Luke begins his Gospel proper with a sequence of four incidents which lead up to the birth of Jesus. The first takes place in Jerusalem, the second in Nazareth; the other two are set in an unnamed village in the hill country of Judea. His claim to have followed out the story ‘from the very first’ (1:3, AV) means, in fact, that he intends to begin not with Jesus’s baptism (the start of his ministry,)1 nor even with his birth (the start of his earthly life), but with