What did the apostle Luke think about Jesus' birth?

Answer 1

A:

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke each tell the story of the birth of Jesus, but Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament) says the two accounts are "massively different" and virtually irreconcilable. He says that Luke likes to set his Christian drama in the context of well-known events from antiquity, although sometimes he does so inaccurately.

The author, writing around the end of the first century, could not have known the private thoughts and experiences of Zachariah, Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, after a period of at least a century. So he had to improvise, just as the author of Matthew's Gospel had done before him. He knew from the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus that there had been a census under Quirinius, so he wrote a narrative around Josephus taking Jesus to Bethlehem to meet what he said were the requirements of that census. This placed the birth of Jesus in the city of David, Bethlehem, where the Jews believed a Messiah would be born, but at the same time explained why he became Jesus of Nazareth. The census took place in 6 CE, but Lukealso places the birth of Jesus during the reign of King Herod, who died ten years earlier, in 4 BCE.