Word: birth
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...actual birth announcement is in Luke 2: 11. An angel proclaims, "Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy ... for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." And "suddenly," Luke continues, "there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will...
Exegetes like Eden Theological Seminary's Patterson think the angel's birth announcement embodies the hope that Jesus' coming kingdom will turn political as well as religious worlds upside down. "Luke can't be saying anything other than 'You think you have a son of God in Augustus?'" he says. "'You think you have a savior in the Emperor? It's all foolishness. If you want to know the peace of God, not the Pax Romana, you have to look somewhere else.'" Since the '60s, such readings have inspired Christian social activists from civil rights preachers to Catholic liberation theologians...
...also many of the Greeks," and who is described as crucified in accounts from the next century. Beyond such testimony, there are literary tools used to weigh plausibility. Were the Christian narratives written close after the events? Were there many talkative eyewitnesses? Do they agree? The details of Jesus' birth--in a humble place attended by only a few--are ill suited to the first two criteria. Mark and John do not tell about the Nativity at all. And despite agreeing on the big ideas, Matthew and Luke diverge in conspicuous ways on details of the event. In Matthew...
...might be tempted to abandon the whole Nativity story as "unhistoric," mere theological backing and filling. Or one might take a broader view and, like the constantly evolving scholarship, look anew at these stories and what they tell us not just about the birth of Jesus but also about how his message was spread. "It's virtually impossible to reduce the accounts to a single core narrative," contends L. Michael White, University of Texas at Austin religious historian and author of From Jesus to Christianity. But that may not be the most important point. "What jumps out at close readers...
...conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost"--but he does so in a few brief lines, making the Annunciation proper just one in a sequence of such dreams and concentrating less on additional information about the event than on a series of citations regarding the prophecies the birth will fulfill. Scholars see this as an excellent indicator of Matthew's background and audience. A Jew living in a primarily Jewish community (either in Galilee or what is now Lebanon), he was brought up, like most of his neighbors, on the Jewish Scriptures (which Christians now know...