The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke

Raymond E. Brown was a Catholic biblical scholar, and this Doubleday book is his standard scholarly historical-critical commentary on the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, examining their composition, sources and theological purposes verse by verse. Its strength is that it remains, decades after publication, the commentary most cited in critical scholarship on these two Gospel birth accounts, combining rigorous historical-critical method with genuine attentiveness to the texts' theological intent. Its limit is that it is a critical academic commentary rather than a devotional or catechetical reading, so a claim about how these narratives are received doctrinally within a specific church tradition needs a source addressing that tradition's own theological reading rather than this historical-critical commentary alone.