Nativity naiveté

SIR: Christopher Howse (January issue) makes a mistake in assuming that the first two chapters of both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels can be treated seriously as historical sources. It is very clear from Acts (1.22, 10.37, 13.24/5) that the first Christians knew nothing of Jesus’s life before his baptism by John, which is why Mark’s gospel – the earliest, and the main narrative source for the other two above – starts with that event.

If you compare those opening chapters, you will find they have nothing in common: in Matthew, Jesus is born to a family actually living in Bethlehem, and the ‘flight into Egypt’ gives him a mechanism for subsequently transposing it to Nazareth; in Luke, the family lives in Nazareth, and the (otherwise unknown) Roman census is the mechanism for placing Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. The whole of the material of all four chapters should be regarded as purely legendary.

The traditional dating of Jesus’s birth wholly depends on two statements in Luke: 3.1, which dates the baptism in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, and 3.23, which states that Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty.

All depends on whether this is to be regarded as worthwhile evidence. If it is, the traditional dating can’t be questioned; if it is not (which is my opinion), we have no means of dating the event at all.

David Taylor, Ffestiniog, North Wales