Reconciling the Flight to Egypt with Luke 2

User avatar
TK
Posts: 1477
Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 8:42 pm
Location: North Carolina

Re: Reconciling the Flight to Egypt with Luke 2

Post by TK » Wed Dec 21, 2016 1:47 pm

That's what happens when I work from memory. Thanks for the clarification Matt.

User avatar
steve
Posts: 3392
Joined: Thu Aug 21, 2008 9:45 pm

Re: Reconciling the Flight to Egypt with Luke 2

Post by steve » Wed Dec 21, 2016 4:02 pm

Allowing contradictions in Luke and Matthew's account is not an assault on their competence, because we don't hold any historian, ancient or otherwise to a level of infallibility. I would not accuse a historian contemporary with George Washington as incompetent if he got some facts wrong. He was simply human.


A competent historian is one who can tell the difference between good and bad sources, and who sticks with reliable ones, so as not to mislead his readers. While a good historian may not remember, or have access to, minor details (such as whether the interval between Caesarea Philippi and the Transfiguration was "after six days" or "about eight days"), a good historian does not write chapter-length narratives about events that have no correspondence with anything that occurred. Those who do so would lose credibility as historians, and it would be their competence that would rightly be called into question. If either Matthew or Luke engaged in such chicanery, it would completely call into question every pericope unique to them in the Gospels.
Allowing the possibility that there are problems between the two accounts does not disallow the authority of the birth narratives.
No one would suggest this. There are "problems" in interpreting and harmonizing many parallel accounts. That is not the same as saying there is a contradiction between them. By definition, a contradiction exists only when two accounts cannot both be true. If they can both be true, then they can be harmonized. These are the choices in such cases, either harmonization (not even a slight difficulty in the present case) or contradiction. The latter most certainly would disallow the authority of at least one of the birth narratives, since one of them would necessarily be untrue, meaning that all of its elaborate details have been falsely reported.
But bringing an a priori insistence that the accounts harmonize unnecessarily ties one hand behind ones back in studying the texts.
Not nearly so much as does the imposing of imaginary difficulties upon the reports, gratuitously (yes, that is the right word) casting doubt on their truthfulness.

Singalphile
Posts: 903
Joined: Sun Apr 22, 2012 12:46 pm

Re: Reconciling the Flight to Egypt with Luke 2

Post by Singalphile » Wed Dec 21, 2016 8:31 pm

After a brief review, I don't see anything very noteworthy about the difference.

I do think that some people don't think things through, beyond showing that there's no absolute contradiction. It is actually interesting to consider whether one or the author was aware of the other's account. In this case, it doesn't seem to me to reflect poorly on anyone, whether or not Luke was aware of Matthew's account or whether or not Matthew was aware of the other gospels' omission of that journey. Of course we don't know what the case was.

Also, when you think about it, absolute, inescapable contradictions don't just happen. Can you imagine Luke writing, "And when they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth, and they - Joseph, Mary, and Jesus - traveled straight to Nazareth and they didn't go anywhere else, especially not to Egypt, at that time nor at any other time ... and by "Egypt", I mean the most well-known geographical region and country located at the northeast of the African continent, not any spiritual or metaphorical "Egypt" or any lesser known place called Egypt.

No one writes/talks like that unless they're trying to be contradictory.
... that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. John 5:23

Post Reply

Return to “The Gospels”