Response and Surresponse

046

We invited Professor Mason to respond to Professor Murphy-O’Connor’s comments in Bethlehem…Of Course, and he agreed. We then asked Professor Murphy-O’Connor to respond to Professor Mason. He too agreed. Their statements appear below:

Steve Mason’s response:

Polemicists and apologists attach themselves to conclusions; they either attack them or defend them. Historians, on the other hand, pose open-ended questions, asking When? Where? and especially, Why?

Although I did my best to cast my essay on where Jesus was born in the historical mode, much of Professor Murphy-O’Connor’s critique suggests that he imagined it as polemical. Clarification may be in order.

Despite appearances, what Murphy-O’Connor and I agree on is much more extensive—and important—than what we disagree on. In particular, we concur that the early Christians were quite creative with historical details of Jesus’ life. He notes that the census mentioned in Luke 2:1 cannot have been the occasion for Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, and he acknowledges that Matthew created historical details (the Magi, the massacre of the innocents) to suit his Gospel’s agenda. Like the other writers, Luke felt quite free to change times and events, placing, for example, the census of 6 A.D. during the reign of Herod (37–4 B.C.).

Second, Murphy-O’Connor and I agree that the earliest surviving evidence for Jesus’ birth is relatively late, as much as 100 years after the event. We apparently disagree as to how far back one can trace, by inference, the roots of this evidence. These two points of agreement (the historical inaccuracies and the late date of our earliest witnesses) are the basis of my argument.

The logic of my essay was fairly straightforward. In answer to the question “Where was Jesus born?” I wished to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to support a probable hypothesis. The answer, it seems to me, must be “no.” We have no firsthand evidence. We must depend on those who were in a position to know. But Jesus and his family members left nothing in writing. The first generation of Jesus’ followers, reflected in Paul’s letters, is similarly silent. Only in the second and third generations, 60 to 120 years after the event (the time of the gospel evidence), do we find implicit and explicit statements concerning Jesus’ birthplace. These are in some tension, however. Mark and John suggest a Nazarene origin and Matthew and Luke both name Bethlehem as Jesus’ birthplace—but under very different circumstances. By the fourth generation, the birth stories of Matthew and Luke had become widely known and to a large extent conflated. References to Jesus’ birth in a cave, as mentioned by Murphy-O’Connor, appear only in this fourth generation; the first Church of the Nativity is erected even later, in the fourth century. This evidence is not of sufficiently high quality to permit a probable historical judgment about Jesus’ birthplace.

If Murphy-O’Connor wished to make a Bethlehem hypothesis historically probable, he would need to demonstrate not only that the evidence is of high enough quality to support a probable judgment, but that the Bethlehem hypothesis best explains all the evidence. He would need to explain how we know that the Bethlehem element of the Matthean and Lukan birth stories originates with Jesus or his immediate family, while other elements on which they disagree—the census (Luke) or the persecution by Herod (Matthew), the family’s origin in Nazareth (Luke) or Bethlehem (Matthew), and other elements—do not. He would need to ask: Was the Bethlehem story widely known among Jesus’ first followers? If it was, why did Mark and John suggest (or imply) a Nazarene origin? Why are the accounts of Matthew and Luke so contradictory, as Murphy-O’Connor admits? Explaining all the relevant evidence this way is indispensable to making historical hypotheses probable or even plausible. Strangely, Murphy-O’Connor bypasses this task altogether and dismisses as “irrelevant” my attempt to consider the germane evidence from our earliest, silent sources (Paul, Mark, Acts, etc.).

In lieu of examining the earliest evidence, he argues that the local Bethlehem tradition about Jesus’ cave-manger goes back to at least the mid-second century A.D. and Justin Martyr (wrote c. 150 A.D.). Murphy-O’Connor seems to think that this is relevant archaeological evidence for Jesus’ birth, since he chides me for ignoring it. Fascinating though the cave tradition may be, only one thing about it is relevant to us: Is this tradition, which appears 150 years after Jesus’ birth, more easily explained as a continuous and independent recollection of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem or as a later tradition that developed on the basis of the birth stories in Matthew and Luke? If, as Murphy-O’Connor suggests, there was a continuous and vigorous tradition in Bethlehem about Jesus’ birth (before Herod’s death in 4 B.C.) that predates the Gospels, it would be very difficult to explain Mark, John, Matthew and Luke—including the dramatically different stories in the last two concerning how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem.

Murphy-O’Connor’s basic position is that my analysis amounts to “deductions from silence.” Here he makes an elementary error. Arguments from silence are bad because they falsely deduce a conclusion from ambiguity. If one were to assert—against a Bethlehem birth—that because first-generation Christians were silent about the Bethlehem birth they could not have known of it, that would indeed be a fallacious argument from silence. Or if one were to maintain—in support of a Bethlehem birth—that the 054first-generation authors were silent because they assumed he was born in Bethlehem, that too would be fallacious. In either case, one would be deducing a positive conclusion from ambiguous silence.

Since my argument did not reach any such positive conclusion, however, but gave the deafening silence its full weight, I cannot be charged with arguing from silence. Please recall: I said that because those who were in a position to know did not speak clearly about the place of Jesus’ birth, we cannot hope to be clear on the matter. To support the Bethlehem hypothesis (or any other) as historically probable would require an argument from silence—that the first-generation authors as well as Mark and John knew about it, even though they did not mention it. Thus Murphy-O’Connor contends: “Now, it might be fairly late when some Christians wrote about the birthplace of Jesus, but that says nothing about when they first became interested in or knowledgeable about the subject.”

I reject all such arguments from silence. Murphy-O’Connor has the right principle but the wrong target.

One small point: Murphy-O’Connor’s mind is boggled, he says, that I should attribute the agreement of Matthew and Luke on Bethlehem (and on precious little else) to a “source.” My mind is boggled by his boggled mind. When two authors agree on something, there are only three possibilities. Either they independently and coincidentally invented the item; or one borrowed it from the other (or they colluded) directly or through mediation; or they independently got it from some third party. We would presumably all agree that Matthew and Luke did not likely invent the Bethlehem location out of thin air, coincidentally. And Murphy-O’Connor supports the common view that they wrote independently of one another. That leaves only the possibility that their agreement on Bethlehem goes back to some third party, to some other source. Perhaps Murphy-O’Connor imagines that I meant a shared written source, but I neither said nor intended such a thing.

Murphy-O’Connor rightly notes that the Christians’ identification of Jesus as Messiah did not require them to create a Bethlehem birth, since even the notion that the Messiah should be a descendant of David was only one option among many in ancient Judaism. I said much the same: As far as we know, most other Jews did not expect a Messiah born in Bethlehem. Mark, in a story taken over by Matthew, even has Jesus challenging the notion that the Messiah should be David’s descendant (Mark 12:35–37). Nevertheless, in an ancient context that preferred its distinguished persons to have distinguished births, it was natural that some Christians would explore the manner of Jesus’ birth long after the fact. For Christians with such an outlook, the connection with David and with scripture fulfillment would be a sufficient (not necessary) point of origin for the Bethlehem tradition. There was nothing requiring the author of Matthew to have Jesus fulfill scripture by visiting Egypt or by riding two animals (as he understood the Messiah would do from the prophet Zechariah), but Matthew did write under this influence. Matthew did not include only those elements he knew to have happened historically.

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor is a highly respected scholar, and I regard his work with the greatest admiration. On the question of Jesus’ birthplace he poses provocative questions about the backdating of the Bethlehem cave tradition and the notices in Matthew and Luke. At the end of the day, however, we all run up against the silence of the only ones clearly in a position to know. Murphy-O’Connor has not shown why Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is more than a mere possibility.

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor’s surresponse:

The difference between Professor Mason and me boils down to the way we approach ancient texts in search of historical information. He treats the Gospels as defendants with a poor record of veracity. What the authors say must be treated with the gravest suspicion because the likelihood is that they made it up, particularly if the texts are of late date. Inevitably he comes to the conclusion that we cannot know what happened.

I, on the contrary, treat the Gospels as witnesses. They may be confused and biased, they may rely on inaccurate information, but their aim is to tell the truth. Thus when the Gospels offer me what appears to be historical information, I accept it at face value, unless I have proof to the contrary.

Thus Mason rejects Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus because he can find no reason to accept it, but I accept that Jesus was born in Bethlehem because I find no reason to reject it.

Which of these approaches is to be preferred? Mine is simply the application to the Gospels of the method human beings use in dealing with all sources of information, both ancient and modern. We believe what we are told, or read, unless we have reason to be suspicious about it. We do not automatically ask for proof of truth, but we are instinctively alert for notes. Information flows in unless it is blocked by a critical sieve.

If Mason’s approach to the Gospels reflects the way he lives, he must be “agnostic” about everything. I doubt very much that this is in fact the case. Life would be impossible. Which means, of course, that he singles out the Gospels for uniquely harsh treatment as sources of historical knowledge. This is unjustifiable. The Gospels must be treated as all other documents. Mason may think that he is acting as a responsible historian, but in his approach, criticism, which might yield positive results, has been transformed into skepticism, which is a dead end.

We invited Professor Mason to respond to Professor Murphy-O’Connor’s comments in Bethlehem…Of Course, and he agreed. We then asked Professor Murphy-O’Connor to respond to Professor Mason. He too agreed. Their statements appear below: