Why Can't Luke and Matthew Just Get Along?

Mary riding on a donkey? Wise men visiting the newborn Jesus in a cave? A callous innkeeper turning the holy family away? Search as you might, you won't find any of this in the gospels. You will find them in The Protoevangelium of James from the second century, along with an assortment of other spectacular happenings associated with the birth of Jesus. 

What's in our gospels? Two accounts that actually share very little in common. Is it possible to reconcile the two? Many have declared victory in their attempts to make Matthew and Luke agree, especially among those with certain dogmatic agendas in mind when they set out to map the two stories onto each other. In fact, many Bible inerrantists must make them agree because for them rule number one concerning the Holy Scriptures is that there are no internal contradictions or disagreements among the Bible's authors. It's all one truth from one truth-speaking God.

We all have biases and assumptions we bring to the Bible as we interpret it. The majority view among western protestants who adhere to an inerrant, inspired and infallible Bible usually approaches it with a rubric that includes these assumptions:

1) The New Testament is accurate in the same sense as applied to modern nonfiction or journalism. In other words, when we read the stories in Matthew and Luke, we are looking at a set of falsifiable facts that more or less reflect the actual occurrences they record.

2) Adding material that is possible (however remotely) to the Bible's texts to make them agree is no problem. For example, Luke begins his tale in Nazareth as the family's hometown, while Matthew's story commences with the Magi showing up in Bethlehem- no mention of Nazareth until they return from Egypt. Blending the two stories requires making Matthew say something he actually never says. In fact, when Matthew's attention does turn to Nazareth-after a trip to Egypt-, he mentions it as if Nazareth was a new idea: "There he (Joseph) made his home in a town called Nazareth." Historical details and timelines are malleable. 

3) The Bible's accounts are utterly unique in their content and rhetorical goals. This assumption ignores the ancient traditions like the encomium, or glorifying a "great man" by adding signs, portents and wonders to their birth story. The usual approach of treating ancient writings as embedded history and interpreting them as such does not apply in the Bible's case because they are elevated to a special status. In other words, "scripture" is not always subject to the same interpretive methodologies as other similar documents of the time period.

It is an odd note that those who hold these assumptions also invoke the importance of reading in context and understanding some things about the social conditions that shaped their composition. Problems occur when dogmatic commitments prevent interpreters from admitting data that challenges their status quo. And there are some significant ones when we try to make Matthew and Luke agree on the nativity.

One event described by two accounts

The gospel of Luke begins with much more background detail before we get to the exciting parts. Luke starts with a detailed story of the conception of John the Baptist featuring Elizabeth and her husband, the priest Zechariah.

Six months later, the same angel that dealt with Elizabeth and Zechariah appears to Mary and announces a miraculous pregnancy. Luke states that this occurs in Nazareth in Galilee.

After Mary hears the announcement, she rushes to a Judean town in the hill country where Elizabeth and Zechariah have their home. Mary stays there for three months, Elizabeth has her baby and Mary returns home to Nazareth. We're still not sure of the timing for this; Luke has yet to offer a definite marker, except for a reference to "the time of King Herod." If this is Herod the Great, we can conclude that it's before 4 BCE the date most scholars think that Herod the Great met his demise.

Side note: Luke's story has Mary traveling alone though territory that is infested with bandits. This would be absolutely taboo for her culture- venturing outside the home with no male authority to protect her. Did Luke decide to omit information about a male family member or Joseph going with her? Was he unfamiliar with the local realities of Galilee when the trip took place? Perhaps it's simply a missed detail in Luke's research.

Matthew, After the Genealogy

Matthew: At first we don't know where Mary and Joseph are. We usually assume they are in Nazareth, then travel to Bethlehem, but that information is not in Matthew at all. The story moves quickly in a single paragraph:

• Mary and Joseph are betrothed

• She was found to be pregnant by the Holy Spirit

• Joseph plans to divorce her

• In Joseph's dream, an Angel persuades him to stay with Mary

• Why? Because the child is Jesus, and according to Matthew, it fulfills a prophecy from Isaiah 7:14

• And there was no intimate contact between Mary and Joseph until the birth

Matthew's story then leaps ahead to the scene in Judea, specifically Bethlehem, in the time of King Herod. There's no explanation given for their being in Bethlehem; the text reads as if Matthew simply thought that they lived there. The Magi from the east then arrive in Jerusalem, asking where the astrologically-indicated birth had occurred. We are given a glimpse into Herod's court where the appearance of these dignitaries and their entourage scares the daylights out of the royals and "all Jerusalem."

Is there any way to pin down which Herod this is? There were two of them in Judea in this general time period, Herod the Great and his son, Herod Archelaus. Matthew's characterization indicates Herod the Great, who was known for using murder to maintain his power.

Herod consults his chief priests and scribes for any information about a recently born Messiah (simply, an anointed king or priest of Israel), and they inform him that Micah chapter 5 mentions Bethlehem as the birthplace of a "ruler that will shepherd my people Israel." We get the idea that Matthew is really interested in showing how the events of Jesus' birth were foretold in the ancient Jewish writings.

Herod then attempts to use the Magi to sniff out the details "so that I too may go and pay homage."

Again Matthew's story proceeds quickly:

• The Magi find the place

• They pay Jesus homage, offering gold, frankincense, and myrrh (worth a fortune!)

• Warned in a dream, they set off for home, skipping the report to Herod

This occurs at "the house" where little Jesus was staying with his parents. Matthew does not record any movement between Bethlehem and Nazareth at all, in fact Nazareth seems like an unplanned afterthought when they return from Egypt. This does not matter to Matthew as long as Jesus can claim Bethlehem as his birthplace, as foretold by the ancient writings.

Next on the timeline is Matthew's narration of the holy family's flight into Egypt. Triggered by a dream, Joseph heads south- perhaps bankrolled by the small fortune they receive from the magi. Strangely, we don't hear about the possible equivalent of millions of dollars the family took with them, or how it affected Jesus' ethic of poverty and severe criticism of the rich and powerful. The family's enormous capitalization simply disappears from the story.

We aren't told by Matthew how long Jesus was In Egypt, but he does give us some chronological markers regarding their return. Another dream for Joseph informs him that "those who were seeking the child’s life are dead." Herod the Great died in 4 BCE, after which Rome appointed his son Herod Archelaus who died in 18 CE, well after he was deposed as ethnarch in 6 CE and banished to Vienna in Gaul. It certainly looks like Matthew really meant Herod the Great, murderer of the Bethlehemite children (incidentally there is no historical mention from Josephus or anyone else about this event- was it only a handful of children? Two or three? Bethlehem was not a large town).

Now we can imagine Jesus's family sitting around the breakfast table somewhere in Egypt, and Father Joseph says, " I had a dream last night…"

Matthew's story places a pin on the timeline at around 4 BCE. If Jesus was born in 6 BCE, he's two years old at the breakfast table. Of course the dream could have occurred any period of time after Herod the Great's death, so we can't assume too much here.

The plain sense of the text in Matthew's gospel makes it clear that the family intended to go back to Bethlehem, or somewhere in Judea, as if that was home. We pick it up in Matt. 2:22. "But when he (Joseph) heard that Archelaus was ruling Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will be called a Nazarene.”

We know from Matthew's estimation that this movement from Egypt, past Judea and into a new home in Nazareth occurred between 4 BCE and 6 CE, a span of eleven years. Why 6 CE? Archelaus was deposed and exiled that year. Egyptian Jesus could be between three and eleven years old.

Matthew is not quoting a direct Old Testament prophecy about Jesus being called a Nazarene, but making an inference about passages like Isaiah 11:1 which discusses and "shoot" or "branch" from the stump of Jesse (king David's father) and this "branch" will bear fruit. The word Matthew picks up on is in Hebrew "NZR" or "Netzer" which is a close approximation of "Nazareth." So it was believed that the Messiah could possibly be considered a resident of "Branchtown." Was the author of Matthew stretching things a bit? Maybe he had to because it was common knowledge that Jesus and his family were Galileans from Nazareth ("can anything good come from there?") yet Jesus's prophesied birthplace had to be Bethlehem. 

So, Joseph hears that Archelaus was now reigning in Judea (between 4 BCE and 6 CE ) and is rightly concerned that he might also carry out his father's paranoid and murderous plans against his messiah-child. So Matthew has him heading past Judea into Galilee which was now under the tetrarchy of Herod Antipas, Archelaus' brother. Was Antipas perceived as a lesser threat to the young Messiah than Archelaus? Jesus later calls Antipas "that fox," and it was Antipas that drunkenly orders the execution of Jesus's cousin John the Baptizer. He and Jesus meet in person in Jerusalem on that fateful Passover- Jesus's last before his crucifixion.

And so we leave Matthew's nativity story with the little family ensconced in Nazareth sometime between 4 BCE and 6 CE. We can safely conclude from the textual material in Matthew that Jesus was born in 6 BCE, counting backward from the latest possible year of 4 BCE when Herod the Great dies, using Herod's two-year-old child edict as a basis for that number which takes the reader back to 6.

Luke's Account

"In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register."

After Luke's detailed backstory explaining John the Baptist's origins, this gospel has Joseph and Mary travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of a census enforced on a non-Roman province (Galilee) that compelled them to travel to Joseph's ancestral home in another non-Roman province: Judea. A Roman census did in fact occur in 6 CE, but Luke is vague about the political realities at the time. He merely refers to "…the days of King Herod of Judea…" Which one?

What's odd about this account?

Historically, we know that the responsibility for a tax-related census in Galilee and Judea would have been delegated to King Herod the Great if the date of the census was before his death in 4 BCE. After that, a census affecting Galilee should have been handled by Herod Antipas the Tetrarch. Ethnarch Archelaus would be the sole authority in charge of any census in Judea until his ouster in 6 CE. After 6 CE, Judea was placed under direct Roman rule through the current Legate of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, a local administrator named Coponius, and later Procurator Pontius Pilate.

Encyclopedia Britannica does speculate that there may have been an earlier census or two:

"There may have been an earlier census under another governor; an inscription in the Lateran Museum records an unnamed governor who twice ruled Syria, and the suggestion has been made that this was, indeed, Quirinius and that in an earlier time a reported census according to Roman calculation might have been carried out circa 8 BCE, one of a series of such."  The religious situation in the Greco-Roman world of the 1st century AD

Luke seems a little too certain of his details to attribute the "first" Quirinius census to a possible earlier one. He also credits Caesar Augustus for the count. Augustus himself reported in his Res Gestae Divi Augusti ("The Deeds of the Divine Augustus") that he conducted three censuses of Roman citizens during his reign, in 28 BCE, 8 BCE, and 14 CE. First, we note that Galileans and Judeans are not Roman Citizens. Second, It's possible that Luke somehow conflated the 8 BCE census with the one in 6 CE. But again, Rome never directly administered censuses of client kingdoms, which Judea certainly was at that time.

So at best, we must take Luke's details with a grain of salt. According to the information we have in hand, we can't make Luke and Matthew agree on the timing of Jesus' birth, by a span of 13 years. Matthew's story indicates 6 BCE and Luke, inadvertently or not, pins the birth to 6 CE (0 counts as one year).

On with Luke's version of events

We're now in 6 CE, Herod Archelaus' last year as "ethnarch" (not technically a king, but Luke insists on this, unless he's confusing Herod the Great with his son Herod Archelaus) of Judea, Samaria and Idumea. This is the year that Archelaus was deposed and administrative responsibilities were transferred to Quirinius, governor of the province of Syria. Herod Archelaus' realm consisting of Samaria, Judea, and Idumea was now under direct Roman rule, and would be for the foreseeable future.

In mid-to-late 5 CE- just prior to Quirinius' census in 6 CE, Elizabeth is miraculously pregnant somewhere in Judea. Mary and Joseph encounter the Angel Gabriel in Nazareth in Galilee, whereupon Mary travels to Elizabeth's town to help with the birth. As the year turns to 6 CE, Herod Archelaus is deposed. Judea is now a Roman province. Quirinius immediately orders a census as standard procedure for new Roman provinces. And Mary is starting to show.

Note that Luke has the Holy Couple in Nazareth from the very beginning of the story. Both Luke and Matthew knew that Jesus was "from Nazareth," but his birth in Bethlehem was important for symbolic reasons. It appears that they solved the equation differently: Matthew starts in Bethlehem and has them end up in Nazareth after a sojourn in Egypt and Luke has them start in Nazareth, a census compels them to Bethlehem, and then they return to their hometown.

What happens next?

Let's ignore for a moment the chronological discrepancies between the two accounts and look at Luke's gospel in more detail.

Mary and Joseph and the new baby were situated among the animals of the house in which they took shelter. A typical first century three-room house had space for the family's livestock on the ground floor with living and sleeping spaces on the second floor.

Local shepherds are inspired by a terrifying spectacle of angels announcing the birth to them, after which they hastily trekked into town to see the baby.

Eight days later (still in 6 CE?) Jesus is circumcised by a priest. 25 days after that, Mary would finish her stint as "unclean" and wade into a mikveh pool to cleanse herself (after a total of 33 days as specified in Leviticus 12). After that, Mary and Joseph would qualify to enter the temple precincts to undergo the redemption ceremony, which Luke erroneously calls "…the purification rites required by the Law of Moses…"

Redeeming a firstborn son required the substitution of a blood sacrifice in the baby's place. The process involved slaughtering a sheep, with a poverty allowance for using two doves or pigeons, which is what Luke specifies for the couple. See Leviticus 12 for Luke's source material.

According to Luke's details about the temple and the prophetic words from Simeon and Anna (residents of Jerusalem who meet baby Jesus), we're in Judea for at least a month, unless the family commutes between Nazareth and Jerusalem during Mary's unclean period for both the circumcision and the redemption ceremony.

This is where it gets unusually difficult to make the two gospels agree. Luke recounts how the family returns to Nazareth in Galilee, while Matthew puts the family on the road to Egypt. Luke says in chapter 2 verse 39:

"When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him."

Different times, Different places

So Luke has the three back in Nazareth with no hint of any emigration to Egypt. We've already seen in Matthew that the family doesn't set foot in Nazareth until their return from Egypt, which if you recall, occurs only after Herod the Great is dead and Archelaus and Antipas take over their respective territories in or about 4 CE. Luke starts his narrative in 6 CE, a full ten years after Matthew's story.

Furthermore, Luke's gospel mentions the family's yearly attendance at Passover in Jerusalem. Luke 2:41 tells us: "…every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of Passover." A plain reading of this assumes a residence in Nazareth during Jesus' childhood. If this is true, then we have to add a major plot point to Matthew's gospel which isn't there at all. How did the family accomplish this annual journey if they were in Egypt for at least two years, from 4 BCE to 6 CE? Did they travel up from Egypt? This would have been something like a 300 mile journey on foot, and taken up to two weeks each way. 

If we give some credence to Luke's story, it should mirror Matthew's apparent two-year stay in Egypt. That would take us from 6 CE into 8 CE (when Jesus is age 2). Remember Matthew 2:16 which specifies that Herod ordered the murder of all children around  Bethlehem  "…who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the magi."

Once again, the big problem we run into is that by 8 CE, Judea was ruled by neither Herod the Great nor his incompetent son Herod Archelaus. By then Judea was a "satellite of Syria," under Coponius.

Another possibility, if one supposes that almost anything is possible no matter how far-fetched, is that the magi arrived in Bethlehem during one of the holy family's annual visits from Nazareth for Passover. So perhaps Jesus is between ages 2 and 12, a young boy staying with his parents in "the house" in nearby Bethlehem. The visit is noticed by everyone in Jerusalem, especially Herod. Could it happen like this?

1. Jesus is born in Bethlehem (Luke and Matthew)

2. They return to Nazareth (Luke)

3. They go to Jerusalem for Passover every year (Luke)

4. On one particular Passover, the Magi visit (Matthew)

5. They don't return to Nazareth, but flee to live in Egypt (Matthew)

6. Every year, they keep the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover (Luke)

7. They keep showing up in Jerusalem- an extremely risky proposition if both Herods are hunting for them?

8. Until Herod the Great dies in 4 BCE? Still dangerous under Archelaus…

9. Herod the Great dies and they move from Egypt to Nazareth

When we overlay on this timeline the dates of Quirinius's census, Herod's death, Archelaus's rule and the logistics of visiting Jerusalem every year for Passover, it gets a bit preposterous.

Can the Two Accounts be Reconciled?

One possibility: When Luke says "They returned to their own town of Nazareth," one could suppose that Luke's silence about Egypt does not mean it couldn't have happened. Luke never says that the family never went to Egypt! So one can insert any number of years between Luke 2:38 and 39. We can simply insert the Egypt trip between Luke's "When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord…" and "…they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth."

This proposal still has to deal with the difficulty of shoehorning in annual Passover visits to Jerusalem AND Matthew's claim that it was the death of Herod the Great that prompted a return to Antipas's Galilee. If Luke's account commences with Quirinius's census in 6 CE, Herod the Great had already been dead for ten years before Jesus was born.

And what about Luke's Jesus and family hanging around in Judea, in either Bethlehem and Jerusalem, where either Herod the Great or Archelaus are lurking? Matthew's story jumps in with the family being visited by the Magi in Bethlehem with their vast treasure-gift. First the Magi are warned in a dream to skip town, then Joseph is similarly warned. How do we fit in Luke's circumcision, Mary's purification and Jesus's redemption rite in Jerusalem at the Temple? The fact that Luke tells us that they offered up a dove in place of a lamb indicates the family's relative poverty, inferring that they had not banked their Magi treasure yet.

In Luke 3, we have yet another very specific pin in the timeline: "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas…"  Luke wants to assure us that the baptism of Jesus is a dateable historical event. 3:23 narrows it down further, describing Jesus as being around age 30 when this occurred and his ministry commenced.

Tiberias became emperor in September of 14 CE, the 15th year of his reign would put the baptism year at 28 or 29 CE. By simple arithmetic, a 30-year-old Jesus would have a birth year of 2 or 1 BCE, a better match with Matthew, but not exact (nothing is really that exact with this topic!), and it raises more questions than it answers, among which is Luke's whole census timing debate.

Both gospels end their accounts here. Luke relates the scene in which Jesus is found in the temple debating with the priests at age 12 and returns to Nazareth with his annoyed parents. Matthew leaves us with Jesus the Nazarene living in Galilee and picks up with John the Baptizer in chapter 3.

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Whew! After all the comparing and contrasting is done, with what are we left? And what are modern readers of the Christmas stories to think? Some observations:

This style of analysis is completely foreign to ancient ways of hearing or reading texts. Before the enlightenment era, truth could appear in many forms, not the least of which were legends, fables and mythologies. A group of early Christians with access to a written copy of Matthew's gospel would not necessarily also have Luke's and vice versa. As they heard it read (most were likely unable to read for themselves), they may have simply taken the story at face value without any need or desire to compare it with other versions. In addition, these early believers needed to anchor their faith in a story that made sense to them and supported their previously-established ideas about Jesus.

It seems obvious that these are not raw eyewitness accounts, but rhetorically crafted literature, cultivated over time by people motivated by a prior commitment to a specific interpretation of the events in question. The goals of the writers and compilers of the two gospels were not to publish an unbiased and factually accurate account of Jesus' origins. This aligns with the rhetorical standards of their time period; it was perfectly acceptable to add, subtract or change details in order to achieve a greater effect on one's audience. From Homer to Herodotus to Plutarch, the boundaries between storyteller, moral influencer and historian remained fuzzy.

Contemporary with the New Testament, Plutarch and Josephus both claimed to strive for strict accuracy in their historical accounts, but they were far more comfortable with incorporating certain biases than most modern writers are. For example, Josephus writes in reference to the causes of the Jewish War with Rome: "In truth, the Romans afforded us no pretext for our revolt; we were the first aggressors; and against such adversaries, who offered us no injury, we took up arms." One of Josephus' aims was to stay on Vespasian's good side.

First century writers had not heard of "confirmation bias" when they composed their works. Since "we all know" that Jesus was a divine person of great importance, his birth must have displayed the usual miraculous elements as those of other ancient VIP's. Caesar Augustus, Alexander the Great, and many Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings claimed virgin births on their resumes. Astronomical signs were thought to accompany major political or social changes. And for Matthew, the improvised parallels to Moses were too much to resist.

Modern historians are reasonably certain of the sequence of Herodian and Roman political realities adjacent to the approximate time of Jesus' birth. After doing our best to harmonize all three by mapping this known timeline to Matthew's and Luke's, we must admit failure in harmonizing them. What does that mean for an approach that assumes the Bible is univocal and inerrant?

The inerrancy approach has a difficult row to hoe. It looks like Matthew's gospel works if we start the story in 6 BCE or possibly a little earlier. Luke gets his Herods and census dates mixed up, and it's impossible to reconcile his timeline markers with both Matthew and the known political facts of that time period. Josephus's confirmation of the dates of Quirinius' census can be critiqued, but there are other sources that help us set some dates, like coinage, inscriptions and astronomical events. So it looks like the gospels are neither univocal (saying the same thing about everything) nor inerrant (contains no mistakes of any kind, historical or otherwise).

So how is a modern respecter of the Bible to keep these stories in a category that remains faithful to a traditional approach? Can the Bible still be authoritative? If one gospel gets so many details wrong, can we trust any of them to tell us something true about God? How can Luke's words carry truths about Jesus when Matthew's contradict?

A careful reading of Matthew reveals his agenda of rooting this new not-yet-Christian-but-no-longer-Jewish sect in ancient Jewish traditions and national story. Naturally he would make Jesus a second Moses emerging from Egypt, and a descendant of King David to whom all nations will soon pay homage- depicted in the visit of the magi. It was a normal interpretive exercise to create a story of bereavement in Bethlehem that would fit the first part of Jeremiah's encouragement to cease mourning the children of Ramah because of the eventual return of the exiles to their homes.

Did Matthew make up some of his material? Or did the writer absorb various theories and etiologies that persuaded the early church to believe? All four gospels are combinations of  material original to a certain author, plus compiled vignettes, remembered speeches and events, explanations and interpretations of what the Jesus event was all about. What we read in the gospels is a snapshot of a religion in the process of chaotic change. In them we see the beginnings of the painful emergence of Christianity from Judaism.

The Hydra is a microscopic aquatic creature that reproduces asexually by growing a "bud" on the outside of its tiny body. When the genetically identical bud matures, it pinches off and swims away, leaving the parent behind. This is what we see in much of the New Testament. Hopeful believers trying to make sense of the disruption brought about by a messianic prophet who made such a deep impact on his world that those who followed him had no choice but to believe that there was something supernatural about him. This belief eventually brought them into conflict with Judaism and a future parting of ways.

See the gospels as experimental. The communities behind the writings of the New Testament had undeniable experiences together and their work is their way of "thinking out loud" about those experiences. Dead ends, mistakes, biases, interpretations based on unconscious cultural attitudes, operating on varieties of diverse givens and assumptions; all these and more can be detected in the pages of both New and Old Testaments. They were in a sense "trying it out" on their own society. Allow Matthew and Luke to propose something as true. Allow them to tell their story to their own people while we listen in. We don't have to blindly agree. By now, we've seen that we can't- there are just too many discrepancies.

Perhaps the real question centers on finding what's meaningful. Fiction can be as deeply meaningful as nonfiction; maybe even more so!  Legends and myths are there to caution against bad behavior and to inspire and teach us to live well.

For more on this theme:

Read Raymond E. Brown: The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library)

This discussion on StackExchange: What can we infer from the different nativity accounts in Matthew and Luke?

Where we get much of the imagery for our Nativity scenes: The Protoevangelium of James

Article in Beliefnet: Matthew and Luke's Nativity Accounts: Symbolism or Fact?

From GotQuestions.org: "There is nothing in the…chronology that contradicts either Matthew or Luke. The only way to find a contradiction between Matthew 2:21–23 and Luke 2:39 is to make assumptions based on a preconceived bias against the veracity of Scripture."  From:  Do the narratives of Jesus’ birth contradict each other?

Herodian Dynasties from Wikipedia

My Jewish Learning: Josephus Flavius

The Christmas stories: Matthew vs. Luke