Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?
WHERE IS HE FROM?
The centre of interest of the new 'book of Genesis' (the opening phrase of Matthew in the Greek) is not gynecology, any more than that of the old one is geology. To search it for answers to such questions or to take the stories at that level is to misread them. The descriptive details are often provided by the Old Testament. There is obviously, for instance, a close parallel between the Magnificat in Luke 1.46-50 and the Song of Hannah in 1 Sam. 2.1-10. Matthew in particular is concerned to show how everything is a fulfillment of what God has been up to from the beginning, bearing throughout the watermark of his signature. (This is brought out strongly in the popular book by the Roman Catholic Hubert J. Richards, The First Christmas―though he tends perhaps to see it everywhere.) Whatever the underlying history (and there is no reason to suppose that there is not quite a lot of history, particularly in Luke), it is overlaid and interpreted by stories with all the legendary and mythical beauty of folk-tales―whose point is not to distract from the history nor again to be taken simply as history, but to draw out the divine signature of history. Once we forget this and start asking prosaic or scientific How? questions rather than meaningful Why? questions (whether of the opening chapters of the Old Testament or the New), then not only do we miss the point for ourselves: we put stumbling blocks in the way of other people. By asking them to credit the entire infancy narrative (stopping stars and all) literally as history we are in danger of discrediting it. For that is not what it was 'written up' to be. I have no doubt, as I said, that there is history behind it, and as a New Testament scholar I am interested in digging into this (even into the possible relevance of comets for determining the date of Jesus's birth). But that is not the point. Doubtless there is some history behind the story of the Flood, but to send expeditions looking for arks on Ararat is not the way to bring home the real truth of that story. So too the marvelous stories of the annunciation and the virgin birth, the wise men and the shepherds the massacre of the innocents and the flight into Egypt, may indeed reflect fact. But to take it all, with the fundamentalists, as prose rather than poetry is to confound everything, and these days, to put off a large number of intelligent people.
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