Michael BG wrote:
If we assume that Matthew created the story that Jesus lived in Egypt so he could apply an Old Testament prophecy to Jesus – “Out of Egypt I have called my son” (Mt 2:15c – Hosea 11:1 [When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.{RSV}]) is your theory affected? (It is most likely that neither of the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke are based on any reliable historical tradition.)
If we only had the gospels of Mark and Q what evidence would you have for your theory?
Ok, they are a lot of issues brought up here:
First: the Old Testament prophecy (Hos 11:1) "Out of Egypt I have called my son." As I have said before, I don't regard the New Testament an ONLY history. It is a lot of things, and written on several levels. On the surface, it is very much sacred text, with many Old Testament references, and many supernatural events described. And underneath that surface, it is very much history (often related to the Jewish rebellion). So applying an Old Testament prophecy to historical events is typical, as I see it, for the New Testament narratives.
Second: The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. Here we have perhaps the most glaring contradiction in the New Testament. There are only two birth narratives, and one of them says that Jesus was born 4 BCE, at the latest, whereas the other says he was born in 6 or 7 CE! To my mind, when there are obvious contradictions like that, the information should not be "discarded", but rather the opposite -- the difference means something!
Now if we first take Luke: Luke says that Jesus was born when "a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth.
This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria."
What's weird about this indicator -- the tax census under Quirinius -- is that this census is highly significant also according to Josephus, but for a completely different reason! It sparked the first organized Jewish rebellion against Rome:
"Yet was there one Judas, a Gaulonite, of a city whose name was Gamala, who, taking with him Sadduc, a Pharisee, became zealous to draw them to a revolt, who both said that this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery, and exhorted the nation to assert their liberty;... All sorts of misfortunes also sprang from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree; one violent war came upon us after another."
Now the strange thing about Luke using this census as an indicator of the time when Jesus was born is that he here DOESN'T EVEN MENTION THE REVOLT! So the birth of the organized Jewish rebel movement(in Josephus) has become the birth of Jesus (in Luke).
As I see it, this is one of the many examples of rebellion-related subtext in the New Testament. And it says nothing about when Jesus was actually born, but it states when his movement (which I consider to have been a rebel movement) was born.
Now if we look at the second birth narrative, that in Matthew, elaborating on that takes a little longer (for a more detailed description, see "A Shift in Time", pp. 95-105), but very briefly: As you may have gathered, my hypothesis is that the actual events -- as they happened according to Josephus -- where shifted from the late 40s and 50s CE, to the late 20s and 30 CE when depicted in the New Testament. But whereas Luke and Acts seem to have a very consistent subtext on this matter, Mark and Matthew seem to suffer from some jumbled chronology. And if we go straight to Matthew's birth narrative (or rather his description of Jesus's return from Egypt), there is an obvious chronological oddity there: Right after we are told of Jesus returning from Egypt -- as a child -- the text says: “Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea” (Matt. 3:1).
But how can Jesus return from Egypt as a child, at the same time as John the Baptist starts preaching? According to Luke, they are the same age (or at most six months apart)! As I see it, the most likely explanation for this is that when Matthew was originally written, the time shift had not yet been implemented on the text, the king who died was not Herod the Great (but perhaps Herod Agrippa I), and Jesus did not return from Egypt as a child, but rather as an adult.
Now that may sound as a frivolous assertion. If it were not for the fact that there are several early non-biblical sources which state that Jesus spent years as an adult in Egypt. I will here quote only the earliest one, from Contra Celsum (where Church Father Origen quotes Celsus, who wrote ca. 175-80 CE). The sentences in quotes are from Celsus (who refers to a fictive Jew), the rest is Origen's text:
'He [the fictive Jew] accuses Him [Jesus] of having "invented his birth from a virgin" and upbraids Him with being 'born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child, who having hired himself out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having there acquired some miraculous powers, on which the Egyptians greatly pride themselves, returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these proclaimed himself a God.”' (Cels. 1.28)
Strangely, Church Father Origen doesn't even deny that adult sojourn to Egypt, because in the next segment (1.29), he writes: "“And now, our Jesus, who is reproached with being born in a village … and being despised as the son of a poor laboring woman, and as having on account of his poverty left his native country and hired himself out in Egypt … has yet been able to shake the whole inhabited world.”
Other descriptions of, or references to, Jesus having "brought magic" from Egypt as an adult -- or being referred to as "the Egyptian" -- come from the Talmud, from Sepher Toldoth Yeshu, from Arnobius of Sicca, and from Amulo, Archbishop of Lyons ("In their own language they [the Jews] call him Ussum Hamizri, which is to say in Latin Dissipator Ægyptius [the Egyptian Destroyer/Disperser]" ; Amulo, Epistola, seu Liber contra Judaeos, ad Carolum Regem, 39).
And then we have the strange thing that the Gospels have nothing to tell us about Jesus after age 12 -- when he goes to Jerusalem -- and before age thirty, when he suddenly reappears in the story. And as he enters the synagogue in his hometown, Nazareth, people at first do not recognize him, and then only recognize him in relation to his parents and siblings, i.e. presumably as a child or young boy (Matt. 13:54-56;Luke 4:16-23; Mark 6:1-3) . Where has he been in the interim?
So, thirdly, to answer your question "If we only had the gospels of Mark and Q what evidence would you have for your theory?": I would have the close analogy between the events of the Mount of Olives, as depicted in the Gospels, and that of "the Egyptian", in Josephus. And I would have all the non-biblical evidence of Jesus's adult sojourn to Egypt, the lack of New Testament information before age 30, as well as the strange homecoming to Nazareth, apparently after a long absence.
