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This episode has been edited for clarity and space.
David Capes
Let’s talk about some of the specific things that you find in Matthew’s birth account, and then let’s talk similarly about Luke as well. What’s happening in the birth narratives that we really need to pay attention to.
Caleb Friedeman
I think part 1 cues us up to be attentive when we come to Matthew, besides just resituating the burden of proof, it also really makes us think about sources and how an author is using them. Because sources are one of the historiographic features. And by the way, I don’t think that Matthew cites sources, so he doesn’t use the historiographic feature of sources in his birth material. But what he does do is use sources pretty evidently. I do a pretty close analysis of both the genealogy and the birth narrative proper.
And one of the really fascinating things is a lot of scholars agree that Matthew is using sources for his genealogy, and particularly the Old Testament. Places like 1 Chronicles 1–3, places like Ruth 4 are pretty evidently in view there.
David Capes
That’s right.
Caleb Friedeman
So he’s using these sources and actually following them fairly closely. And where he departs from those sources, he seems to be operating within a range of flexibility that was acceptable for Jewish genealogies. So that’s interesting, and it doesn’t track very well with the idea that this is just legendary. Matthew is following sources. If all he wants to do is write a legendary genealogy, why not just take every big name, Old Testament figure that he admires? Why not put Isaiah in there, regardless of whether they were related in any way? Why not just have a random assortment of the hall of faith or something like that.
David Capes
Yes, why not put Moses in there? Throw Noah in there.
Caleb Friedeman
Exactly, yes. Obviously, he likes Isaiah a lot because he cites him. Why not include people like that in there if this is just legendary genealogies of sources? Though, we find, I think, sources heavily implied by the birth narrative proper. A lot of scholars tend to focus on Matthew’s use of the Old Testament as being something that counts against historiographic intent. I actually think a close analysis of that material pushes the other way.
Because when you look at Matthew’s fulfillment citations, to me it’s quite evident that those citations and the texts that he’s selected depend on the story. Why would you pull this precise group of texts together unless you already had traditions about Jesus that made you think about them? Because most of them are not things that you would just readily relate to a Davidic Messiah figure just in the abstract. You would need to have traditions about Jesus in front of you.
And then you say, okay, how does Jesus fulfill this part of the Old Testament? Oh, I see a connection here. And by the way, you can also pull the citations out, and the story works pretty well without them. And I’m not the first scholar to have observed that. It seems to me that Matthew is pretty evidently working with some existing traditions, and then he is adding these fulfillment quotations into that. He’s working with some kinds of sources when he’s writing this birth material. Those are just a couple of the key points that I make about Matthew. And then for both Matthew and Luke, I talk some about the time elapsed. We can come to that in just a minute.
David Capes
Well, let’s move over to Luke. What are some of the features then that we need to pay attention to in Luke historically?
Caleb Friedeman
Just a few quick points here. I think it makes us take Luke 1:1-4, the preface, very seriously. And what I mean by that is, many of these ancient biographers like Luke will include a blanket note about their sources at the beginning of the biography. Prior to the birth material that seems to apply to the whole. Philo, for example, does this in his life of Moses, and Luke does a similar thing here. Because we have analogies for this kind of thing. It makes us say, wait a second. We can’t just bracket out the birth material when Luke has just made this claim about going back to those who were eyewitnesses and
servants of the word.
We really need to think about how this material relates to that. Luke employs the historiographic feature of sources in Luke 1:1-4, and that applies to the birth material also. Though I argue that Luke actually presents Mary, Jesus’s mother, as a source within the birth material itself. Twice. Luke 2:19, and 2:51, where he describes Mary as preserving all the words in her heart. Based on my published dissertation. I’ve done that work there, and I reprise it here. But I make a fresh case for why we should regard that as a source marker.
And the last thing I’ll say, in terms of a historiographic feature, is I think Luke also employs what I would call negative evaluation in the genealogy. When he says that Jesus was the Son as was thought, of Joseph. So that could be distancing. Where he just saying, I’m not willing to take responsibility for that claim. I think, though, when you read it in light of the rest of the account, where it’s pretty clear that Joseph is not Jesus’ biological father, then it’s suggesting a negative judgment on the idea that Joseph was Jesus’s father in a normal biological sense.
