It was only later, when on the basis of his ministry, and after they had come to certain conclusions and confessions about this man Jesus, that Matthew and Luke attached birth stories to their accounts of Jesus. They described his birth in the way they did, because they felt that in doing so, it would explain the man they encountered in his adult years. Now we know that birth traditions do not develop around all people. But, when they do develop, they constitute a powerful commentary not on the birth of the subject but on the adult significance of the life whose birth is being described. Birth stories, whenever and wherever and about whoever they are told, reflect the human need to understand the origins of greatness of a particular person who, in the mind of the teller of the story, has deeply affected and shaped human history.
Church historians point out that it took years for the birth stories to be formed.
In fact, they did not appear in written form until almost 100 years after the actual birth of Jesus. As such they reflect the desire of early disciples to make sense of their profound and transforming experience of this One born of the woman Mary. Now it helps a great deal to realize that their way of speaking of his birth pointed to something that a camera or a video-tape could never capture. The point being made here is that, 'the heart cannot worship what the mind has already rejected'. When people gathered in this sanctuary 3 years ago to hear addresses by Bishop John Shelby Spong, what many in the audience found liberating, was his assertion that, for him at least, the powerful meaning behind the symbolic elements in these birth stories only became possible when the wooden literalism of the symbol was destroyed.