The Nativity: Seven Historical Problems

Are the Infancy Narratives Historical?

If there is a rare point of consensus among Gospels scholars today, it is that the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke have little historical value. As one prolific Jesus historian, Maurice Casey, comments, critical scholars have “known for a long time that these entertaining stories are not literally true.”¹ Here Casey is referring not only to non-religious scholars like himself, but to Protestants and Catholics too.

I am inclined to agree with these historians. While the nativity stories are profound narrative expressions of the truth that Jesus is the Son of God, they do not provide us with a reliable historical guide to the circumstances of Jesus’ birth. They are what we may call theologoumena: normative theological truths presented in narrative form.

On the face of it, this may seem a peculiar position to hold. When we open up the infancy narratives, we find what appear to be straightforward historical accounts. We find ourselves flung into the world of Judean history in the early Roman Empire. And apart from the palpably miraculous nature of it all (which may concern the sceptic more than the Christian), there is little which is immediately objectionable.

As we place these narratives in their literary and historical contexts, however, a number of problems appear. And when this bundle of problems is considered together, the nativity stories begin to look less like history and more like narrative theology. Rarely, however, are the relevant issues laid out side-by-side. In what follows then, I outline seven key problems for the historicity of the nativity stories.

#1 Pagan Parallels

First, the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke are highly conventionalised. That is, they draw on tropes found in the birth stories of other ancient heroes. I have examined these tropes in detail in my post, How to Write an Infancy Narrative. For the purposes of this overview, however, we might briefly look at five commonalities: