MetaCatholic

I have often found many of Ben Witherington’s books helpful and insightful, but he offers an extraordinary post today on Luke’s infancy narrative. The ostensible point is the quite unexceptional one, that Luke’s language by no means necessitates an inn. (While he thinks, quite plausibly, that kataluma means the guest-room, I doubt the evidence, linguistic or archaeological, takes us beyond a large-room – when many houses had only one real room.)

I have no problems at all with this point, but it is the way he treats the whole story as factual. A census for tax purposes takes Joseph to Bethlehem, and Joseph takes Mary to get her away from the wagging tongues in Nazareth speculating about her pregnancy. At this point, Witherington abandons Luke briefly for Matthew (who, of course knows nothing of either census or, indeed, any idea that Nazareth is their home-town) to have an angel nudging Joseph into this pre-martial honeymoon to see the Revenue. Then he’s back to Luke and the Holy Family’s late arrival meaning their relatives have run out of space in the guest-room, which, even if it is the correct translation of kataluma, is another thing completely unknown to Matthew, where Jesus seems to be born in the family home.

Then comes the absolute nadir of the “argument”:

Now I have to tell you, this story is too improbably [sic] NOT TO BE TRUE. I mean, no one would make up a story like this which suggested to the skeptical in the home town and to latter day skeptics ever since that Jesus the Son of God was illegitimate. The story of the virginal conception must surely be true, for an evangelistic religion in that honor and shame culture would never make up a story like this about the birth of their Savior if they wanted to convince a patriarchal world of its truth. It’s too improbable not to be true!

Whatever the truth of the virginal conception (I happen to accept it - sometimes by the skin of my post-Enlightenment mental teeth), any responsible argument (which can’t judge the truth of this kind of eschatological in-breaking of God) really needs to take account of the sheer incompatibility of the Matthean and Lukan narratives, and ask what the authors were doing. But using a mish-mash of Matthew and Luke, ignoring their flat contradictions, and culminating in the idea that improbability is a sufficient argument for truth is just flat out wrong.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that in carefully delineated ways an understanding of the cultural “improbability” of a particular story (or conversely, its neat cultural fit) can be a tool in the historian’s toolbox. I just don’t like it produced as an apologetic bludgeon at the end of an argument that shows no historical sensitivity to the texts being investigated.

Nor do I think it an excuse that this post is called a sermon. How on earth are we to encourage a responsible use of Scripture when even scholars harmonise in the pulpit? What is the point of sounding learned and scholarly about Luke’s vocabulary, when the individuality of Luke’s text, and it’s relation to Matthew’s equally individual text, is entirely ignored?

Sorry for the rant, but this just so irritates me.