Wise Men and Shepherds Together

Our family set up our two creches for the season. It’s always nice to see them again after an eleven month absence!

If you’re familiar with the biblical Christmas stories, you know that Matthew and Luke have contrasting accounts. Matthew 1:8 through chapter 2 gives us the angelic announcement to Joseph, the visitation of the wise men, the escape to Egypt, the massacre of the innocents, and the return from Egypt. These stories provide a parallel of Jesus’ birth and that of Moses. Matthew has nothing about an inn and a manger, and Jesus’ family goes to Nazareth to escape Herod’s wrath, rather than the family journeying from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of a census.

Luke 1:5 through 2:40 interweaves John the Baptist’s birth with Jesus’ and provides us with accounts of John’s parents, the angelic visitation to Mary, the journey to Bethlehem because of the census, the inn with no vacancy and the manger, the angels and shepherds, and Jesus’ presentation at the Temple in accordance to Jewish mitzvot.

You may know that a second century Syrian man named Tatian took the Gospels and wove them together into a harmony called the Diatessaron. According to Howard Clark Kee (Jesus in History: An Approach to the Study of the Gospels, second edition, HBJ 1977, 280ff), the work was known only in fragments or in Armenian translation until the twentieth century when a complete Syriac version was discovered. One fifth century bishop destroyed copies that he could find, replacing them with the canonical gospels. We don’t know why Tatian compiled his Diatessaron, but it harmonized the gospel accounts of Jesus while, of course, neglecting the integrity of each gospel author.

Here is an online translation of the Diatessaron: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/diatessaron.html

I think about all this because, of course, we tend to conflate the gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth in our imaginations, and in our creches. The three wise men figurines stand among the shepherd figurines and the little manger and baby Jesus (plus a few animals). And why not? We understand the differences between the two gospel accounts and we picture the stories together.