reasons for not mentioning Davidids: one personal, and one political.

Josephus was himself of the Hasmonean, or Maccabean, family. The Hasmoneans were a priestly family who had led the fight for Jewish independence against the Greek successors of Alexander the Great, and had established an independent Jewish commonwealth, with themselves as priest-kings, to the distress of many pious Jews, who welcomed their military exploits, but who maintained that, by express Divine command, only descendents of Zadok could be high priests, and only descendents of David could be kings.

Out of sheer familial jealousy, therefore, Josephus would say as little about the Davidids as he could. He had another reason for silence. He had saved his own life in the war against Rome by deserting to the Roman side and proclaiming that the Jewish prophecies that a man would come out of Palestine and rule the whole world applied, not to any Jew, but to the Roman general Vespasian, whose military exploits in suppressing the Jewish revolt were in fact a prelude to his being proclaimed emperor. In order to make this line stick, he had to ignore the plain statements that this world-ruler to come would be a descendent of David, and the easiest way to do this was to ignore Jesus, Hillel, and the whole Davidic dynasty. Source

quote:And you say the 3 wise men went to Joseph's house in Nazareth?

The Bible says "wise men". There is no indication of how many, only that they brought 3 different kinds of gifts: Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh. People have mistakenly thought this meant there were 3 Magi.

I also didn't say they went to Joseph's house. I said they went to the house where Joseph, Mary, and Jesus were.

Since they were in a house, they weren't still hanging out in a manger.

quote:Then why do so many church Christmas plays and nativity scenes portray the wise men as there, that night, at the manger?! Is this misleading? A church misleading its followers?

Because they have not taken the time to study the Bible, as they have been commanded.

They make us look stupid, because they wear their ignorance on their sleeve, for all the world to see.

This is what happens when mankind does not take God seriously.

quote:This isn't the only problem between the birth stories in Matt and Luke. We totally skipped over Luke mentioning that Joseph went to Bethlehem for the first census that took place while Quirinus was governor of Syria (before Jesus was born), while Quirinus didn't even come into power to conduct the census until after Herod the Great was dead.

Make a thread.

quote:And I've seen the apologetic for this too. Oh, and there's the discrepency between the family lines in Matthew and Luke. And the apologetic for that too.

Make a thread.

quote:That's what? 3 apologetics necessary in the first 2 chapters of Matthew and Luke?

The only thing necessary is education.

quote:It's almost like a puzzle that doesn't fit together so it's duct taped together by layer after layer of apologetics. You'd think the divinely inspired word of God would be a little more clear, wouldn't you?

That is certainly how it SHOULD seem to someone who doesn't understand the Bible.

It's crystal clear, when a person studies it seriously. That requires prayer, and discernment.

quote:Of course not!

God works in mysterious ways!

Anytime you want to stop being a jerk is fine with me.

(I know you thought you were being clever, but sadly...you failed.)

[hyroglyphx]

"When Augustus heard that Herod king of the Jews had ordered all the boys in Syria under the age of two years to be put to death and that the king's son was among those killed, he said, "I'd rather be Herod's pig than Herod’s son." -Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius: A Roman historian

[Elephantitis Man]

quote:Originally posted by hyroglyphx:"When Augustus heard that Herod king of the Jews had ordered all the boys in Syria under the age of two years to be put to death and that the king's son was among those killed, he said, "I'd rather be Herod's pig than Herod’s son." -Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius: A Roman historian

Ambrosius wrote this in the 4th Century. Not exactly a first-hand account.

[Digital_Savior]

Josephus wrote, "I was born to Matthias in the first year of the reign of Caius Caesar." which was in 37 CE.

Josephus was born 4 years after Jesus died, and we know this because Jesus was crucified when he was 33 years old, which was in 33 CE.

Therefore, Josephus was not alive during the lifetime of Herod, either, since Herod died when Jesus was still a baby.

So, shall we discount the historical documentation of Josephus as well, since it wasn't a first-hand account ?

Also, you mentioned that Herod killed two of his sons, and that is incorrect. Historical records show that he killed 3; Aristobulus, Alexander, and Antipater.

[napoleon_complex]

Jesus wasn't born in 1 CE.

He was born in 6 BC. I'd expect you of all people to know that.

[hyroglyphx]

quote:Originally posted by Elephantitis Man:

Ambrosius wrote this in the 4th Century. Not exactly a first-hand account.

Where is all of this coming from? Here's what I see all too much of: People enjoy trying to bring down the Bible, and the Bible only. They have a daunting challenge, because no other collection of writings has ever been more verified and attested for than the Bible. Its absolutely ridiculous to claim otherwise. Archeology continually proves the Bible's accuracy. Secular history continually corroborates Biblical history. So for you to harangue the Bible with as much ferocity as you do, places all of classical antiquity into question... Interestingly, we don't see you attempting to debunk the historicity of Siddhartha or Plato. There is far less supporting them and their writings, but you don't question them at all. So why do you feel compelled to pick on the Bible, only? What is your motivation, especially when its keeps proving its value, over and over again?