In discussing how researchers create narratives to portray historical events or write biographies, Benedict Anderson, author of the highly acclaimed Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, drew a contrast with the Gospel of Matthew.
These narratives . . . are set in homogeneous, empty time. Hence their frame is historical and their setting sociological. This is why so many autobiographies begin with the circumstances of parents and grandparents, for which the autobiographer can have only circumstantial, textual evidence; and why the biographer is at pains to record the calendrical, A.D. dates of two biographical events which his or her subject can never remember: birth-day and death-day. Nothing affords a sharper reminder of this narrative’s modernity than the opening of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. For the Evangelist gives us an austere list of thirty males successively begetting one another, from the Patriarch Abraham down to Jesus Christ. . . . No dates are given for any of Jesus’s forebears, let alone sociological, cultural, physiological or political information about them. This narrative style . . . . was entirely reasonable to the sainted genealogist because he did not conceive of Christ as an historical ‘personality,’ but only as the true Son of God. (pp 204f)
Yet how many biblical scholars have attempted to fill in the gap in Matthew’s Gospel by calculating the exact or approximate years of Jesus’ birth and death! Rather, the more enlightening inquiry should be to seek to understand why the first evangelists did not have the historical interests that fascinate modern readers.
(Of course, it would be too easy to fall back on the claim that Pilate’s appearance in the gospel establishes a historical setting and time — until one pauses to recall that the Pilate in the gospels is a character utterly unlike the historical Pilate. As I wrote earlier, the Pilate of historical record (sc. Josephus) was renowned for his cruelty but all the evangelists, Matthew included, present him — most UNhistorically — as benign and soft when he meets Jesus, and as being cowered by the Jewish priests and mob into doing their will against his own. A historical person has been rewritten to meet the needs of the narrative.)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. Verso, 2006.