he interprets – Jesus’ journey to Egypt as both predicted and necessary. “This was to fulfill ←49 | 50→what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son”. ” (Matt. 2:15). Matthew’s interpretation of the journey completely fails to realize the meaning of Jesus going to Egypt. He cannot recognize the implications in his own narrative – between Herod’s order to kill the children of Bethlehem and the foundational night of Passover in Egypt.
Jesus will recognize his purpose by being the only one to understand the relation of the two historical moments. Dead children, in Egypt and in Bethlehem, engender him.
The journey was not to fulfill a prophecy as Matthew believes. Jesus returns to an inauguration. The parallel between the death of the Egyptian first-born and the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem has implications that will only be revealed by Jesus in his relationship to the dead and dying and at the culmination of his ministry, first during the Last Supper and the foundation of a sacrament (the extraordinary meaning of his body and his blood internalized by his disciples) and in the garden of Gethsemane as he confronts, in terror, his own death. Even though Matthew “had no inhibitions about imposing his own interpretation on the text he borrowed,”96 his decision to include the slaughter of the innocent and Jesus’ journey to Egypt has meanings (for the hermeneutic reader) he may not have envisioned. Jesus does not fulfill prophecy by being in Egypt. He returns to a historical experience and places himself, in self-conception, to an inauguration led by Moses. Matthew’s interpretation, as an attempt to persuade the reader, becomes vulnerable and questionable when, as we will see most especially in his relationship to death and mourning, another meaning altogether is understood by Jesus himself. Jesus is not the fulfillment of a prophetic tradition. The return to Egypt allows him to compare two events, the creation of Passover in Exodus and the meaning of his birth and his life.
“When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men” (Matt. 2:16). Many commentators believe the incident to be fictitious. “The story of the infanticide of Bethlehem,” Bock writes, “is thought to be legendary and unhistorical.”97 Whether the event took place or not has no bearing at all on the overall significance of the relation of Jesus’ birth with Herod’s monarchical ←50 | 51→rule as himself the proxy king of the Jews. At issue, ultimately, is the first misunderstanding of Jesus, one that will be perpetuated and lead to his arrest and execution. The slaughter of the children of Bethlehem following the birth of Jesus will be essential to his life once he begins his ministry. In his concern for the well-being of children, we notice the extent of his feelings, his care for them; those are obvious. There are also other examples of Jesus’ sayings, challenging for the hearer and much more difficult to understand. When, for example, he tells his listeners that one must become like a child to enter the kingdom of God, they would have been, at least, unsure about his meaning and, perhaps, dumbfounded; they needed to hear much more in order to collect together all his references to children. In the gospels, Jesus will warn others with nothing less than a severe threat: to those who are a scandal to children, “stumbling blocks” while raising and bringing them up, it would be preferable if their life ended, their future nullified. Rather than simply a relationship of protection and care, Jesus provides us with his conception of child development (of socialization and indoctrination) that in some sense prevents the child from being other than a mimetic copy, nothing more than emulation. In the gospel of Luke, there will be a unique biographical experience of Jesus as a twelve-year-old in the Jerusalem temple and a parable of the prodigal son no one has interpreted as autobiographical. Jesus understands himself to be prodigal not in terms of disappointing his father or squandering his inheritance, but to make a distinction between Joseph as his lawful father (legal according to the Roman census) and himself as the father to the man who – to become who he was – had to abandon his family and his home. Jesus had to engender himself as a child from the concept of being the “first-born.”
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75 In What are the Gospels? A Comparison of Graeco-Roman Biography. Second Edition. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004, Richard A. Burridge believes that “the gospels belong with other works of a clear biographical interest,” 191.
76 Girard, René. The One by Whom Scandal Comes. Tr. M. B. DeBevoise. East Lansing: Michigan State Press, 2014, 69.
77 Wright, N. T. Who was Jesus? Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992, 73.
78 Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Luke the Theologian: Aspects of his Teaching. New York: Paulist Press, 1989, 37.
79 Wansbrough, Henry. “The Infancy Stories of the Gospels since Raymond E. Brown,” 5–22 in New Perspectives on the Nativity. Ed. Jeremy Corley. London: T&T Clark, 2009.
80 Vermes, Geza. The Nativity: History and Legend. New York: Doubleday, 2006, 3. He later adds that the gospels of Matthew and Luke “are unlikely to be reliable from the point of view of history,” 28. That Vermes turns to extant texts to argue for the virgin birth being a later, theological attestation may be (as always with him) philologically interesting but perhaps neglects the more important hermeneutical point, the one that will be a consequence of my leading argument. In Jesus the Jew, his argument that Matthew and Luke “treat it merely as a preface to the main story” (214) runs completely counter to my own. Merely a preface?
81 Wright, Nicholas Thomas and Borg, Marcus. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. New York: HarperOne, 1989. Wright’s entry into the section entitled The Birth of Jesus is “Born of a Virgin?,”178. Marcus Borg’s response is entitled “The Meaning of the Birth Stories.”
82 Brown, Raymond E. The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. New York: Doubleday, 1993, 29.
83 Lüdemann, Gerd. Virgin Birth? The Real Story of Mary and her Son Jesus. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1998, 140
84 Bultmann, Rudolf. The History of the Synoptic Tradition. Tr. John Marsh. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963, 291–292.
85 Machen, John Gresham. The Virgin Birth of Christ. London: James Clarke & Co., Ltd., 1930, 1, my emphasis.
86 Boers, Hendrikus. Who was Jesus?: The Historical Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1989, 11.
87 Shenk, Richard A. The Virgin Birth of Christ: The Rich Meaning of a Biblical Truth. Bletchley: Paternoster, 2016.
88 Tabor, James D. The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, his Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006, 154. Despite Tabor’s confidence (“he surely knew,” “would have been well aware”) it is very hard to think
