Epiphany

3 Epiphany

Exploring the text
People often speak of the ‘birth narratives’ of Matthew, and due to the influence both of Luke’s account and of popular renderings of the nativity, it is easy to miss that Matthew has very little in the way of a proper ‘birth narrative’. There is material which refers to what happened before Jesus’ birth (which we looked at in the previous chapter) and material which refers to what happened after his birth, but very little material relating to his birth per se. Matthew’s so-called birth narratives could more accurately be called ‘epiphany narratives’, in that they focus on first the finding and then the worship of Jesus by the Magi...