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@badassad @amateurexegete Okay. Both Luke 2:1-21 and Matt 1-2 tell the story of Jesus being born in Bethlehem. Except they tell completely different stories. In Luke, Jesus' parents live in Nazareth, travel to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus is born while they are there, and then they return home to ...
@badassad @amateurexegete ... Nazareth. But in gMatt they live in Bethlehem, Jesus is born there in their home, they are forced to flee King Herod, go to Egypt, then return but can't settle back in Bethlehem so do so in Nazareth. Both these stories are riddled with problems and neither can be ...
@badassad @amateurexegete ... harmonised with the other (they are set a decade apart to begin with). But they both share one thing in common - they "explain" how a man who everyone knew of as a Galilean from Nazareth came to be born in Bethlehem in Judea. This is because that was where the Messiah was ...
@badassad @amateurexegete ... supposed to be from. This all makes sense if Jesus being a Galilean from Nazareth was historical and this posed an awkward problem for those who wanted to hold him up as the Messiah - John 7:41-42 even depicts people rejecting this idea because he was from the wrong town....
@badassad @amateurexegete ... But if the whole story of Jesus is just "made up", why didn't they "make up" a Messiah who was from Bethlehem in the first place? Why "make up" a Messiah from an insignificant village like Nazareth when they were supposed to be "making up" the story of a Messiah? This ...
@badassad @amateurexegete ... indicates that the idea he was a Galilean from Nazareth - something found repeatedly in all gospel traditions - was historical and so the traditions the gospel writers drew on had to deal with that and shoehorn this Galilean into the Messiah story via these accounts of ...
@badassad @amateurexegete ... him being born in the "right" town despite growing up in the wrong one. That's just one example. There are many more.
