Word: matthewes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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MOST CHRISTMAS WORSHIPPERS, OF COURSE, are not currently focusing tightly on the Gospels' backstory. In this holiday season, they will be less interested in analyzing Matthew's message than in celebrating it, less concerned about parsing Luke's sentiments than in singing them. The beauty of Christmas carols is that they can retrieve the drama that the eye may quickly skip over on the page. Luke's description of "a multitude of the heavenly host praising God" is certainly vivid. But does it truly express--the way, perhaps, the single word glory, extended in five-part harmony over four delirious...
...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's Nativity, the angelic Annunciation is made to Joseph while Luke's is to Mary. Matthew's offers wise men and a star and puts the baby Jesus in a house; Luke's prefers shepherds...
...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," he says, "is Matthew's and Luke's different roads to performing the vital theological task of their age: fitting key themes and symbols from Christianity's parent tradition, Judaism, into an emerging belief in Jesus and also working in ideas familiar to the Roman culture that surrounded them." Thus the Nativity stories provide a fascinating...
There is no better introduction to the differences between Matthew's and Luke's approaches to the Nativity story than their tellings of the first key scene in the drama: the angelic announcement that a very special child will be born...
...Matthew's version, an unnamed angel brings the news to Joseph in a dream. Matthew delivers the important information straightforwardly enough--"fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is 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...