Today, the service at my home church was pretty cute and very enlightening to my sense of the myths and stories that give meaning to the lifes of Christians, particularly the Christmas story.
The pastor was sitting on the stage and was reading the story of Jesus' birth from Luke 2 on stage. The kids were fairly talkative and kept popping up their hands to make remarks or ask questions. When he got to the part about the sheperds visiting the new-born Jesus, one of the kids said "I know what they brought; they brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh." The pastor replied to the kid, "No, that's the wise men, that's found in the other story."
At this moment, I realized that a lot of Christians would not realize this difference between the two stories. This difference is utterly defeated by the nativity scene that pops up all around churches and in Christian households through out the Christmas season depicting both shepherds and wisemen gathered around the family with the animals looking on with keen interest.
Some may explain this difference because of the different perspectives of the author. However, the term "different perspectives" insinuates that the authors were actually there and saw the shepherds or wisemen entering the barn. This is simply not true for various reasons (how could they of been alive, the Gospels are written in Greek and Jesus' disciples spoke aramaic, etc.). What is true, however, is that Matthew and Luke wrote independent birth stories with the only sharing factor perhaps being the Gospel of Mark (with no birth story) and the elusive "Q" source, which supposedly only contained tales of Jesus' miracles and signs.
Most scholars believe that Luke was written to a primarly Gentile audience and that Matthew was writing to a primarly Jewish-Christian audience. Also, for a compromise between the liberal and conservative estimates of the dating of Matthew and Luke, they were probably composed between the mid 70's and 90 CE. Hence, the authors of Matthew and Luke were writing to different audiences but within the same 15 year old range.
However, because both "gospels" are found in between the same covers and are only seperated by Mark in canonical order, most people assume the stories can be combined and that the gospels would not be compromised but they can't. The authors of Matthew and Luke did not write with each other mind and composed their birth stories using different sources. So, who is modern man to combine them and not perserve them for what they are?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
This is good stuff. I love seeing you grapple with this stuff in public like this.
It's got to be in public. I feel that is the only way, as Mullinax says, I can see what truly is at stake.
Just like it's easy to a holy man on a mountain, it's easy to be a scholar and a believer in an ivory tower.
Post a Comment