Skipping a Bit (Luke 2:39,40)
With these two verses, we come to an issue that, for some people, is a problem. Luke tells us that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus move back to Nazareth after his dedication. For the flow of this gospel, for the theme Luke is teasing out of the life of Jesus, this works perfectly. It is only when people read Luke’s account in the context of Matthew’s account that they see a problem. That is because Matthew says that the family has to move to Egypt before they move back to Nazareth.
This is less of a problem than some may think. In fact, it is a strength of the historic accounts here.
First of all, the gospels do not contradict each other here, but rather they complement each other. It would be a problem if Matthew and Luke stated facts that could not be harmonized. For instance, if one gospel said Jesus was born in Bethlehem and another said He was born in another city. That is not the case here. Instead, we have two accounts that seem to cherry-pick different aspects of the story.
If we just had Matthew’s account, we would not know that Mary and Joseph started out in Nazareth and temporarily moved to Bethlehem (and then Egypt). We would not know about the shepherds or the census that caused the family to relocate. If we just had Luke’s account, we would not know about the wisemen or Herod’s role in the story.
Not only that, but the fact that the stories differ on these points is a case for their authenticity. This is evidence that they are not simply creating a story and “getting their facts straight.” They are not relying on one another, but instead they are records of various eye-witness accounts that, as all historic events seen by multiple people, differ but compliment each other.
Luke focuses on the family life of Jesus and His parents, on their devotion and faithfulness to God. Matthew had a different theme in mind. He focused on the more global and political aspects of the story, highlighting the fact that Jesus was the promised King to come.
Luke is also working in a literary structure where he is comparing Jesus’s infancy to John’s. Just as with John in 1:80, he tells us that Jesus grew and became strong (2:40), but he is also going to expand on how Jesus grew, just as he has expanded on all of Jesus’s story in comparison to John’s…
This is less of a problem than some may think. In fact, it is a strength of the historic accounts here.
First of all, the gospels do not contradict each other here, but rather they complement each other. It would be a problem if Matthew and Luke stated facts that could not be harmonized. For instance, if one gospel said Jesus was born in Bethlehem and another said He was born in another city. That is not the case here. Instead, we have two accounts that seem to cherry-pick different aspects of the story.
If we just had Matthew’s account, we would not know that Mary and Joseph started out in Nazareth and temporarily moved to Bethlehem (and then Egypt). We would not know about the shepherds or the census that caused the family to relocate. If we just had Luke’s account, we would not know about the wisemen or Herod’s role in the story.
Not only that, but the fact that the stories differ on these points is a case for their authenticity. This is evidence that they are not simply creating a story and “getting their facts straight.” They are not relying on one another, but instead they are records of various eye-witness accounts that, as all historic events seen by multiple people, differ but compliment each other.
Luke focuses on the family life of Jesus and His parents, on their devotion and faithfulness to God. Matthew had a different theme in mind. He focused on the more global and political aspects of the story, highlighting the fact that Jesus was the promised King to come.
Luke is also working in a literary structure where he is comparing Jesus’s infancy to John’s. Just as with John in 1:80, he tells us that Jesus grew and became strong (2:40), but he is also going to expand on how Jesus grew, just as he has expanded on all of Jesus’s story in comparison to John’s…
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