¶1of scholars who are actually on the opposite side of the debate for me will cite ancient birth narratives and ancient biographies outside the Gospels and say, "Look, these are clearly meant to be legendary, mythical. They're not making historical claims. And so, that's how we should read the Gospel birth narratives as well." What I discovered was just very surprising. Things that I found in the stories didn't square with a story I'd been told by modern scholars. >> The subtitle of your book is reopening a closed case.
¶2I wonder, what is this closed case that you're trying to reopen? Why did you choose to write this book? >> Yeah, it's been a tradition in historical Jesus scholarship, I think, to really leave the birth narratives off to the side. So, if you look across a lot of the major historical Jesus works of the last generation of scholarship, what you'll find is that most of them devote very little, if any, attention to Jesus's birth, childhood, origins. And it's really just seen as a topic that can be safely ignored.
¶3And when scholars do deal with it, often the conclusions that they reach about what we can know about Jesus's early life are just very, very minimal things. Like, for example, a scholar might say, "Well, he may have been descended from David. His His human parents were named Joseph and Mary. And he was born probably in Nazareth, not Bethlehem." Things like that, right? And maybe a around the time of the death of Herod the Great, right?
¶4In terms of when he was born. So, you'll have those kinds of very minimalist conclusions that are put forth. And then if you ask, "Why are we leaving these what seem like fairly significant parts of Matthew and Luke out?" The reasons that are given usually aren't sufficient at a truth level, right? In terms of the critiques of their truth, it wouldn't be sufficient to leave those narratives totally out, right? So, there has to be something deeper.
¶5And what I've discovered is really you see two kinds of skepticism that scholars will level at the birth narratives. One is what I call skepticism of intent, which questions whether a source is intended to be historical in the first place. And the other one is skepticism of truth, which is to say, this source is historical, but I think the author gets something or some things wrong. And I think really the skepticism of intent is responsible for a significant amount of that kind of sidelining of the Gospel birth narratives in modern scholarship. And that's really what I'm pushing on and and challenging in this book.
¶6>> And so, one of the ways you challenge this skepticism of intent is by looking at the genre of the Gospels. Can you tell us a bit about how you go about doing that? I mean, you look at the Gospels as ancient biographies. Are infancy narratives, birth stories, are these the kinds of things to show up in other ancient biographies? >> Yeah, so as you know, a lot of scholars today, most scholars today, tend to view the Gospels as being ancient biographies.
¶7And if not ancient biographies, then ancient biographies are closest parallels to what we have in in the Gospels. So, then the question becomes, how did those kinds of narratives function? And a lot of scholars who are actually on the opposite side of the debate from me will cite ancient birth narratives in ancient biographies outside the Gospels and say, look, these are clearly meant to be legendary, mythical. They're not making historical claims. And so, that's how we should read the Gospel birth narratives as well.
¶8And I I saw these kinds of claims being made as I was reading the scholarly literature for quite a while, and I decided just to go look at the narratives themselves and see, okay, what is what is Plutarch doing in his birth narratives? What is Suetonius doing in his birth narratives? And what I discovered was just very surprising. It the the things that I found in the stories didn't square with the story I've been told by modern scholars. And so, that's really where this book comes from is some close engagement with primary sources, authors like Plutarch, Suetonius, Philo, Cornelius Nepos.
¶9>> Mhm. And you you identify four features that you take to be indicative of historical intent. You talk about their use of sources, something you call transparency, and evaluation and distancing. Can you just unpack how those markers are well, what they are and also how they markers of historical intent. >> Yeah.
¶10Yeah, so these are really the kinds of things that I just started to notice as I was reading ancient birth narratives that were not squaring with the what I might call the legendary intent hypothesis, right? That ancient birth narratives were just as a rule intended to be legendary. So I and then I I kind of categorize them into these uh these categories you now see in front of you that I'm calling historiographic features. So one one would be as you said sources. So and this is simple, an author just cites one or more sources for their story.
¶11This isn't something that we'd really expect if this was just meant to be a legend. >> Yeah. >> Right? If if we're essentially writing a nursery tale or something like that, this is just an interesting story. It doesn't really matter where the information came from because it didn't come from anywhere.
¶12It came from the author's imagination. >> Mhm. >> So citing a source seems to be indicative of some kind of historiographic intent. And we can talk more about possible fringe exception cases to that as well. But another thing that I saw is what I've called transparency.
¶13So this is where the author kind of pulls the veil back and allows you to see behind their narrative to what's going on in the background and says, "Hey, I've got multiple sources here and they don't all say the same thing." >> Yeah. >> So I have some differences between how my sources are narrating things and I just want to be up front about this. So here's one way the story is told, here's another way that the story is told, here's a third way, right? >> Yeah. >> And then you have evaluation where an author might explicitly evaluate an account and say, I think that this source gets it wrong and here's why.
¶14And then the last thing is distancing and this is where an author puts distance between their reputation as an author and a claim that is being made. So, consider the difference for example between me, if I was making as an author the claim that Zeus impregnated someone's mother. >> Yes. >> Versus if I say, it is said that Zeus slept with this person's mother. >> Yeah.
¶15>> Right? Those are two very different kinds of claims. On the first one, I am actually bearing the responsibility for the truth of that. On the other one, I'm just saying it's been said. Someone someone has said this and I'm just acknowledging that it's in my sources, but I'm not taking responsibility for that claim.
¶16I think all four of those things suggest a historiographic consciousness on the part of authors. And by the way, they're not unique to birth narratives or unique to ancient biographies. You'll find these throughout ancient ancient biographies and adult material as well and you'll find them in ancient historians outside the Gospels. So, for example, you'll find them in Herodotus and Thucydides, Polybius and authors like this. >> Fantastic.
¶17So, >> [snorts] >> I suppose when we're thinking about birth stories, some people would say that ancient birth stories are legendary because they contain all of these things that strike us as modern people as highly fantastical. They contain omens and portents and dreams and you know, maybe seeds telling of future greatness. There's this line from Suetonius, the second-century biographer, where he says in his biography of Augustus, "Having reached this point, it will not be out of place to add an account of the omens which occurred before he was born." You know, it's almost like this is just standard fare of what you do when telling a story. >> [snorts] >> How does that relate to your to your thesis? Does that sort of undermine the historical intent of the biographer?
¶18>> I don't think so, and here's why. >> [clears throat] >> So, on the one hand, we have to ask in any given case, is the [snorts] author actually claiming that this happened? Are they taking responsibility for that, or are they simply reporting it as being in their sources, right? Via transparency or via distancing, for example. So, we have to ask, what is the author actually asserting or claiming versus what they're just including in their account.
¶19So, that that's one dimension that these historiographic features bring up. We have to have a nuance in terms of how we think about these things. But, the other issue that you have to think about is the kinds of supernatural things that are involved. So, for example, you know, the ancient world, pretty much everybody believed that there were gods. >> Yeah.
¶20>> Or that there was a god, but often numerous gods, right? And they often thought that the gods would communicate things not necessarily through a written text, like a Bible or something like that, but through portents, right? Things that happen in the heavens or certain things that we might call coincidences today, right? And when those things happened, and they they saw something that we would think would be a coincidence, they might think that that was revealing something about what the gods were saying, right? So, it wouldn't be unusual to say that as a historian or as a biographer, hey, this thing happened and then people saw significance in that.
¶21That would actually be a very normal thing in the ancient world. Be weird if we didn't have those kinds of reports. >> Yeah. >> So, you have what I might call omens on the one hand. And then you have actual actual supernatural events that we might call miracles.
¶22And what's fascinating is, while you do find some some miracle claims in ancient biographies, they're not exclusive to birth narratives. And in fact, you don't find many of those claims in birth narratives. >> Mhm. >> So, you when you find them, they're in adult material as well. So, they really don't provide any kind of a basis for saying that birth narratives are uniquely ahistorical.
¶23>> Yeah. >> like that. So, so those are just a variety of factors that I think requires to nuance our view of ancient birth narratives beyond what has often been done in scholarship. >> Would you say that ancient biographers were happy to include legendary material though in their infancy stories? You know, I I'm thinking of someone like uh Plutarch when he tells the story of Alexander the Great and he had some of these techniques that you've been describing, but he nevertheless [snorts] feels free to narrate what we would probably consider to be legendary material about the sort of divine conception of Alexander's birth and so on.
¶24So, they are happy to include legends, but their overall presentation is not legendary. Is that the sort of distinction you would make? >> Yeah, and I I think what you see there is ancient biographers are often just trying to be honest about what's in their sources. >> Yeah. >> Right?
¶25And as good historians, as historical authors you might say, they're trying to say, "This is what I see here and this is what I want people to know is out there and you know, dear reader, you can go make your own judgment about these things." Right? But here's my judgment and that's what you're going to find. And when you actually get the biographers judgment, they're usually not making these kinds of claims about supernatural conceptions and things like that. Those those sorts of things when you find them are usually qualified by transparency or evaluation or by distancing. >> Yeah.
¶26>> But there's one more element I think we have to take into the picture here that we haven't talked about yet and that is that ancient biographers, many of them actually thought that supernatural events could occur. >> Yeah. >> Right? They they really thought that it was a legitimate aspect of history and that you could really say that you thought something had happened and that didn't make it non-historical when you made a miracle claim. And you even see them discussing things like this sometimes, like Plutarch has some discussions of this in his works where he'll say, you know, yes, I recognize that it looks like this claim is kind of crazy, but I really think that the evidence warrants saying that the divinity was at work in that situation.
¶27And so, as moderns who might be more skeptical of those kinds of claims, we just have to recognize simply because we think that a claim is a bit fantastic or if we don't think that probably happened, there may be a difference between how we perceive that event and how the ancient biographer is perceiving that event. >> Mhm.