Elias
I am not surprised that the Roman Biblical Commission shied away from making a stand on the 'historicity' on the infancy narrative. Unfortunately it seems a substantial number of our �Catholic� biblical scholars do no believe in them foremost is the late Fr Raymond Brown who was Auburn Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Union Theological Seminary and author of more than 25 books on the Bible.
In book �The Birth of the Messiah (Doubleday,1977)� Brown thought that the Gospel writers had little factual basis for the infancy Gospels - rather they, especially Luke, built up scant data by using parallels to Old Testament texts .
In his Book Brown asserts
1/ �The rest of the Matthean infancy narrative is quite different from Luke's infancy narrative. The genealogy in Matt 1:1-17 is very unlike the genealogy that Luke has placed outside the infancy story (3:23-38).�
2/�According to Luke 1:26 and 2:39 Mary lives in Nazareth, and so the census of Augustus is invoked to explain how the child was horn in Bethlehem, away from home. In Matthew there is no hint of a coming to Bethlehem, for Joseph and Mary are in a house at Bethlehem where seemingly Jesus was born (2:11)�
3/The census of Caesar Augustus when Quirinius was governing (and the Greek says governing not Governor) Syria causes much debate, Brown challenges that it cannot be seen as historical fact, as Quirinius was recorded as being the Governor at a later date and the census was in 6/7 AD.
4/� A second difficulty is that Luke tells us that the family returned peaceably to Nazareth after the birth at Bethlehem (2:22,39); this is irreconcilable with Matthew's implication (2:16) that the child was almost two years old when the family fled from Bethlehem to Egypt and even older when the family came back from Egypt and moved to Nazareth.�
5/�Of the options mentioned before we made the detailed comparison of the two narratives, one must be ruled out, i.e., that both accounts are completely historical. Indeed, close analysis of the infancy narratives makes it unlikely that either account is completely historical. Matthew's account contains a number of extraordinary or miraculous public events that, were they factual, should have left some traces in Jewish records or elsewhere in the NT (the king and all Jerusalem upset over the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem; a star which moved from Jerusalem south to Bethlehem and came to rest over a house;�the massacre of all the male children in Bethlehem).
In a debate I had with a Biblical Scholar, an obvious supporter of Brown, in my own country of New Zealand. I refuted each of the above assertions. The response I got was one of rage. There seems to be two schools of Biblical scholars, one modernist, which Brown and my New Zealand friend falls into, and the other traditional which follows closely to what the church teaches, such as the late EWTN Fr Most. He described Brown as a person who wrote many books with many errors.
It would be great to here from the forums resident scholars on this.
Brian
