Episode 59: Year B – Epiphany of the Lord
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, I focus on several details that come from the Gospel reading for this upcoming Sunday’s feast, the Epiphany of the Lord. The Gospel is taken from Matthew 2:1-12. We’ve already talked about some of the details and challenges that arise from this text in episode 7 of the Sunday Catholic Word for Year A, the major one being issues surrounding the star. You can check out that episode for a treatment of those details. Here, we’re going to focus on other details that pertain to the historical reliability of the text. And we’re going to do so in a question-and-answer format.
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Hey everyone,
Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.
I’m Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.
In this episode, I’m going to focus on several details that come from the Gospel reading for this upcoming Sunday’s feast, the Epiphany of the Lord. The Gospel is taken from Matthew 2:1-12. We’ve already talked about some of the details and challenges that arise from this text in episode 7 of the Sunday Catholic Word for Year A, the major one being issues surrounding the star. You can check out that episode for a treatment of those details. Here, we’re going to focus on other details that pertain to the historical reliability of the text. And we’re going to do so in a question-and-answer format.
Let’s get started.
Here’s the first question: How can you believe Matthew is reliable when he disagrees with Luke as to where Joseph and Mary began their married life? In Luke, they are from Nazareth, and in Matthew, they are from Bethlehem.
Agnostic New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman, is famous for making this objection. He did so in his debate with Jimmy Akin. I offer my thoughts on the objection in detail in my article “Where Did the Holy Family Live?” at catholic.com.
I can’t go into all the details here. But I’ll share a few things I say in the article.
The first thing to note is that Ehrman was right to point out that Luke believes that Joseph’s and Mary’s original home was in Nazareth. Luke writes, “Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem” (2:4).
The conflict, at least for Ehrman, comes into play when this is contrasted with Matthew’s account. Rather than starting with a scene in Nazareth, Matthew explains the miraculous conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb by the Holy Spirit (1:19-24) and then immediately says Jesus was born “in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king” (2:1). He then goes on to describe the details of the birth story in 2:18, saying, “Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way.”
So Matthew begins the story of the holy family with Bethlehem, and he says nothing about Joseph and Mary traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem. That’s enough for Ehrman to conclude that Matthew thinks Joseph and Mary started their married life together in Bethlehem, not Nazareth—thus the contradiction with Luke.
The first thing we can say in response is that Matthew never says Joseph and Mary started out their life as a married couple in Bethlehem. Ehrman reads that into the text.
In the verses leading up to the statement that begins “now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem” (2:1), Matthew explains only how Jesus was conceived—virginally, without the cooperation of Joseph—and that Joseph took Mary into his home (2:18-25). He doesn’t tell us the town where this took place. His interest was not where this happened—only that it happened.
So, at least here in these verses, Matthew doesn’t contradict Luke. For Matthew to contradict Luke, he would have say that Mary became pregnant and started living with Joseph in Bethlehem.
But what about Matthew’s apparent seamless transition to “now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem” (2:1)? Doesn’t that show that Matthew thought Joseph and Mary started out in Bethlehem? No, it doesn’t!
The phrase, “now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem,” can be easily read as Matthew skipping over or omitting the Lukan material about Joseph and Mary leaving Nazareth for Bethlehem (on account of the census) and just picking up the story with Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Omitting material doesn’t constitute an error, nor does it make for a contradiction.
Moreover, it was common practice for ancient authors to select material they wished to include and not include. Compare Mark 10:46-52 and Matthew 20:29-34, for example: Mark omits the other blind man who was with Bartimaeus on the roadside. But that doesn’t mean there’s a contradiction between Mark and Matthew.
This leads me to another question, the answer to which employs a similar principle: How can you think the Gospels are reliable when Luke and Matthew contradict each other when it comes to their nativity stories? Luke doesn’t mention any magi, or wise men, being present at Jesus’ birth whereas Matthew does.
My colleague here at Catholic Answers, Trent Horn, has a great “Ready Reason” video that deals with this question entitled Were there Magi At Jesus’ Birth? I’ll summarize his answers here.
First, as Trent points out, Matthew simply could be recording a detail that Luke chooses to omit. Omission of a detail doesn’t entail a contradiction.
Now, this response assumes with the objection that Matthew records the magi being present at Jesus’ birth. But that doesn’t seem to be true according to Matthew’s text.
Our first clue is that Matthew never says the magi were present at the manger. They weren’t even in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. Matthew records in 2;1, “[W]hen Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to ‘Jerusalem.’”
Furthermore, in 2:11, Matthew tells us that the magi went “into the house” where they “saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him.”
Now, someone might counter, “Perhaps they weren’t at the manger immediately after Jesus was born. But we can still loosely speak of the magi being present at Jesus’ birth in the sense of being there around the time of Jesus’ birth.”
Matthew gives us another clue that seems to go against this idea. He tells us in verse 12 that the after the Magi didn’t return back to Herod, like he requested, Herod “killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the Wise Men.”
As Trent points out in his video, along with many other scholars, if the Magi had gone to Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’ birth, then why would Herod need to kill male children two years old or under? That Herod decrees this implies that the time the wise men ascertained that a king had been born was around two years prior to the visit. Herod wanted to cover all his bases and exclude all the male children who could possibly be the sought after as new born king.
Another question that might arise concerning this story, and the last one we’ll consider in this episode, is this: Why would the magi/wise men “from the east” have concluded that the celestial sign signified the birth of a newborn Jewish King? It would seem Matthew made this story up simply for his theological purposes—namely, to convince his Jewish audience that the Jewish prophecies concerning the Gentile nations, like the first reading from Isaiah 60:1-6 reveals, is fulfilled in Jesus.
Here’s what Isaiah 60:1-6 reads,
Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem! Your light has come,
the glory of the Lord shines upon you.
See, darkness covers the earth,
and thick clouds cover the peoples;
but upon you the LORD shines,
and over you appears his glory.
Nations shall walk by your light,
and kings by your shining radiance.
Raise your eyes and look about;
they all gather and come to you:
your sons come from afar,
and your daughters in the arms of their nurses.
Then you shall be radiant at what you see,
your heart shall throb and overflow,
for the riches of the sea shall be emptied out before you,
the wealth of nations shall be brought to you.
Caravans of camels shall fill you,
dromedaries from Midian and Ephah;
all from Sheba shall come
bearing gold and frankincense,
and proclaiming the praises of the LORD.
Is Matthew trying to convince his Jewish audience that this prophecy, along with many others, is fulfilled in Jesus? Absolutely!
But this theological implication doesn’t necessarily mean the story is fabricated. The theological implication could be rooted in and based on the historical event of these Gentile dignitaries coming to worship Jesus—God made flesh, thereby fulfilling the prophecy.
But what about the reason that’s given for the belief that this is fabricated? How could these men “from the east” possibly have interpreted this as a sign for a newborn Jewish king?
One response is what I’ve already mentioned in episode 7 from Year A. There was a series of predictions in the Babylonian text, referred to as Jupiter omens, that were related to the celestial event that took place at the time of Jesus’ birth.
One of them was that if Jupiter reached a halting point in the morning and not some other time during the day, enemy kings would be destroyed.
Second, it was believed by the Babylonians that if Jupiter passes the head of Venus, Akkad, the chief city of Mesopotamia, would be conquered with a strong weapon.
There was also a prediction, summarized by Dag Kihlman [CHECK] in his book The Star of Bethlehem and Babylonian Astrology, that “If Jupiter passes Regulus and gets ahead of it, and afterwards, Regulus, which it had passed and got ahead of it, stays within its setting, someone will rise and kill the king and seize the throne.”
Such predictions would have been considered good news for the people of Babylon, and thus the Magi, because at the time the Parthians were ruling them. They were being ruled by an enemy king.
Now, scholars point out that along with the predictions about the destruction of the enemy king of Akkad, there is mention of a king who will bring about that destruction as being from “Amurru,” which is the Babylonian word for the region west of Babylon.
This region would have included Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Western Syria. And among these regions, Herod was the only powerful king. The west region of Babylon would not have included the Romans because there were no kings within the Roman Empire, only governors. Thus, the Magi go to visit who they know as the Jewish king in response to seeing the heavenly phenomenon of Jupiter, Venus, and Regulus lining up in conjunction with each other, appearing as a single star, which the Magi interpret as a sign that their enemy king is going to be destroyed by a king from “Amurru.”
Now, there’s another possible explanation as to why these men “from the east” would have interpreted the celestial phenomenon as a sign for the birth of a newborn king of the Jews—namely, they were friendly with Jews living in their own land and may have been influenced by the biblical revelation of the Jews concerning prophecies of the star arising from the house of Jacob. In his article “The Mysteries of the Magi,” Jimmy Akin explains,
[I]f the Magi were Persians, they wouldn’t have been polytheists. By this period, the Persians did not believe in the old gods, and their dominant religion was Zoroastrianism. This faith taught the existence of a single, great, all-good creator god to whom they referred as “the Wise Lord” and whom they believed would vanquish evil in the end. They believed in the renovation of the world, the final judgment, and the resurrection of the dead.
If the Magi were Persians, they could have seen themselves as spiritual kin to the Jews and as worshiping the same God—the only true God—using their own terms for him. Additionally, they may well have had contact with Jews living in their own land and thus may have come into contact with biblical revelation that influenced their perception of the star. They could have learned, for example, of the lion as a symbol of Judah, and they could have associated the coming Jewish Messiah with a star.
One of the most famous messianic prophecies is that “a star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel” (Num. 24:17). At that time, this prophecy had long been associated with the Messiah, which is why in the A.D. 130s the messianic pretender Simon bar Kosiba was hailed as “Simon bar Kokhba” (Aramaic, “Simon, son of the Star”).
So, here we have an alternative explanation as to why these wise men “from the east” would interpret the celestial phenomenon as a sign signaling the birth of a newborn Jewish king. Therefore, the magi’s being from the east doesn’t serve as a reason to think Matthew is fabricating the story for his theological ends.
In fact, as Jimmy points out in that same article, that Matthew even includes the astrology of these men testifies to its historical accuracy. Astrology was not popular among the Jews. This is not something that Jewish Christians would fabricate.
Well, my friends, that does it for this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. The readings for this upcoming Epiphany of the Lord gives us ample opportunity to hone in our apologetical skills, especially when it comes to defending the historicity of Matthew’s Gospel.
As always, I want to thank you for subscribing to the podcast. And please be sure to tell your friends about it and invite them to subscribe as well at sundaycatholicword.com. You might also want to check out the other great podcasts in our Catholic Answers podcast network: Cy Kellet’s Catholic Answers Focus, Trent Horn’s The Counsel of Trent, Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery, and Jimmy Akin’s A Daily Defense, all of which can be found at catholic.com.
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I hope you have a blessed Epiphany of the Lord.