By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

When Passionist Father Donald Senior looks at the stories about Jesus’ birth and infancy in the Gospel of Matthew, he sees a lot of parallels with the world today.

As the church approached Advent and the Christmas season in a time of fear and war, Senior reflected on the infancy narratives and what the stories of Jesus, Mary and Joseph tell Catholics about their faith and the relationship between God and people.

“There are some powerful and adult themes, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, which has so many eerie connections with what’s happening today,” said Senior, the president of Catholic Theological Union (CTU). “There’s this whole troubled way of Jesus’ conception being understood, with … Joseph thinking he’s illegitimate until he learns from the angel what’s going on. Then there’s threat, genocide, children being slaughtered. Then there’s displacement, exile with his family, he’s threatened. They can’t go back home—there’s another despot there. They’re refugees in Nazareth.”

Senior, 61, was recently appointed to the Pontifical Biblical Commission. The commission works under the jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, chaired by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, overseeing the promotion of biblical scholarship and reviewing questions of biblical interpretation.

He will serve as one of two appointees from the United States among the biblical commission’s 20 scholar-priests. The other is Cistercian Father Denis Farkasfalvy of the University of Dallas. They will serve a five-year term.

Senior teaches the New Testament at CTU and also serves as general editor of The Bible Today and the Catholic Study Bible.

Over the years, he said, Bible scholars have debated the elements of the stories in Matthew and Luke, the narrative that includes Mary’s journey to visit Elizabeth and the shepherds and angels made familiar by crèches everywhere.

“What strikes us is the richness of these texts,” Senior said. “Matthew is showing that what’s going to happen in Jesus’ adult life is already happening at the beginning of his life. Matthew makes a big point of connecting Jesus to his Jewish heritage. It’s just a magnificent biblical reflection that begins to orient the reader to what’s going to happen in his public ministry. Luke does the same, but in a very different mode. There you have John the Baptist, the barrenness of Elizabeth and Zachary is a lot like Abraham and Sarah. … In Luke, you really have the focus on the child. It’s almost like a sacrament of hope for the world. Luke does something that has impacted the Christian celebration of the beauty of the child, the promise of the child.”

In fact, our culture focuses so much on the child, and on modern children, that Christians end up missing some of the more complex themes. At the same time, he said, scholars and others who focus on the details—whether “there were two donkeys at the crib or three,” Senior said—are missing the point: “We need to be attentive to what the evangelists were trying to say through the story.”

The evangelists were working with some rudimentary historical knowledge of the circumstances of Jesus’ family and the traditions that had grown up about his life soon after his death, Senior said, so they are likely to be accurate in the basic facts.

Information from archeological finds, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls uncovered near Qumran in the 1940s, have broadened the understanding of the era in which Jesus lived, Senior said. The last of 37 volumes of text from the scrolls are being published now.

Some scholars—Christians and non-believers—once hoped for more definitive answers about Jesus from the scrolls and other archeological finds. “There was a tendency to look for the smoking gun,” he said, “for a mention of Jesus or something to discredit it.”

Instead, what’s come out of the scrolls and other biblical-era archeology is a greater understanding of the social and economic context in which Jesus lived and, from the scrolls themselves, versions of some Hebrew Scriptures 400 to 500 years older than the next earliest known versions.

“When you step back, what’s amazing is the continuity and the accuracy of the scribes’ transmissions over the four centuries,” Senior said.

In much the same way, Senior has found that archeology and Bible study both tend to affirm Christians’ faith rather than shake it.

Ironically, the Pontifical Biblical Commission was formed in 1902 just as Bible archeology began to heat up, and it consisted mostly of bishops and cardinals who saw their job as defending the faith. Over the years, it took a more constructive, supportive position towards scholarship. In 1943 Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical, which encouraged historical methodology, along with more use of Biblical images in Catholic devotion and worship. Under Pope Paul VI, the commission began to consist of biblical scholars.

Now Senior sees the commission’s job as looking at Catholic Bible scholarship and interpretation with a critical eye.