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12/17/2003 Entry: "Drag and Drop Nativity"

From Ian's Messy Desk i got the "heads up" about the Drag and Drop Nativity Story from ReJesus. It's a very nicely done bit of Flash animation - you put the story elements in the right order and are rewarded with a retelling.

I enjoyed it in the same way as I enjoy the traditional nativity play, but I do have a problem with it. Like the Nativity play, it takes both Matthew and Luke's account of the events around Jesus' birth and assumes that they're telling the same story, and that's by no means clear from the text. The only details that the 2 stories have in common are

• a miraculous conception
• Mary and Joseph
• born in Bethlehem
• raised in Nazareth

Posted by Richard @ 12/17/2003 01:35 PM BST

testing...

Posted by Richard @ 12/17/2003 01:38 PM BST

Yeah, the problem with taking a "harmony of the gospels" very far is that you have gone into it with an underlying assumption: that there is a harmony. It assumes that all the Gospel writers more or less collaborated and decided to each tell different elements of the same story, as though they intended for all four accounts to be put together to make a whole.

That's a pretty big assumption...

Posted by Jonathan @ 12/17/2003 02:42 PM BST

Yeah, the problem with taking a "harmony of the gospels" very far is that you have gone into it with an underlying assumption: that there is a harmony. It assumes that all the Gospel writers more or less collaborated and decided to each tell different elements of the same story, as though they intended for all four accounts to be put together to make a whole.

That's a pretty big assumption...

Posted by Jonathan @ 12/17/2003 02:53 PM BST