Mark gives no account of the birth of Jesus and he was the first to go to print, about 40 years after the death of Christ. Matthew starts his gospel with claims about the genealogy of Jesus, proving he was of royal birth but only on the basis that the father of Jesus was Joseph, writes Vincent Browne.
There is then the story of the virgin birth in Bethlehem, the visit of the three wise men, the flight into Egypt and the return to Nazareth. The historical accuracy of this is dubious, according to Christian scholars, including the Catholic authors of The New Jerome Biblical Commentary.
A loose account was thought appropriate by Matthew probably because that was how authors in those days described the origins of great men.
Luke too feels free to embroider his account of the birth of Jesus. This would not have been then a dishonest device and few 2,000 years ago would have treated it as historically accurate in all details. For instance, the Magnificat was almost certainly his own composition or a hymn then current in Palestine. Luke has shepherds visiting the cradle at Bethlehem and there is no flight into Egypt.
John wrote his account probably 70 years after the death of Jesus and as with Mark there is no account of the birth, it starts with the ministry of John the Baptist.
Not a great deal turns on these oddities in the reports (or silences) about the birth of Jesus. The fact is that Jesus lived about 2,000 years ago and he has had a profound effect on the civilisation of the world - or most of it - since. And that effect is not because of anything he said, for reasons I will turn to in a moment, but because of who he is believed to have been.
Were all that is believed about Jesus to amount to a claim that he was just another prophet, as Islam contends, he would be interesting and what he said would be what was of primary significance about him. But what is claimed about Jesus is not just was he the son of God, sent on earth to redeem mankind and womankind but that he was or is God.
And if that is true it diminishes everything else we know or could know. For it would prove, first, that God exists, and second (and arguably far more significant) that this God is so deeply involved in our lives that he (or she) assumed the form of a human being to guide us and redeem us.
I am not sure I understand what redeem means in this context and, if what I suspect it means is true (that Jesus redeemed us from the sin of Adam and Eve), it seems so off the wall as to collapse the whole edifice. But leave that aside.
If Jesus was God it means also that God cares hugely about us. That in turn means we are unlikely to be transient beings, fluffed out for ever after death. That the whole point of existence is towards some transcendent goal. That there is a point to all this (i.e., life).
But I have a question. Since the "fact" that Jesus was God was by far the most important dimension to him, while he was a human being, isn't it surprising he did not say so? Or at least that he did not say so unambiguously?
In Matthew 27.63, the High Priest says to Jesus: "I order you to tell us under oath before the living God whether you are the Messiah, the Son of God." Jesus said to him: "You have said so. But I tell you: from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the power and coming in the clouds of heaven." (This latter claim was a quotation from one of the Psalms and almost certainly an insertion by Matthew.) Mark makes the same insertion in 15.62. This comes nowhere near a claim by Jesus that he was God.
Jesus repeatedly referred to himself (or rather was so quoted) as "Son of Man" but that did not infer divinity, rather, possibly, a claim to have been the Messiah.
So why, if he was God, did he not say he was, as this would have been by far the most significant message he could have conveyed? Jerome Murphy O'Connor, the famous Biblical scholar, told me in an interview some time ago that the reason Jesus did not say he was God was because no one would have listened to him afterwards because the claim would have been regarded as blasphemous. That is hardly convincing as an explanation for avoiding revealing the momentous truth that he was God.
I find it difficult to see how a great deal can be made from what Jesus said or was quoted to have said. He explicitly affirmed he was not discarding the forbidding law of Moses, he appeared to soften this, however, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount, but his invocation of charity and justice was not new.
The big question remains: was Jesus God? For, if he was, it changes everything.