Sea

I agree. Luke's timeline is definitely stuff that happened in the weeks immediately following the birth.

Matthew gives no description of what happened in the weeks immediately following the birth. In fact, the text positively supports Egypt being something that happened somewhere between one and two years after the birth.

Any harmonization requires the family leave Bethlehem for Nazereth then go back to Bethlehem to meet the magi a year or so later. I agree this is weird, unlikely, and worth bringing up to inerrantists.

However, the presence of another problem in the infancy narratives does not make it ok to present the false implication that the Gospels give contradictory answers for where the family went immediately after the birth. They simply don't.

I agree this is a problem too. See, there are better things to bring up than a faulty charge which just makes skeptics look bad.

Read what?

Basically I'm hoping to see a display of intellectual integrity with the baptism issue. Will skeptics on this forum defend an errancy charge based solely on misreading the text? The SAB also lists this. How embarrassing for skepticism.

spin

Which includes ending up in Nazareth a little over a month after the birth.

I didn't see any dispute over this issue. :huh:

Reading Matthew to insert a trip to Egypt after an unstated trip back to Nazareth is a refusal to read the text which indicates that Bethlehem was Joseph's home. Joseph is forced to move to a new home, Nazareth, in Mt 2:22-23.

The text of Matthew is very clear. Joseph took Mary as wife, ie into his home (1:24), which is revealed in 2:1 as being in Bethlehem. Hence the move to Nazareth in 2:22 is a move to a new home as it is presented there. It is only the willful insertion of Lucan information which causes the Matthean text to falter.

What I said was, you are trying to do away with an obvious error by accentuating another.

When you sink to the apologist's level and refuse to deal with what the text actually says, you are slave to the apologist.

Your words:

It's understandable how someone could read the chapter quickly and think the narration's timeline includes the baptism itself. I recommend reading through again to see what I mean.

Note that last sentence? That's what I thought might be useful for you to do.

I should add that it is excessively presumptuous of you to make the statement you did in the first sentence above ("It's understandable...") when talking of a scholar whose reading has been shown to be both extensive and intensive. You mightn't agree with his analysis of the chronology, but your claim of shallowness is blatantly shallow.

Sorry, my interest was in the birth narratives. If you have a problem with Ehrman's analyses, why not write to him?


spin

JoeWallack

JW:
Oh but it is a plain contradiction. "Matthew" and "Luke" start out in the same location, Bethlehem. Where do they move Jesus from Bethlehem? "Matthew's" Jesus moves to Egypt while "Luke's" Jesus moves to Nazareth (wherever the hell that was). There's nothing in either text to suggest otherwise. A plain contradiction on where Jesus went after he was born. Your claim that these moves happened at different times is just another contradiction. How does a different type of contradiction (time) defend against another contradiction (location)?

The time frames for the Infancy Narratives are different to start with. "Matthew's" Jesus is born c. 4 BCE while "Luke's" Jesus is born 6 CE. There's no reason for "Luke's" Jesus to go to Egypt to get away from Herod the Great because he's long dead. There's nothing in "Luke" indicating any threat to baby Jesus (other than the bogus census journey).

JW:
Matthew 2

"But Matthew's infancy narrative does not take place until perhaps a year after Jesus' birth"

JW:
Why a year later? Why not two years? More contradictions here but this time within "Matthew". All of the narrative until the last verse supports a matter of days and weeks. Herod sees Jesus as a rival and is willing to mass execute children but waits a year or two years to execute his plan? Just enough time for Jesus to go Egypt, Nazareth or Vegas. Common sense also tells us that Herod probably had a safety margin in case Jesus looked older than he was so the last verse is still compatible with a matter of weeks which would make it comparable to "Luke". So it's your supposed defense that is not as clear as you make it out to be.

Simple question C, per "Luke's" Infancy Narrative does Jesus go to Egypt? I don't see much difference here with how the question is phrased, "after Jesus' birth" vs. during the Infancy Narrative. You can certainly add details and more explanation to my claimed error here but I don't see that as any defense against the error. Ehrman sees it as a significant error and I do too. It's an important detail in two Infancy Narratives that are completely different. Obviously at least one of these Narratives primarily used a non-historical source. So at least one Gospel has an entire story that is fiction. Even worse, Christianity placed these stories together in the same Bible and postured that they agree. That's a credibility problem.



Joseph

ErrancyWiki

Sea

How about presenting the contradiction like this:

Luke says the family went back home to Nazareth within weeks of Jesus' birth.
vs.
Matthew strongly implies the family's home was Bethlehem and implies they had never lived in Nazareth until after returning from Egypt.

Not as snappy, but it is a much more accurate description of the problem.

Anyone can make a mistake. Care to point out where the Gospel of John says Jesus was somewhere specific a few days after he was baptized?

This is a discussion thread for his book. Seems like an appropriate place to discuss a problem with it.

Sea

Different locations are only a contradiction if the time is the same.

I can visit the bank and the park "after I have breakfast." It's only a plain contradiction if I say I'm visiting both at the same time. (And the bank isn't in a park.)

One month vs even one year old children look very different.

Luke does not mention Egypt. The difference is describing the problem accurately. Your wiki gives a misleading over-simplified description of the problem, which undermines credibility once anyone notices.

Underseer

So, we should not trust anything Carrier says because he is a mythicist.

Would we be able to trust anything he said if he believed in an historical Jesus? Or would being an historicist also make all of his beliefs wrong?

Toto

Carrier was a historicist at one point. It was his research that led him to change his mind.

But he has no ideological commitment to mythicism. If he found more evidence, he would change his mind again.

spin

No, that's not right. There is no implication that they had never lived in Nazareth: the text says that the family moved to Nazareth, where that "moved" is "came and dwelt" (ελθων κατωκησεν - it's exactly the same as the 4:13 move to Capernaum.) That's it's a town called Nazareth makes the mention of the town new information, ie the writer is introducing Nazareth, just as the writer does in 4:13 where Capernaum is described as being "by the sea within the borders of Zebulun and Naphthali". (Matthew's "prophecy" that it might fulfill what the prophets said wouldn't mean much if the family already lived in Nazareth, would it?) The writer couldn't be more explicit that the family never lived in Nazareth before... sorry, he could have said, "the family never lived in Nazareth before", which is in fact more explicit, but it's a narrative text and not a legally binding contract. Apologists can be so Pharisaic.


spin

Sea

That's what "strongly implies" means. It's not a weak implication that the family first lived in Nazareth after Egypt and it's not explicitly stated. Hence: a strong implication.

bacht

Believers can harmonize anything. It's an interesting psychological phenomenon, but useless for considering the texts as imperfect human artifacts.