How to Write an Infancy Narrative

A Seven-Step Guide to Ancient Birth Stories

How were the births of ancient heroes told?

Unlike most biographies today, which begin at birth, many ‘lives’ – as biographies were called in classical antiquity – don’t tell us anything about their subject’s young life. Like the Gospel of Mark, they skip straight to their adulthood.¹

From time to time, however, an ancient life does outline a child’s origins. For instance, Xenophon writes on the education and early life of the Persian King, Cyrus. Plutarch narrates the births of Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome. And Suetonius describes the birth of Augustus, who lived just a century before.

In my doctoral research on ancient biography, I found that birth stories from Graeco-Roman lives share much in common with the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ birth. To understand how Matthew and Luke selected and composed their narratives, there is much we can glean from similar stories around the same time.

Before we look at some of their common features, however, we might ask whether this comparative exercise is a legitimate one. Some scholars insist that the Gospel writers would not have drawn upon pagan models to narrate the life of a Jewish figure. They contend that the Gospels are unique, and that to draw parallels with Graeco-Roman tales can lead to ‘parallelomania’; seeing parallels where there are none.²

I do not find these arguments persuasive. Such arguments isolate ‘Jewishness’ from all things pagan, as though the evangelists were not writing in Greek and engaging the literary conventions of the Greek world. Indeed, the very genre which they composed – biography – finds no precedent in the Jewish Scriptures.³ The genre was Greek.

As for the idea that the Gospel stories are unique, this is trivially true. All infancy narratives are unique, and no two pagan stories are identical. So it is no surprise that the infancy narratives in the Gospels reflect the evangelist’s distinctive theological and cultural backgrounds. This is no slight on the notion that they also include common cultural tropes about birth stories. The proof is simply in the reading.

A detailed analysis of the ancient birth stories must be left to others.⁴ Yet I believe that the tropes of ancient lives were recurrent enough to sketch a blueprint here. To illustrate this point, I want to offer you a seven-step guide to the features of ancient birth stories. Along the way, we shall see how the Gospels compare.

Step One: Include a genealogy (going back to a king or god…)

The first step in composing an infancy narrative is to establish your subject’s pedigree – their eugeneia, or noble birth. Most biographies do this by mentioning the subject’s father in passing – a strategy taught in educational handbooks of the time.⁵ In longer lives of kings, however, it was sometimes desirable to provide a more robust account of the subject’s lineage. This is where genealogy proper came into play.

Genealogies often traced a king’s family history back to the gods. This rubber-stamped their ‘natural’ authority to rule.⁶ Thus, Plutarch reports a tradition that Alexander the Great was descended patrilineally from Heracles (Alex. 2.1), and Suetonius traces the Roman Emperor Galba’s ancestry back to Jupiter (known to Romans as Zeus) (2.1). In ancient genealogies, it was common to find this overlap of history with myth.

Matthew and Luke follow other biographies in narrating their hero’s genealogy. Like other lives, Matthew’ emphasises Jesus’ royal lineage, tracing it back to David, who is God’s son (Psalm 2:7). While Luke interestingly takes us all the way back to Adam, ‘Son of God’ (3:38). Such accounts fit the genealogical conventions of the time.

Of course, genealogies were not always accurate. We are not to imagine that the Spartan kings actually descended from Heracles, or that Julius Caesar’s great ancestor was King Ancus Marcius. Indeed, given the importance of genealogies to the ancient mindset, it is not surprising that we find some keen to inflate their credentials.

In the case of the Gospels too, several problems persist. While one very early tradition describes Jesus as ‘the seed of David’ (Romans 1:3), the details of this descent are positively shadowy. According to Luke, there were forty-one generations between David and Jesus. But for Matthew, only twenty six. And when it comes to the set of names offered in that same time-frame, only two of them are shared.⁷