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Skeptics like Bart Ehrman pose a challenge: Why does the Gospel of Matthew depict Joseph as living in Bethlehem, while Luke depicts him as living in Nazareth?
Is this a contradiction? Can it be reconciled? And are all such reconciliations “forced”?
In this episode, Jimmy Akin points out an obvious solution . . . and then grounds the reasons for it in a simple reading of the Gospel of Luke . . . alone.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
JIMMY AKIN: My own view is that they had homes in more than one place that Joseph was originally from Bethlehem, so he had property there and he moved to Nazareth for work and he had property there historically.
BART EHRMAN: You think that he had two homes?
JIMMY: Yeah.
BART: But he’s maintaining a home in both places. That’s an interesting idea. I hadn’t thought of that.
Let’s get into it!
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Where Did Joseph Live?
A while ago, Bart Ehrman and I had a debate about the historical reliability of the Gospels.
It’s on my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/JimmyAkin if you’d like to watch it.
During the cross-examination period, Bart proposed a contradiction between the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. He understood Matthew as indicating that Joseph had a home in Bethlehem, and he understood Luke as saying that Joseph had a home in Nazareth.
I pointed out that this was not a contradiction. Joseph can simply have two homes—one in Bethlehem and one in Nazareth.
And to his credit, Bart acknowledged this. He said it was an interesting idea that hadn’t occurred to him.
This didn’t mean that he’s convinced by my solution, but he acknowledged that it’s logically possible.
Independence vs Harmonization
Now, one of the things that Bart is really into is reading each Gospel independently and taking it on its own terms rather than trying to immediately harmonize it with the others.
BART: What happens though is that people take Mark’s gospel and they take Luke’s gospel and they smash them together so that Jesus says and does everything that’s in Mark and in Luke, and then they throw in Matthew, which is different, and John, which is different, and you end up with a mishmash. You have taken each individual author and you’ve ignored what he’s trying to tell you. You’ve created your own gospel in your head. You have written the gospel by combining the four, and so you end up with the seven last words of the dying Jesus. He doesn’t say those seven things in any of the gospels. He says, one here, one here, one here, one here. And each one is having him say these things to make a point, and now you’ve chosen to ignore his point because you’re thinking they’re all reliable. So it all happened.
I don’t think that’s the way to read the gospels. I think when you do that, you’re depriving each of these authors of what he has to say. Each gospel has a different presentation, and if you don’t have the differences, you don’t have these four gospels. I see that as a value of these gospels, not a hindrance.
Bart has a really good point here, which is that we do need to read each document on its own terms.
You will miss the messages individual authors are building into their books if you immediately read each author in terms of what other authors have to say.
That’s quite true, and taking each document on its own terms is foundational for getting a deep and correct understanding of a document.
We do need to read Mark and—at least for the moment—forget what the other Evangelists have said.
We need to do the same thing for Luke, for Matthew, and for John.
And we need to do that for each book of the New Testament.
Taking each document on its own terms is the beginning of the serious study of what these authors have to say.
Bart is also right that the differences between the Gospels are part of their value to us.
If they all said exactly the same things, there would be no point in having four of them, as three of them would not contribute anything to our understanding of Jesus.
Bart is wrong, though, to imply that we should stop there.
One reason is that the authors can expect you to know what the other Evangelists have written.
Because the Gospels were circulating in the early Christian community, and we have evidence that the Evangelists were aware of each others’ work.
Matthew and Luke were obviously aware of Mark, because they both quote from him.
And—although it was fashionable to treat John as writing off on his own—that’s really not what happened.
A careful reading of John makes it very clear that he’s aware of the Synoptic tradition—that is, the kinds of traditions about Jesus found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
In particular, it’s clear that John knew the Gospel of Mark and expected his readers to have read it.
For more information on that, you can read Richard Bauckham’s excellent piece “John for Readers of Mark” in his book The Gospels for All Christians.
I’ve also done work on that subject on my website, JimmyAkin.com
There’s also a strong case that John knew Luke and deliberately fleshed out things that Luke only mentions in passing.
Some have argued that John knew Matthew, but at this point I’m less convinced of that.
The larger point is that the Evangelists show awareness of each other and display characteristics of what scholars call intertextuality—which involves the relationships between texts.
Therefore, we need to not only give an independent reading to each text. That’s our starting point. We need to go on to read the texts in light of each other.
And Bart is simply wrong when he says
BART: And if you say they’re all reliable historically, then you’re ignoring the messages that each one wants to give you. That’s my opinion. If you say they’re all reliable historically, then you’re ignoring the messages that each one wants to give you.
Reliability and what an author’s message is are two different subjects, and concluding that you have historically reliable narratives in front of you doesn’t mean that you’re ignoring the messages that the authors are trying to convey.
Suppose I were doing Revolutionary War research and reading biographies of George Washington.
I might have four biographies of Washington written by four historians, each of whom has done excellent research and is highly reliable in terms of the facts he presents.
That won’t stop each of the historians from presenting some facts that the others don’t mention.
And the purpose of their citing the facts that they uniquely mention will be to help them bring out certain themes and aspects of Washington’s character that they want to explore.
It is important to read each biography on its own terms to figure out what the author wants to say about him.
And it’s important to be aware of how the historians are interacting with each other’s work.
But it’s flatly wrong to say that—just because each author mentions some things that the others don’t—I’ll miss the points these Washington biographers are making unless I assume that their biographies are historically unreliable.
We don’t treat any other historical documents that way, and we shouldn’t treat the Gospels that way, either.
The question of reliability is thus a separate question from what an author is trying to tell us about his subject.
Bart’s right that there is a kind of harmonization that flattens out the differences between the Gospels—and we need to avoid that kind of harmonization.
Part of our process needs to be giving each Gospel an independent reading.
But then we need to build on that by looking at the interactions among the Gospels and taking the degree to which they can be harmonized seriously.
Enter Luke
Now let’s return to the subject of where St. Joseph lived and my claim that he had residences both in Bethlehem and in Nazareth.
How did I arrive at this conclusion?
In the debate, Bart said that Matthew portrayed Joseph as having a home in Bethlehem, while Luke portrayed him having one in Nazareth.
But you don’t need both Gospels to draw this inference.
In fact, all you need is the Gospel of Luke.
So what we’re going to do is look at what Luke has to say about Joseph—giving it an individualistic reading, not a harmonistic one, just like Bart wants—and see what we can infer.
First, though, I’ll set the stage by quoting an assessment of Luke by the British archaeologist William M. Ramsay, who made a special study of him. Ramsay says:
Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy; he is possessed of the true historic sense. . . . In short, this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians” (The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, ch. 18).
I imagine that Bart might not agree with this assessment, but this kind of positive assessment of Luke’s value as a historian needs to be borne in mind.
It gives us reason for caution when we encounter claims by some skeptics—not necessarily Bart—that portray Luke as if he’s hopelessly historically confused, particularly with regard to his birth narrative of Jesus.
Like when Luke says that Joseph went to Bethlehem because of an enrollment decreed by Caesar Augustus and mentions that Joseph was of the house of David.
At this point, many skeptics start engaging in mockery.
“This is ridiculous!” the skeptic will say. “David lived a thousand years before the time of Jesus! The Roman Empire would never conduct a census this way! It would never require people to go where one of their ancestors lived a thousand years ago! Nobody would even know that! I mean, do you know the city where your ancestors lived a thousand years ago?”
Even Bart gets in on some of that action.
BART: Now, this is a very weird phenomenon. Just on the surface of it. How is it that everybody, what Joseph was a thousand years after David, everybody’s going to where their ancestors were a thousand years earlier to register for a census? According to Luke, it’s the census of the entire world.
Well, that can’t be right. It must be the Roman Empire. Okay, the entire Roman, everybody’s going to their ancestral home from a thousand years earlier. How does that work? I mean, suppose the Democrats just really take over everything next time and they decide we all need to register for a tax because how much they like to tax people. And so they got to go register for, and you’ve got to go to register for this tax. You’ve got to go to where your ancestors came from a thousand years ago. Where are you going to go? Really?
Despite the vigor with which some skeptics mock Luke at this point, their criticism is simply misdirected. They are misreading what Luke says.
The First Joseph Passage in Luke
So let’s see what Luke says about Joseph, starting at the beginning of the Gospel, and see how the original reader would have interpreted it.
The first time Joseph is mentioned in the text is when the angel Gabriel comes to announce the birth of Jesus. Luke writes:
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary (Luke 1:26-27).
This passage indicates three things about Joseph:
1) he was Betrothed to Mary,
2) he was Of the house of David, and
3) he apparently has some kind of Connection with Nazareth, since that’s where Mary was when the angel appeared.
That’s all the reader knows at this point.
The Second Joseph Passage
Now let’s read the second passage discussing Joseph and see what one of Luke’s normal readers would make of it. The passage deals with the birth of Jesus, and it begins:
In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city. [So] Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David (Luke 2:1-4).
Luke tells us that “all went to be enrolled.”
The first thing to note is that Luke doesn’t tell us what kind of enrollment this was. He expects the reader to already know that from the events of the day.
Many have assumed that this was a tax census, but we don’t know that. It may have been something else.
In fact, there is a good chance that it was a loyalty enrollment that we have other records of, in which subjects of the Roman Empire swore their loyalty to Augustus Caesar.
We’ll talk about what the enrollment may have been in a future episode.
Whatever the enrollment was, people needed to be somewhere that they could participate in the enrollment, so they went “each to his own city.”
Obviously, this only applied to people who were away from their city during the period of the enrollment.
If you were already in your own city, you didn’t need to go anywhere.
But what if you were away from your own city?
Returning to Your Own City
Did Romans require people to go to their own cities for enrollments if they were away from them? Yes, they did.
In A.D. 104, the Roman governor of Egypt, Gaius Vibius Maximus, issued a decree that stated:
Since registration by household is imminent, it is necessary to notify all who for any reason are absent from their districts to return to their own homes that they may carry out the ordinary business of registration and continue faithfully the farming expected of them (lines 20–27; in Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, 268).
So—if you were away from your home city—you needed to go back there for events like this.
Joseph Returns to Bethlehem
Luke then says, “So Joseph also went up.” From this, we can infer that—at the time of the registration—Joseph was away from his “own city.” Therefore, he returned there.
Where was he at the time? Luke says he went up “from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth.”
Okay, so he was in Nazareth in Galilee. That’s not surprising in light of the fact he was betrothed to Mary, who was in Nazareth when the angel appeared.
So where was Joseph’s “own city”? Luke tells us that he went “to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem.” Thus, Bethlehem was Joseph’s “own city.”
We now come to the statement that really sets skeptics off: “because he was of the house and lineage of David.”
Luke includes this line to help explain why Bethlehem was Joseph’s “own city,” but skeptics draw a completely unwarranted conclusion from this and assume that everybody in the Roman Empire was required to return to where one of their ancestors from a thousand years ago lived.
Does Luke say that? Of course not! It would not be remotely practical to conduct a census—or any other kind of enrollment—in that way.
And that’s not only obvious to us; it was just as obvious to Luke and to Luke’s readers.
Everybody knew that there was no such requirement for Roman enrollments, and neither Luke nor his readers would have ever dreamed that someone would make such a ridiculous inference.
If Luke had the ability to speak with a modern, mocking skeptic, one can easily imagine him wanting to say something like, “Don’t be an idiot. That’s obviously not what I meant!”
And it’s not. People in the ancient world knew how Roman enrollments worked.
They knew that you needed to return to your own city if you were away from it.
So Luke’s reader would naturally infer that Bethlehem was Joseph’s own city, but he was away from it in Nazareth, and so he went back.
The idea that everyone had to go where a famous ancestor of theirs lived a thousand years ago is not only not something that Luke says, it’s also not a commonsense reading of the text.
It’s not what the original audience would have understood.
Then what did he mean? What would an ordinary, first century reader have inferred from what Luke wrote?
What Luke Meant
A logical inference would be that Bethlehem was Joseph’s “own city” because he had a contemporary connection with Bethlehem, because “he was of the house and lineage of David.”
In other words, it was his place of residence because he was a Davidite.
And that would not be surprising. Inheritance was very important in ancient Israel.
As Exodus 32:13 says, the whole land was an inheritance from God, and as Numbers 34:18 mentions, each tribe inherited a particular portion of land.
This area had to be preserved. Numbers 36:1-9 requires that parcels of land could not be transferred from one tribe to another.
Leviticus 25:13-16 allows for parcels to be temporarily “sold” to another person, but the owner got it back in the Jubilee year, so this was really temporarily leasing parcels of land rather than truly selling them.
And Leviticus 25:31 indicates that this included houses in unwalled cities like Bethlehem.
All this created a legal framework that tended to stabilize the possession of properties within particular families.
This had the effect of anchoring the family of David in Bethlehem, and so there were Davidites there.
We’re thus meant to understand that, because Joseph was of the family of David, he had a residence there—a home.
In fact, it was his primary residence, so Bethlehem was his “own city.”
What skeptics have done is fundamentally misread Luke.
Most people didn’t even have a famous ancestor a thousand years ago, so Luke’s readers would have understood he’s talking about a special situation that applied to Joseph.
Not a general situation that applied to everyone.
Luke’s statement that Joseph went to Bethlehem “because he was of the house and lineage of David” is to explain something Luke has just mentioned, which is that Joseph went to the “the city of David.”
All this is an explanation of why Joseph goes to the city of David. It’s because he’s of the house and lineage of David.
This also ties in with how Luke originally introduced Joseph back in chapter 1, where he said that Joseph was “of the house of David.”
So this is all perfectly straight forward.
In chapter 1, Luke introduces Joseph as a member of the house of David.
In chapter 2, he says that everyone was required to go to their own city.
He mentions that Joseph went to the city of David.
And then he reminds the reader that Joseph was of the house and lineage of David, so that explains why he went there.
No first century reader would have supposed that the mere fact that Joseph had a famous ancestor who lived in Bethlehem a thousand years earlier is what made it his own city.
The rule is that everyone goes to their own city to enroll, and what makes something your own city is the fact that it’s your primary place of residence.
Where you have your primary place of residence is the key, and that applies to us today.
If Dallas, Texas is your own city, it’s because Dallas is where you have your primary place of residence. My own city is Fayetteville, Arkansas; that’s where I have my primary place of residence. And Bethlehem was Joseph’s own city.
This is the ordinary, commonsense reading of the text that the first century reader would have understood.
So the reader would understand that Bethlehem was Joseph’s primary place of residence.
He either owned property or was part owner of property there, or at least it was where he had been normally living.
Luke then explains why this was his primary place of residence by noting that Joseph was of the family of David.
A Third Joseph Passage
Now we come to a third Joseph passage, just a few verses later in Luke. It says:
And when they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city, Nazareth (Luke 2:39).
This is at the end of Luke’s birth narrative, and so it is meant to be read in context of what has preceded it.
- Joseph is somehow connected to Nazareth
- Joseph’s “own city” is Bethlehem
- Joseph and Mary’s “own city” is Nazareth
From the first Joseph passage, we learned that Joseph had some kind of connection with Nazareth.
From the second Joseph passage, we learned that Joseph’s “own city” was Bethlehem, meaning that he had his primary residence there.
Now, from the third Joseph passage, we learn something else, which is that Nazareth could also be described as Joseph and Mary’s “own city.”
This implies that they had two residences: Joseph’s primary residence in Bethlehem and their joint residence in Nazareth.
Were They Rich?
Why would they have two residences? Were they rich? Far from it.
Luke relates that when they made the post-childbirth sacrifice for Mary, they offered “a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons” (Luke 2:24).
And in Leviticus 12:8, we learn that this was the offering prescribed for a poor woman who could not afford a sheep.
We thus should not imagine that Joseph and Mary were rich and had two opulent homes.
Instead, we should infer that their dual residency was a situation based on economic necessity.
As I said back in the debate:
JIMMY: I think that they were economically deprived enough. He had to leave Bethlehem for work.
And having two homes is not at all unusual for people in this situation.
Even today, many people have to live away from their family homes in order to find work.
But they don’t just stay out on the streets.
They find some kind of accommodation where the work is, but they still consider their family home their primary residence, and they travel back to it periodically.
Usually, there are other family members there on a permanent basis. This is a pattern that happens in countries all over the world.
To cite one possible example, if a couple is native to Sinaloa, Mexico but comes to Arizona to find work, they’ll have some kind of residence in Arizona and their family residence in Sinaloa, which they consider their primary residence.
The same is true of those who migrate for work elsewhere in the Americas, in Africa, Asia, the Philippines, and in the Middle East.
I’ve met people who have exactly this dual living situation imposed on them by necessity.
And I’ve heard from multiple listeners all over the world who report that it’s what’s happening in their own families: For work they live in one place, but they periodically go back to their true, family home where they came from.
And the same thing was true in the ancient world in cases of economic necessity.
The logical inference that Luke would expect his readers to draw from this data is that Joseph had a residence in Bethlehem, which was his primary, legal residence—in keeping with Jewish property and inheritance practices—so that’s where he went for the enrollment.
However, for economic reasons he spent most of his time in Nazareth and also maintained a no-doubt humble residence there with Mary.
No Room in the Kataluma
This also explains something else we read in Luke, where he says:
[Mary] gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn (Luke 2:7).
This is a traditional English translation which renders the Greek word kataluma as “inn,” but that’s not the best translation here.
As we can discuss in a future episode, the word kataluma means lodging place, and it could be applied to a specific room in a house—namely, the place where people spent most of their time.
In fact—later in the Gospel of Luke—Jesus tells his disciples:
Behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you.
Follow him into the house that he enters and tell the master of the house, “The Teacher says to you, ‘Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’”
And he will show you a large upper room furnished; prepare it there” (Luke 22:10-12).
The word here translated “guest room” is kataluma, and it refers to a specific place within the man’s house where the disciples are to eat the Passover.
For several reasons, it’s likely that “inn” is not the correct translation in the earlier passage and that it would be better if we rendered Luke 2:7 something like this:
[Mary] gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the living area (Luke 2:7).
If, as Luke indicates Joseph went back to Bethlehem because it was his “own city” or primary place of residence, it’s likely he went to a piece of family property, and the living area in this house was full—because some family members were still living there and perhaps because others had returned for the enrollment.
Because the living area of the house was full, Mary thus put the baby Jesus in a manger—away from the living area—in the part of the house where the animals were kept.
Because they did keep animals in their homes in first century Palestine.
There’s more that can be said about all this, but from what we’ve seen today, there is no reason for mocking Luke.
What he wrote all makes perfect sense if you understand it as a first century reader would have and interpret it sensibly.
It’s clear from just reading Luke—just Luke individually—and seeking to understand his message—the way Bart would have us do—that Joseph had his primary place of residence in Bethlehem, but he spent much of his time in Nazareth, where he and Mary had a joint residence.
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God bless you always!