In an interview on The Real Christmas Story

Tell me about the Raymond Brown book, The Birth of the Messiah.

Raymond Brown’s book is great because it is the only full-length scholarly commentary on the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. For somebody who has grown up listening to the Christmas stories, or has made the effort to read the Gospel stories of Jesus’s birth in Matthew and Luke, but has questions about any of the particular things that are said, questions of historicity, all of that can be found in Brown’s book. Not only is there detailed word-by-word explanation of what every single verse means, but there are also a number of helpful appendices that deal with specific issues that come up in the study of the infancy narratives. For example, the disagreements between Luke and Matthew in terms of Jesus’s genealogy. There’s also the question of the historicity of the census that Luke says was taken while Quirinius was Governor: Luke doesn’t quite seem to be getting his historical information correctly. Also, the question of whether or not Jesus was born in Bethlehem and what the historical arguments for that are. They’re really not very good. Most biblical scholars believe that Jesus was born in Nazareth, in Galilee, and that he was later said to have been born in Bethlehem because that was where the Messiah was believed to have to come from.

According to the Old Testament prophecies, you mean?

Exactly.

But in two of the Gospels it does say he was born in Bethlehem.

Yes, in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, it says he is born in Bethlehem. You would think, since these two infancy narratives agree on it, that that would speak favourably to historical credibility. The problem is that Matthew and Luke have very different ways of explaining why Jesus is born in Bethlehem. In Luke you have the census. The family lives in Nazareth and they only go down to Bethlehem because everybody is required to go back to their home town. Jesus is born while they’re there and then they go back to Nazareth, because that’s where they live. In Matthew, on the other hand, it seems as if Jesus is born in Bethlehem because that’s where his parents live. So when the Magi come and visit Jesus, it says that the star shone over the place where the child was. It doesn’t say it was a manger like in Luke; it says it stood over the house where the child was. Presumably they just lived in Bethlehem and they only left because Herod was trying to kill Jesus and resettled in Nazareth because of that. So Matthew and Luke disagree and Mark never says anything about Jesus being born in Bethlehem. John, interestingly enough, has a scene in chapter 7 where some people are debating whether or not Jesus is the Messiah. And somebody essentially says, ‘He can’t be the Messiah, the Messiah is supposed to come from Bethlehem.’ This is presented in John with no trace of irony, as if John doesn’t even know this tradition that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It’s just stated very bluntly that he wasn’t. So this idea of Jesus being born in Bethlehem, even though that ends up being absolutely central to Christian tradition and the piety surrounding Christmas, there’s not a lot of historical information speaking of it and there’s some very good reasons to doubt that claim.

Brown is looking at sources other than the Gospels themselves? Are there lots of other sources?

He’ll look at the range of available sources. He’ll look at the Gospels, but he’ll also look at later Christian literature, at Jewish literature of the same time, the work of Roman historians, the work of Roman poets. He’s basically taking a very historical approach and trying to understand the infancy narratives as products of the time they were written in the late first century.