Matthew and Luke wrote their birth material with historiographic intent. They intended these stories to be true, historically speaking. They did their best work trying to tell us a story that was both historically true and theologically meaningful.

Are the gospel birth narratives real history or just beautiful legends? I'm Nate Hansonen and today on Faith Lab, New Testament scholar

Caleb Friedman went back to the actual ancient biographers like Plutarch, Suttonius,

Philo, and tested a claim that some scholars had been making for decades, that ancient birth

narratives were never meant to be historical, which would then mean that the Jesus birth

narratives that we have in Luke and Matthew were never

meant to be historical. But here's what he found. If Matthew and Luke can't even give us the same

genealogy and some other details don't seem to line up, why doesn't that automatically mean the

whole birth story is just made up? It's a myth. Great question. Simply put, there's a big leap, logically,

between observing that two sources differ with each other and then concluding that therefore

both of them must be made up. So let's just take kind of an everyday life example. You have

a car collision happen. Let's just say that they're two main eyewitnesses,

and they're going to differ regarding some of the details. But also, maybe they also,

they have some overlap in terms of what they would say happen. I don't think anybody would

assume that simply because they differ regarding some details, even important ones that both

are made up. It seems to me that the more reasonable conclusion would be if there's a real incompatibility, one is right and the other is wrong. But often what happens when we come to the gospel birth narratives is people will say, well, they disagree, so they must both be wrong, right? Which is kind of a weird conclusion to come to, right? Why wouldn't the more natural conclusion be that even if they

disagree? And I haven't said that they do yet. But if they do, then why would we assume that

they're both wrong, right? I think one other thing that we have to bring into the conversation here

when it comes to the birth narratives and really to any ancient document is we have to be careful

to read these things as they were written, which

is to say we need to pay attention to their literary genre. And in this case, we have a pretty

good level of confidence that the Gospels are ancient biographies. And so we're talking about the

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