Session 1 Fact, Fable and Parable: Veracity of Redemption

Session 2 The Annunciation Accounts - Mary and Joseph

Session 3 Matthew and the shadow of the Pentateuch

Session 4 Luke and Primal Beginnings

Session 5 Genealogy - Grandmothers and Caesar

Matthew’s Account - Chapters 1 and 2

Luke’s Account - Chapters 1 through 3

Jesus – Son of God

We Christians think of Jesus as the divine Son of God (huios theou) by—working backward—his (a) resurrection, (b) baptism, (c) conception, and (d) even genealogy.

Caesar Augustus – Son of God

But there was also another human being in the Mediterranean world who was the divine Son of God (huios theou) by—also working backward—(a) senatorial decree, (b) adoption, (c) conception, and (d) even genealogy. We are speaking, of course, about Caesar Augustus, emperor of Rome at the time Jesus was born. And we see those genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke as countergenealogies to that of Caesar Augustus.

If you wanted to oppose and replace one Son of God born with a millennium-plus descent from the divinely born Aeneas, you would have to introduce an alternative Son of God with a better than millennium-plus descent from, say, the divinely born Isaac, as in Matthew, or, better, the divinely cre­ated Adam, as in Luke. But what is always clear is that ancient genealogy was not about history and poetry, but about prophecy and destiny, not about accuracy, but about advertising. Page 98

If you understand properly what minimal history but maximal theology those genealogies contain, you will recognize the similar balance in the Christmas stories as a whole. Just as the overtures are miniatures of the gospels, so are the genealogies miniatures of the overtures.

Even though both Matthew and Luke give wildly divergent genealogies of Joseph—even with different fathers for Joseph—they both guard against letting anyone think that he is the biological father of Jesus.

Luke and the Genealogy of the Son of God

The genealogies of Jesus could hardly be more divergent in Matthew and Luke. But the specific content and even the present position of each account is quite deliberately intentional for each author.

Luke locates [the genealogy] not only after Jesus’ coming-of-age story in 2:41-52, but after his account of John the Baptizer in 3:1-20--a full account of John from preaching to prison—and the baptism of Jesus in 3:20-23.  Only then does he give Jesus’ genealogy. But if you focus on that present gospel location and concentrate on the opening and closing verses of the genealogy, you can appreciate the overall purpose of Luke. Watch especially his emphasis on Jesus’ title as “Son of God.”

1.      At the annunciation to Mary, Jesus is the “Son of God” (1:35)—and declared such by an angel.

2.      At the baptism of Jesus, “when Jesus also had been baptized ... the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’” (3:21-22).

3.      Finally, Luke concludes his genealogy in 3^:38 with “. . . son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God.”

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Luke and Matthew

Luke (3:23) begins with Jesus, “the son (as was thought) of Joseph son of Hell.” The corresponding line in Matthew (1:16) speaks of “Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah”.  In Greek, that “of whom” is feminine and refers to Mary, not Joseph.

Matthew

Since there were obviously unnamed females in­volved in every single one of those three sets of 14 generations, the first four designated females must have special purpose for Matthew especially in connection with Mary.

Tamar.

Er and Onan were the sons of the Israelite Judah and the Canaanite Shua in Genesis 38.  Er married a Canaan­ite woman named Tamar and, when he was later struck dead by God, his brother Onan should have married Tamar to cre­ate children in the dead Er's name. (That procedure was commanded in Deuteronomy 25:5-10 most likely to prevent the alienation of family property, and you may recall it from the question put to Jesus in Mark 12:18--27-) But instead, Onan “spilled his semen on the ground” (38:9) and was also struck dead by God. Judah defaulted on marrying his third son, Shelah, to Tamar, so she took matters into her own hands. She covered her face, Judah thought her a prostitute, and bore him twin sons, whom he had to acknowledge: “’She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah.’ And he did riot lie with her again”. (38:26).

Rahab.

At the end of the exodus from Egypt, Joshua sent Israelite spies ahead to reconnoiter “the land” (Joshua 2). Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute from Jericho. She hid the spies from the city’s authorities, lied about their whereabouts, and finally “let there by a rope through the window, for her house was on the outer side of the city wall and she resided within the wall itself” (2:15). In return, Rahab asked for protection when the Israelites came to attack Jericho; the spies promised her future safety and eventually gave it to her and her family (6:22-23).

Ruth.

An Israelite couple, Naomi and Elimelech, left their home at Bethlehem and went to Moab in the book of Ruth. They had two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, who married Moabite wives, Orpah and Ruth. All three men died, and Naomi de­cided to immigrate to Israel, telling her daughters-in-law to stay in Moab and get new husbands for themselves. But Ruth refused to leave Naomi, saying, in these justly famous lines: “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!” (7:16-17).  Ruth is repeatedly identified as “Ruth the Moabite,” even though Deuteronomy 23:3-4 explicitly states: “No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord, because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey out of Egypt.” Still, despite all of that, Ruth, a Moabite woman, is the great-grandmother of David.

Bathsheba.

David committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of a Hittite warrior, Uriah, who fought in his army (2 Sam. 11). When she conceived, David brought Uriah back from the front so that he might think his was the conception. When that failed, David ordered Uriah placed “in the forefront of the hardest fighting, . . . so that he may be struck down and die” (71:15). Once Uriah had been killed in action, “David sent and brought Bathsheba to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son” (71:27). It died, and Solomon, with inter­vention from his mother, Bathsheba, and the prophet Nathan, became king after David (1 Kings 1).

The question is not what resemblances we might imagine between those four mothers and Mary, but what we think Matthew intended to emphasize by mentioning all five in sim­ilar language. Page 89ff.