Are the Gospel Birth Narratives Historical? What Ancient Biographers Actually Show Us
Are the gospel birth narratives historical, or are they beautiful legends that were never meant to be taken as reliable accounts of what actually happened? Listen to the full episode below.
That question has been hanging over New Testament scholarship for decades. A lot of scholars have argued that ancient birth narratives in general were legendary by nature, which would mean Matthew and Luke’s accounts of Jesus’ birth fall into the same category. It sounds reasonable on the surface. But New Testament scholar Caleb Friedeman decided to actually go back and read the ancient sources people kept citing, and what he found surprised him.
Caleb’s research, published through Baylor University Press and summarized in his recent book titled Gospel Birth Narratives and Historiography, takes a different approach than most treatments of the Christmas stories. Instead of starting with Matthew and Luke and arguing backward, he starts with the ancient biographers themselves, writers like Plutarch, Suetonius, Philo of Alexandria, and Cornelius Nepos, and asks a straightforward question: when these authors wrote birth narratives, were they trying to tell true stories?
The answer, based on the evidence he found, is yes. And that changes the entire conversation about the gospel birth narratives.
Were ancient birth narratives ever meant to be historical?
This is the assumption Caleb set out to test. The scholarly claim he kept encountering was that ancient birth narratives in biographies were legendary by convention, meaning the genre itself signaled to ancient readers that historical accuracy wasn’t the point. If that were true, it would apply to Matthew and Luke automatically.
But when Caleb went to the actual sources, he found something different. Across multiple ancient biographers, he identified four recurring features that point toward what he calls historiographic intent: the authors cite sources for their birth stories, they show transparency when their sources conflict, they evaluate the trustworthiness of those sources, and they distance themselves from claims they find extravagant or uncertain.
“Over and over again, I encountered evidence within those ancient sources that just didn’t seem to square very well with this hypothesis that all ancient birth narratives in ancient biographies were meant to be legendary or mythical.” — Caleb Friedeman
These aren’t things you do if you’re writing fiction or legend. You cite sources and flag disagreements because you’re accountable to a standard of truth. That pattern showed up consistently across the ancient biographers Caleb studied, and it showed up in their birth material specifically.
The implication is significant. If the conventions of ancient biography point toward historical intent in birth narratives, then the burden of proof shifts. It’s not that we need extraordinary evidence to show Matthew and Luke were writing history. It’s that you’d need extraordinary evidence to show they were doing something different from every other ancient biographer working in the same genre.
Why do Matthew and Luke have different genealogies?
This is one of the first things people point to when they argue the birth narratives can’t be historical. Matthew and Luke give different genealogies for Jesus. Some other details differ too. Doesn’t that prove the whole thing is made up?
Caleb pushes back on that logic directly. The leap from “two sources differ” to “both sources are fabricated” doesn’t hold up, and it wouldn’t hold up in any other context either. If two eyewitnesses to a car accident give different details about what happened, nobody concludes that the accident didn’t happen. The more reasonable conclusion is that one account might be more accurate on a particular detail, or that both are working from different angles on the same event.
“There’s a big leap logically between observing that two sources differ with each other and then concluding that therefore both of them must be made up.” — Caleb Friedeman
He also points out something important about genre. The gospels are ancient biographies, and ancient biographers worked with a different range of flexibility than modern writers. Reordering events, compressing timelines, and omitting generations in genealogies were all normal conventions. Matthew’s genealogy, for example, omits a few kings that Chronicles includes in the Davidic line. But other Jewish genealogies in the Old Testament do the same thing. That’s not a sign of fabrication. It’s a sign of someone working within the established conventions of the form.
The differences between Matthew and Luke don’t automatically undermine the historical intent behind either account. They might reflect different sources, different literary choices, or different aspects of the same tradition. But the jump to “it’s all legend” skips a lot of important steps.
Can a story be both theological and historical at the same time?
This is where a lot of people get stuck. The birth narratives aren’t just historical claims. They’re deeply theological. Matthew weaves in Old Testament fulfillment quotations. Luke frames the whole narrative around divine revelation and angelic announcements. Doesn’t the theological weight of these stories prove they were crafted for meaning rather than accuracy?
Caleb’s answer is that this is a false choice. History and theology aren’t competing categories. They go together naturally if the events themselves carried theological significance. The Christian claim is that the incarnation was both a historical event and a theologically meaningful one. An author can tell a true story and also reveal its deeper significance.
With Matthew specifically, Caleb makes a fascinating observation about the fulfillment quotations. If Matthew were inventing the story to match Old Testament prophecies, you’d expect him to pick texts that were already widely understood as messianic. But several of the texts he quotes, like the Hosea passage about “out of Egypt I called my son,” don’t appear to have been read as messianic prophecies before Matthew used them. The more likely explanation is that the story came first, and Matthew found Old Testament texts that illuminated what had already happened.
“It actually seems like the story is driving it rather than the quotations driving the story. And he’s incorporating these into an existing story, which means that he’s got some kind of a source that he’s working with.” — Caleb Friedeman
In other words, the theology isn’t replacing history. It’s being layered onto a historical tradition that Matthew received and passed on.
What evidence does Luke give that his birth narrative is based on sources?
Luke’s case is even more . His gospel opens with a historiographic preface, Luke 1:1-4, where he describes his method: he’s followed things closely, he’s drawing on eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, and he’s writing an orderly account so that his reader can have certainty. That preface comes before the birth narrative, which means it applies to the birth material, not just the rest of the gospel.
But Luke goes further. Within the birth narrative itself, Caleb identifies what he believes is a specific source indication. In Luke 2:19 and 2:51, Luke writes that Mary “preserved these things and pondered them in her heart.” Caleb argues this isn’t just a devotional aside. It’s an allusion to Daniel 7:28, where Daniel preserves a divine revelation in his heart before it’s eventually written down. The pattern is the same: revelation, preservation, communication. Luke is signaling that Mary is the source of this material.
“We have better reasons for thinking that the birth material of Luke is historiographic in intent than we do for the rest of the Gospel of Luke. If anything, we should be giving this material more credence in terms of intent than we do to other parts.” — Caleb Friedeman
That’s a striking conclusion. Rather than the birth narratives being the least historical part of Luke’s gospel, the density of historiographic features in those opening chapters actually makes them the most explicitly sourced section of the entire book.
What does “skepticism of intent” versus “skepticism of truth” mean?
Caleb makes a useful distinction between two types of skepticism that often get blurred together in these discussions. Skepticism of intent says: this source was never trying to be historical in the first place. Skepticism of truth says: this source was trying to be historical but got some things wrong.
Both are legitimate scholarly moves. But they require different kinds of evidence, and they lead to very different conversations. If you’re skeptical of intent, you’re arguing that the genre or the author’s purpose wasn’t historical at all, more like a novel than a biography. If you’re skeptical of truth, you’re engaging with the source as history and evaluating its accuracy on specific claims.
The problem Caleb identifies is that some scholars do both at the same time. They argue that the birth narratives aren’t intended to be historical, but then they also critique them for getting historical details wrong. That’s an internal contradiction. If the stories aren’t meant to be historical, there’s nothing to critique. If they are meant to be historical, then you need to actually evaluate the evidence rather than dismissing the genre.
Caleb’s work is focused primarily on the first question, intent, because that’s where the conversation has been stuck. If the birth narratives were written with historiographic intent, then we can have a productive conversation about whether the details hold up. But if the genre question is settled prematurely in favor of legend, that conversation never happens.
Q: Were the gospel birth narratives meant to be taken as history? A: New Testament scholar Caleb Friedeman argues yes, based on four historiographic features found consistently in ancient birth narratives across multiple biographers. Matthew and Luke show the same patterns as other ancient authors who were writing with historical intent.
Q: Why are Matthew and Luke’s birth narratives different? A: Differences between the two accounts don’t automatically mean both are fabricated. Ancient biographers commonly worked with different sources and employed conventions like timeline compression and generation omission. The differences may reflect different sources and literary choices, not a lack of historical intent.
Q: Is Mary a source for Luke’s birth narrative? A: Caleb Friedeman argues that Luke 2:19 and 2:51, where Mary “preserved these things in her heart,” is an allusion to Daniel 7:28 that signals Mary as Luke’s source for the birth material. Combined with Luke’s historiographic preface, this suggests Luke was working with eyewitness-level tradition.
Q: Can the birth narratives be both theological and historical? A: Yes. History and theology aren’t competing categories. Matthew’s fulfillment quotations appear to be driven by the story rather than the other way around, suggesting he received a historical tradition and then identified its theological significance through Old Testament texts.
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