Christmas in the Bible

UPDV Updated Bible Version

Transcript as of May 22, 2005

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We all know the story about the birth of Jesus Christ including: The Virgin Mary being engaged to Joseph; the Wise Men; the Shepherds; the flight to Egypt; Herod killing the infants, and so on. But is this what really happened?

We're going to find out by looking into the accuracy of what has been passed down to us in our Bibles.

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One of subjects that the Updated Version has researched for accuracy, concerns the events surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ.

Almost all of the information we have about Christmas in the Bible is in the first two chapters of Matthew and the first three chapters of Luke.

Let's take a look at Matthew.

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Here we have a rough timeline of the Birth of Jesus according to Matthew.

It's not entirely clear in Matthew how much time passes between some of these events, so the times in this chart are just approximations.

In Matthew we have the story which involves Mary being found pregnant while she was only engaged. And while Joseph is considering divorcing her, an angel appears, assuring him that everything is ok.

Then after Jesus is born, wisemen from another country follow a star to Jerusalem, looking for the King of the Jews. And Herod asks them when the star appeared, and to report back to him. Then the wisemen are led by the star which stood over where Jesus was. They find him and opened all types of gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrh. And before they leave, they are warned by God in a dream, not to return to Herod.

Then, Joseph has another dream where an angel tells him to flee to Egypt because Herod is going to try to kill Jesus. So Joseph and Mary take Jesus to Egypt. Then, Herod kills all the infants in Bethlehem and the surrounding area, two years old and younger.

After Herod dies, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream in Egypt telling him to return to Israel. So he goes back, then is warned in another dream on the way back not to go to Judea. So instead he goes to Nazareth.

Quite a dramatic series of events. Did any of that really happen? Let's find out.

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In researching the birth story that we have in Matthew, some serious problems began to surface. In about the last 100 years, additional evidence has been found that shows what we have in Matthew in our Bibles today is not what was there originally. This problem is not limited to just the birth narrative, but is actually found throughout Matthew.

We're going to break this up this discussion of Matthew into three sections.

First. We'll talk about what evidence there is.

Second. We'll go through the types of differences and some examples of them.

And then third, we'll discuss what needs to be done about this.

So first, here is some of the evidence which shows that what we have today in Matthew is not what was there originally.

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One of the first sources that has some good comprehensive information about this, is a relatively short publication, 74 pages long, by Shlomo Pines, called "The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christianity According to a New Source". This came out in 1966.

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What Mr. Pines evaluates, is an Arabic manuscript from about the year 1000 AD. As far as he knows, this text has never been studied before.

The importance of this document, is, that it appears to use as a reference, independent sources that go back to the very beginnings of Christianity.

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We read on page 23 regarding the Gospel of Matthew, "It seems to be pre-supposed that the original Gospel...did not contain an account of the birth and life of Jesus."

What he means by this, is that Matthew originally did not record a story about the birth of Jesus Christ. Matthew also did not record much of the material which we might call the narration. The narration is the extra material which ties together the events and teachings of Jesus in a logical sequence.

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And then, he goes on to discuss the importance of this. The importance is, it is an independent tradition, that seems to answer a problem that has long been debated.

What is that problem?

Well, from other sources, we have a quote from Eusebius, who was a third century historian who lived from about 260 AD to 339 AD. Now at one point, Eusebius quotes Papias. Now Papias lived from around 60 AD to 130 AD. This was very close to the time of the original writings of the Gospels. And Papias said:

"Matthew compiled the sayings in the Hebrew language, and everyone translated them as well as he could."

The question has been, What does the word 'sayings' mean?

As English readers, we generally expect to see books written in a narrative format. That is to say, we have a running story, in chronological order, of what the characters said. And we also have an ongoing narration which tells us what is going on and when it is happening. But that is not always the case in other writings. We often see writings that merely contain sayings, that is, just collections of various sayings or events. We also see that many times, these collections of sayings, are not written down in chronological order.

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In order to figure out what has happened here, it is important to understand this concept of something written as 'sayings'. So let's look at how a collection of sayings in Matthew might have appeared.

What we would expect to see are various sayings or events together in one place, but not necessarily related to each other.

So, we could start with something like:

Jesus said, The harvest indeed is plenteous, but the workers are few. Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth workers into his harvest.

After that, might be:

Jesus said, To him who strikes you on the [one] cheek offer also the other; and from him who takes away your cloak don't withhold your coat also.

And then after that, we could have:

Jesus said, No man can serve as a slave to two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or he will hold to one, and despise the other. You can't serve as a slave to God and mammon.

So, assume this goes on like this for page after page. And then, pretend that you come across it and try to make it into something that resembles a book as we know it. How would you go about putting this together? It would be very similar to a big jigsaw puzzle.

So what we have in Matthew today, is not just a translation, but an attempt by someone to re-arrange the original material into a smooth story. This might not be so bad, if it were done faithfully.

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Now let's go back to the document we were looking at a few minutes ago.

We now have two independent sources concerning the origin of the book of Matthew.

This first one states, Matthew originally did not appear to contain the account of the birth and life of Jesus. Which means that besides not having a story about the birth of Jesus, it was originally arranged only as a collection of 'sayings' like we just discusssed.

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And the second one, was the quote from Papias, who lived around 60 AD to 130 AD. And he said,

"Matthew compiled the sayings in the Hebrew language, and everyone translated them as well as he could."

The account of Matthew that we have is not in Hebrew, or even Aramaic. Our version is written in Greek. So what we have, is one of these translations from the original sayings of Matthew. But that's not all we have. We also have material that was added or changed by someone at a later time. According to these two witnesses, someone later on must have added the account of the birth of Christ to Matthew.

Those are two witnesses, let's look briefly at a third.

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This third one I only want to go through quickly -- just to let you know there is a third witness. The source for this material was in a dissertation by Glenn Koch in 1976.

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This third witness is a writing, in about the year 375 AD, by Epiphanius. He also is aware, that there are copies of Matthew, which do not contain the events surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ.

So what we have so far, are three, independent witnesses, confirming that early versions of Matthew were significantly different than what we have today -- especially when it comes to the story about the birth of Jesus.

We now see that the text of Matthew has been changed. But who did it, and why?

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There was a study which was published in the Spring 2002 edition of, "Perspectives in Religious Studies," by Derek Dodson. It was titled, "Dreams, the Ancient Novels, and the Gospel of Matthew: An Intertextual Study". In this 13 page article, Mr. Dodson compares the dreams found in ancient Greek novels with the dreams found in the Gospel of Matthew. And what he finds will shed some light on the editor of Matthew.

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This study does a detailed analysis and compares the style of dreams in Greek novels to dreams in Matthew. And what the study reveals is, that the use of dreams in Matthew is very similar to the use of dreams in Greek literature.

This means, that either the original author of Matthew also happened to be a writer familiar with this type of Greek literature; Or, more likely, the same person who later added the extra material to Matthew, was also familiar with Greek novels.

This person could also have been the one who translated Matthew into Greek. And, at the same time, he used his Greek writing skills to transform the original Matthew into what he thought was a much more exciting story.

This is similar to what you might find by comparing a book which you have read, to a movie at a theater which is based on that same book. They can be quite a bit different. The movie often goes way beyond what was in the book.

Take a movie such as the Ten Commandments, and compare it with the original account in the Bible. There are all kinds of dramatic events in the movie which are not anywhere in the original.

And that's what we have today in Matthew -- an exaggerated version of the original.

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We have now gone over supporting evidence of Matthew being changed by a later editor. We also have a good idea of the creative license that this person used in writing his version of the Gospel.

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There are essentially three categories of changes that were done to Matthew.

We've already looked at additions to the text, such as nearly the entire birth account.

But the changes go beyond just additions. There are also exagerrations where the writer changed the Gospel of Matthew in order to enhance the story.

Let's look at two examples of this.

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The first example is in Matthew 8:28, which is an account of when Jesus meets either one or two people who are possessed by demons. He later casts out these demons.

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The verse in Matthew reads:

And when he came to the other side into the country of the Gadarenes, there met him two possessed with demons, coming forth out of the tombs, exceedingly fierce, so that no man could pass by that way.

So the facts in Matthew that we want to look at are: he says that there were two people who were possessed, and that they were so fierce that no man could pass by that way.

Two people -- nobody could pass by.

But that's not what the other Gospels say.

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In Mark we read the same account, but he says there is only one man, not two. And also, he only says the man could not be bound any more even with a chain. Nothing is mentioned about being so fierce that nobody could pass by as we read in Matthew.

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In Luke, we also see that there was only one man.

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And also that he was bound and able to break the bands apart.

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In comparing Matthew to Mark and Luke, we start to see a pattern of exagerration in Matthew.

Matthew says there were two people who were demon possessed that Jesus met. Mark and Luke say, only one.

Matthew says they were so fierce that nobody could pass by that way. Mark and Luke only say that he could not be bound.

This is just one example of what the editor of Matthew did to enhance the story.

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Here's a second example where Jesus meets either one or two blind men near Jericho and gives them their sight. Again, we see the exagerration in Matthew. Matthew says two blind men were healed by Jesus. On the other hand, Mark and Luke agree that only one blind man was healed.

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Now we've gone over two categories of changes that were done to Matthew.

First, there were additions to the text, such as most of the birth narrative in the first two chapters.

Second, there were exagerrations.

And, third, we also have many verses which are in the wrong place. This type of problem is found throughout Matthew. It's a serious issue because using the wrong context can give the wrong meaning.

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So far, we've seen the evidence of Matthew being changed.

And, we've reviewed the types of problems found in Matthew.

So what do we do about this?

It seems we have three choices.

1) We could leave Matthew as it is. However, this doesn't seem to be a good solution. The Bible is no place for a work of fiction.

2) We could remove it entirely. Although this might be necessary, we may not have to go this far as long as we can find another reasonable solution.

3) We can fix it. We have three other Gospel accounts, so it should be possible to accurately reconstruct Matthew. We can also look at the type of changes that were made to Matthew. This can show us what kind of material to look for that was changed.

Accordingly, this third option is the one followed by the Updated Version: The text of Matthew has been reconstructed.

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The process followed to reconstruct Matthew consisted of three general steps:

The first step was to remove the material in Matthew which could not be found anywhere else. Since we already know that the extra birth account managed to get in, we have no way of knowing if anything else that was added is valid or not. So, if we can't find the material somewhere else, such as Mark, Luke, or John, it was not included in Matthew. Also, any exaggerations or other types of changes were removed or made to conform to the other accounts.

The second step was to keep the material that was found elsewhere. However, it had to be reorganized so it would be in the right context.

The third and last step was that after all this, it became apparent that the traditional chapter and verse numbering system could not be kept. So the book of Matthew was renumbered based on its new sequence.

If you would like more information on what was changed and why, there are supporting documents on the updated.org website. The website also contains conversion charts between the traditional numbering system and the new one.

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And now, we can figure out what did and did not happen during Christmas.

We start, by removing the information from Matthew that is not supported. So everything from Chapter 1 verse 18 through the end of Chapter 2 has been removed.

This means the following information or events no longer have a place in the account of the birth of Christ:

Joseph being engaged to a virgin

Joseph deciding to divorce

The wise men from the east

The star

The flight to Egypt

Herod killing the infants

And the return from Egypt

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So Matthew is not going to be much help in figuring out what happened at the time of the birth of Christ. If we want to see what really did take place, we'll have to find out from Luke.

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Here we have a timeline of the birth of Christ. Earlier, we looked at a chart like this, but it only had Matthew on it. This chart has both Matthew and Luke. Luke is at the top in Green. And Matthew is at the bottom in Blue.

But Luke tells us what really happened. Let's go over Luke's account:

First we have:

1) Both Mary and Joseph already living in Nazareth.

2) An angel appears to Mary, not to Joseph.

3) Several months later, Mary and Joseph travel together to Bethlehem.

4) Jesus is born in a manger.

5) At the time his birth, angels appear to Shepherds who come to visit Jesus. Not Wise Men.

6) We then know, that after 40 days from his birth, Jesus is brought to Jerusalem. We know it's 40 days because of the timing of the purification mentioned at Luke 2 and in Leviticus 12.

7) Then, the infant Jesus is presented in Jerusalem and the sacrifice is made for him according to Law.

8) Afterwards, they all simply return to Nazareth. They don't go to Egypt and back.

9) And, once every year, they return to Jerusalem for the Passover.

That's essentially all there is to it. It's pretty straight forward.

Except, for one last thing...

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What was the relationship between the parents of Jesus?

We have established that the birth account in Matthew is not original. So we can no longer look to it for explicity telling us if Mary was a virgin or if she was only engaged to Joseph near the time that Christ was born. We are now left with only a few verses in the Bible that give us this information.

Let's take a look at them.

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In Luke 1:26 and 27, traditionally we have read:

Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.

This is how it used to read -- calling Mary a virgin, and only that she was betrothed to Joseph.

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It should read:

Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to the wife of a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and her name was Mary.

Here we see Mary being called the wife of Joseph.

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This is a comparison of the two. On the left, is the way it used to read. On the right, is the reading in the Updated Version.

We see that instead of Mary being a virgin betrothed to Joseph, she is actually married to Joseph. This modification appears to have happened at some early point during the transmission of our Greek texts.

Now, the change here is conjectural. That is to say, there is not an actual manuscript that reads this way. But, the support for this reading comes from the pattern of changes to the other parts in Luke which we do have evidence of. Now we will look at those.

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We have only been able in the last 100 years to revisit these readings about Mary being engaged. The reason is that a little over 100 years ago, two significant early manuscripts were found. They are what we now call the Old Syriac. Syriac is a language somewhat similar to Hebrew -- or Aramaic which was probably the language that was originally spoken during the time of Christ. These manuscripts are dated as going back to about the third or fourth century. One of these two manuscripts is quite important, as it does not always follow as closely to our traditional sources. So it gives us, an independent account to evaluate what the original reading was.

What this manuscript shows in Luke 2:5 is best explained by Agnes Smith. She was the one who did most of the work on the discovery and publication of this manuscript.

In referring to Mary, she says:

The Syriac versions, as we have said, leave us in no doubt about her position, for in Luke 2:5 they call her Joseph's wife - no ambiguous words such as espoused, or espoused wife, are used.

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Here's how Luke 2:4 and 5 read, based on the this Syriac version:

We start in verse 4:

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea (Jew-day-a), to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David;

Then in verse 5, traditionally we read:

to enroll himself with Mary, who was betrothed to him, being pregnant.

But, following the Old Syriac, we now read:

to enroll himself with Mary, his wife, being pregnant.

Mary was not engaged. She was Joseph's wife. And had been for some time.

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The one other place we can look to is Luke Chapter 1 verse 34:

Here we have the scene where Mary asks the angel how it is that she will become pregnant.

Traditionally we read,

And Mary said to the angel, How will this be,

seeing I don't know a man?

However, we now read:

And Mary said to the angel, How will this be?

I am not able to have children.

So the problem is that Mary was not able to have children. It wasn't that she had not yet known a man.

The reason for this change, is due to a misunderstanding by most of our Greek manuscripts.

Based on the Syriac, which is close to the Aramaic which would have been spoken originally, there is a definition we can look at for the word which is causing this misunderstanding.

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In this Syriac English dictionary, we see that one of the meanings of this word is in the context of refusing to give out in due time, to fail to produce as the earth her seed, the womb a fetus, or a tree its fruit.

This closely describes someone who is not able to have children.

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We can also trace this in a Greek manuscript that we have. Most of our manuscripts use a word meaning to 'know' a man. However, this manuscript uses a word which means to 'share' used with a man. And, if we look up this entry in a Greek dictionary, we find this:

"as I am unable to take part in the cultivation."

Again, we find support that Mary was simply unable to have children.

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To summarize, Mary and Joseph were not engaged near the time of the birth of Christ. They were already married.

Mary was not a virgin at this time.

She was in the earlier years of her life, still considered a young woman, but was not able to have children. She was barren.

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Lastly, there is the quote in Isaiah 7:14 which in almost all Bibles reads as follows:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you+ a sign: look, a virgin will be pregnant, and give birth to a son, and will call his name Immanuel.

This reading is because most of our Bibles translate this verse using a Greek version of the Old Testament. However, everywhere else, the Old Testament is almost always translated directly from the Hebrew, the original language.

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Here's how the verse should read, by following the Hebrew:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you+ a sign: look, the young woman will be pregnant, and give birth to a son, and will call his name Immanuel.

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Comparing the two, we see that Isaiah did not say 'a virgin', but rather, 'the young woman.'

So, after looking at this last verse, we find there is no support in the Bible for saying that Mary was engaged or a virgin near the time of the birth of Christ.

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Now, back to our timeline of Christmas, where we make this final note about the birth of Jesus. And that is, that Joseph and Mary were already married for some time, but unable to have children.

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As we mentioned before, the problems in Matthew affect more than just the birth of Christ. Further details are available by reading Matthew in the Updated Version as well as the information on the www.updated.org web site.

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This concludes the presentation on Christmas in the Bible.

Thank you for your time.

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