Word: matthew
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...womb appeared to be part of a theological progression. The very first Christians thought that Jesus had become God's Son at his Resurrection; Mark, the first Gospel written, seemed to locate the moment at his baptism in the Jordan; and it is only by the time that Matthew and Luke were writing that believers had dated his Sonship to before his birth. Thus, if Mary was the eyewitness source for the Holy Spirit's direct involvement in Jesus' birth (and who else could it be?), her testimony was lost to Christians for half a century before Luke somehow picked...
...Christians, who see Luke's line that "Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart," as a sign that she simply delayed telling people, and who must fight claims, some 2,000 years old, that the Nativities got the virginal conception wrong. Fellow Jews early on challenged Matthew's Gospel assertion that it fulfilled a prophecy in the Book of Isaiah that the Messiah would be born to a "virgin." (Isaiah's Hebrew actually talks of a "young girl"; Matthew was probably working from a Greek mistranslation.) Critics may also have alleged that Jesus' birth early in Mary...
...possible implication that the Gospel writers imagined the Holy Spirit and Mary engaged in the kind of physical divine-human intercourse that vividly marked many Greek and Roman myths, is one of the most rancorous areas of the new scholarship. Brown found no merit in it. "Every line of Matthew's infancy narrative echoes Old Testament themes," he argued. "Are we to think that he accepted all that background but then violated horrendously the stern Old Testament [rule] that God was not a male who mated with women?" Other scholars claim that Luke especially might have been familiar with pagan...
Or would "O little town of Nazareth" be more accurate? Strange as it may seem, a majority of scholars now lean in the latter direction. Those sticking with Bethlehem point out, not unreasonably, that both Matthew and Luke place Jesus' birth there. The skeptics note that they reach the town by such extravagantly different means that one has to wonder whether they weren't trying too hard to get there...
...Matthew's account, Joseph and Mary are Bethlehem residents and Jesus is born at home. But his very birth necessitates their flight to Egypt (and eventually Nazareth) because Jerusalem's vicious regent, Herod, is determined to murder the Bethlehem child he has learned will one day be King of the Jews. None of that gripping story, however, can be found in Luke. According to Luke, Joseph and Mary, Nazarenes, are on a brief if inconvenient visit to Joseph's ancestral home of Bethlehem, complying with a vast census ("All the world should be enrolled") ordered by the Roman Emperor Augustus...