In the Bleak Midwinter: The Dark Infancy Narrative of Matthew: Part One

Scar of Bethlehem: Banksy

Every Gospel has its weak points. The weak point to Matthew is its very grim and dark beginning. And the weak point to the grim and dark beginning is the long and dull list of names, the genealogy that tells of the ancestry of…. Joseph, divided into three sets of fourteen from Abraham all the way up to Jacob the father of Joseph “the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus who was the Christ.”

Mary just sort of shows up. Her ancestry is never drawn out. Some, pointing to the slightly different genealogy in the gospel of Luke say that is her family tree, but it is not. There have been some traditions that point out the names in the two genealogies are so close Mary and Joseph must be cousins and this may have been true, but it isn’t pointed out in any gospel and certainly not the Gospel of Matthew. Here, Mary is a mystery, and she is not the main character of this story. This is the story of Joseph. Joseph who hears from Mary that she has conceived of the Holy Spirit and Joseph who, in a dream, is told by an angel to not fret over Mary’s strange story, but take her as his wife, It is Joseph who chooses to not have sexual relations with Mary until she has given birth. We do not get the lyrical Christmas story of Luke here. We get the tale laconically. Joseph took Mary as his wife, she bore a son and called him Jesus. It is chapter two that opens up telling us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

Here is something. Nowadays we all understand the Gospel by what is called a harmonization of the Gospels, but they are four different books, and according to Matthew, not only is Joseph a descendent of David, Joseph and Mary are living in Bethlehem. There is nothing about Caesar Augustus taxing the world and massive population shifts of Jews going to their native places. Matthew simply introduces Joseph and Mary and then says Mary gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem, presumably, because this is where they lived.

Next we are told, “Behold when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem asking, where is he who has been born King of the Jews?” This whole story, to me, is colored blue and grey with black in it as well. This is the story for Epiphany, the end of holidays, the return to school. The story of the Magi is the tale told before the bone chilling cold a long January and February, a time in which, like cursed Narnia, it is always winter, but bears no hope of Christmas.