The Genealogy of Jesus

THE MESSIANIC PEDIGREE

• According to Matthew, Joseph was a descendant of Jechoniah, whose lineage was cursed never to have a descendant to sit on the throne (Jer 22:28-30).
  
• If Jesus was born of a virgin, Joseph’s lineage is irrelevant anyway because (not withstanding his descent from Jechoniah) kingship cannot be passed on through adoption. Therefore, the Matthean genealogy does not help his claim.
• Likewise, if Jesus was born of a virgin, the whole question is moot since kingship can only be passed through the father and not the mother. Therefore (assuming it traces Mary’s ancestry), the Lukan genealogy does not help his claim.
  

We will tackle the issue of Jechoniah’s curse in Part Two. For now, let us make a few more general observations (drawn largely from this website).

First, Jesus was hailed as the "son of David" throughout the New Testament and not just in the genealogies. For example, he was recognized as such in the Song of Zechariah (Lk 1:69), by the blind man of Jericho (Mt 9:27; Mk 10:47), and by the massive crowd who greeted his triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Mt 21:15; cf. Mt 12:23). Furthermore, Jesus' Davidic lineage was an integral part of the early apostolic preaching, as evidenced by Peter (Ac 2:25-30), Paul (Ac 13:22-23; Ro 1:3; 2 Ti 2:8), and John (Rev 5:5; 22:16). Even a foreigner (the Canaanite woman, Mt 15:22) had heard and repeated the claim that Jesus was a descendant of David.

Second, nobody in the first several centuries of Christian history ever bothered to dispute Jesus' messiahship on the grounds of invalid lineage. With so many of his followers claiming Jesus was the son of David, one would think a formal legal refutation of the claim (by the Sanhedrin, or perhaps later by the rabbis of the Tannaitic era?) would have been in order.

It is, furthermore, certain that questions about the purity of Jesus' lineage would have been raised. During the reign of the Hasmonean priest-king John Hyrcanus, a certain Pharisee named Eleazar said Hyrcanus should give up the high priesthood because his mother had been captured in war (in accordance with Lev 21:14), thus insinuating that he was illegitimate (see Josephus, War 1:67-68; Ant. 13:288-299; b.Qidd 66a; b. Ber 29a). This obviously infuriated Hyrcanus, who thereafter switched his allegiance from the Pharisees to the Sadducees. We may assume that an equally high degree of certitude would have been demanded with respect to a possible future royal heir of David, but if so, there is little in the New Testament or the earliest rabbinic writings to suggest that any such demand was made. The Jewish charges against Jesus were limited to blasphemy and possibly idolatry and/or sorcery (depending on the interpretation of certain passages in the Talmud). The issue of being genetically disqualified never came up. Apparently there was a wide base of acceptance of Jesus' Davidic lineage.

Third, the church historian Hegesippus mentioned persecution of some of Jesus’ relatives as much for their Davidic ancestry as because they were Christians. Around AD 170 he wrote:

There still survived of the kindred of the Lord the grandsons of Judas, who according to the flesh was called his brother. These were informed against, as belonging to the family of David, and Evocatus brought them before Domitian Caesar: for that emperor dreaded the advent of Christ, as Herod had done.

So he asked them whether they were of the family of David; and they confessed they were….

Some of these heretics, forsooth, laid an information against Symeon the son of Clopas, as being of the family of David, and a Christian. And on these charges he suffered martyrdom when he was 120 years old, in the reign of Trajan Caesar, when Atticus was consular legate in Syria. And it so happened, says the same writer, that, while inquiry was then being made for those belonging to the royal tribe of the Jews, the accusers themselves were convicted of belonging to it…

(The same historian mentions) others also, of the family of one of the reputed brothers of the Saviour, named Judas, as having survived until this same reign, after the testimony they bore for the faith of Christ in the time of Domitian, as already recorded.

(He writes as follows:) They came, then, and took the presidency of every church, as witnesses for Christ, and as being of the kindred of the Lord. And, after profound peace had been established in every church, they remained down to the reign of Trojan Caesar: that is, until the time when he who was sprung from an uncle of the Lord, the aforementioned Symeon son of Clopas, was informed against by the various heresies, and subjected to an accusation like the rest… (Hegesippus, Fragments, emphasis added).

In summary, certain of Jesus’ relatives were recognized as members of the family of David at least into the early years of the second century. Among them were the grandsons of Judas, a brother (or by some interpretations a cousin) of Jesus, and Symeon, whose father Clopas was said to be Jesus’ uncle.

Fourth, it is possible that Joseph claimed paternity of Jesus by default. In some versions of the Jewish circumcision ritual, the father states, "Behold, I am prepared and ready to fulfill the positive commandment commanded me by the Creator, blessed be he, to circumcise my son." Even if this declaration were not included in the first-century liturgy, the traditional prayer at the conclusion of the ceremony would have included an implicit declaration of paternity. A prayer would be offered, perhaps by one of Jesus' grandfathers, that would begin along the following lines:

Our God, and the God of your fathers, raise up this child to his father and mother, and let his name be called in Israel Jesus, the son of Joseph. Let his father rejoice in the issue of his loins, and his mother in the fruit of her womb...

Fifth, God’s covenant with David and his royal dynasty might be seen as conditional at any rate. Note the conditional nature of the promise in Ps 132:11-12: "If your sons keep my covenant and my decrees that I shall teach them, their sons also, forevermore, shall sit on your throne." It might well be argued that the kings of the Davidic dynasty failed to keep God’s covenant and decrees (see, for example, 1 Ki 2:4; 1 Ch 28:5-7, 9; Jer 22:24-30; 36:30; Eze 21:25-27). In such circumstances, might not God look elsewhere for a viable messianic candidate--either to a secondary Davidic line or outside that line entirely?

In this light, we may perhaps understand why Jews in this period were not unanimous in expecting a specifically Davidic Messiah.

• The Dead Sea Scrolls describe two messiahs—both a kingly “Messiah of Israel” and a priestly “Messiah of Aaron,” who seem to reign concurrently (CD 12:12–13:1; 14:18-19; 19:9-11; 1Q28a 2:1-21). The idea of both a kingly and a priestly ruler was not unique to Qumran; is also attested from second-century BC sources such as the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. The Qumranians, however, seem to have been the first to apply the title “Messiah” to these figures.
• Many ancient rabbis saw in the biblical figure of Joseph a foreshadowing of the Messiah. In some theories, a “Messiah ben Joseph” would first come as a suffering messiah, and only later “Messiah ben David” would come to reign as king. A marginal reading in the Codex Reuchlinianus Targum of Zechariah 12:10 states: “And I shall cause to rest upon the house of David and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of prophecy and true prayer. And afterward the Messiah son of Ephraim [i.e., Joseph] will go out to do battle with Gog, and Gog will slay him in front of the gate of Jerusalem. And they shall look to me and shall inquire of me why the nations pierced the Messiah son of Ephraim.” (See also b. Sukkah 52a; Rashi commentary in loc.; Ibn Ezra; Abrabanel; Moses Alshekh).
• There was some speculation about whether John the Baptist was making messianic claims about himself (Jn 1:19-24). Given that John was clearly of priestly lineage (Lk 1:5), on what basis might such a claim even be taken seriously?
• Many Jews—most notably the highly respected Rabbi Akiba—accepted the messiahship of Simon bar Kosiba in the early second century. It is possible, but not proven, that Simon was recognized as the kingly "Messiah of Israel" and his collaborator Eleazar of Modein as the priestly "Messiah of Aaron" as in the Qumranian scheme. There is no evidence, however, that Simon was or even claimed to be of Davidic lineage.

• If a man died childless, the custom of levirate marriage provided for his widow to marry his brother or other close kin. The firstborn son of this union was legally reckoned to be the son of the dead man (Dt 25:5-6; Ru 4:1-9).
• If a man had daughters but no sons, the custom of Zelophehad adoption permitted him to legally adopt the husband of her oldest daughter (Nu 36:1-13), provided they marry within the tribe of their father. The children of this marriage would be considered the grandchildren of their mother's father.
  
• If a woman was unable to conceive, there was a custom in the patriarchal period whereby she would provide her husband with a female slave by whom to father children (Ge 16:1-2, 30:1-4).

Seventh, we must ultimately assume that Matthew and Luke presented their genealogies in good faith and that Matthew at least did not knowingly present evidence for Jesus' pedigree that he knew would have been laughed out of court. Let us therefore assume that Matthew’s account of Jesus' lineage at least plausibly would have justified a claim upon the Davidic throne.

That said, certain biblical figures stand above the rest as links in the chain of the Messiah’s ancestors. All of these are to be found in Matthew’s genealogy. In particular, the Messiah was expected to be…

• a descendant of Abraham: Ge 22:18
• a descendant of Jacob: Nu 24:17-19
• a descendant of Judah: Ge 49:10
• a descendant of Jesse: Isa 11:1-2
• a descendant of David: 2 Sa 7:12-13; Ps 132:11; Jer 23:5-6; 33:17; Hos 3:5
• a descendant of Solomon, the son of David who built the Temple: 2 Sa 7:12-13; 1 Ki 5:5; Ps 89:34-36
• a descendant of Zerubbabel: Hag 2:21-23

OVERALL STRUCTURE AND THE EXISTENCE OF GAPS

• Alexandrinus, Bezae, Old Latin, and the Syriac Peshitta have the same generational sequence as Matthew: Aram – Aminadab.
• The original reading of Sinaiticus and the Sahidic Coptic version has Arni – Admin – Adam.
• A few Greek uncials, along with the Bohairic Coptic and Ethiopic versions, have Joram – Aram – Aminadab.
• Papyrus P⁴ (apparently—the text is not entirely legible) and the second corrector of Sinaiticus has Arni – Admin – Aminadab.

This is a thorny text-critical puzzle. The Editorial Committee of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament eventually decided to follow P⁴, but only with some difficulty. In Metzger’s Textual Commentary, he includes the following explanation:

Faced with a bewildering variety of readings, the Committee adopted what seems to be the least unsatisfactory form of the text, a reading that was current in the Alexandrian church at an early period (Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, corrected edition [UBS, 1975], 136).

Some scholars assume that Arni is to be identified with Ram (or Aram), but this is not at all certain. At any event, there is ample room in both genealogies at this point to accommodate some skipping of generations.

It is in fact likely that both accounts of Jesus' genealogy skip generations here and there. This is not entirely unheard of in ancient genealogies in general and in Jewish genealogies in particular. A generation might be skipped for any number of reasons. Most obviously and mundanely, the genealogist simply may not have had the necessary data to include every generation. Another rather mundane explanation may be that a person's father died young, perhaps even during the child's formative years. In that case, a man might be reckoned "the son" of someone who was actually his grandfather. It must be noted, of course, that in Hebraic thought one's "father" need not be one’s immediate male ancestor—any male ancestor up the line can qualify for that title. That is why Matthew can call Jesus both "son of David" and "son of Abraham."

Some have suggested there are gaps in Jesus' genealogy in Matthew in order to reproduce the pattern of "fourteen generations" (Abraham to David, David to the Exile, the Exile to Christ). This phenomenon may be related to the numerical value of the name David, the sum of whose Hebrew letters (d-w-d) add up to fourteen. Although less often suggested, Luke's list of seventy-seven names might have been intended to represent eleven sets of seven names each. According to Metzger, with a reading for Luke 3:33 that involves three names rather than two, Luke's genealogy

falls into an artistically planned pattern, even more elaborate than Matthew's (cf. Mt 1:17); thus, from Adam to Abraham, 3 x 7 generations; from Isaac to David, 2 x 7 generations; from Nathan to Salathiel (pre-exilic), 3 x 7 generations; from Zerubbabel (post-exilic) to Jesus, 3 x 7 generations, making a total of 11 x 7, or 77 generations from Adam to Jesus (Ibid.).

The medieval Jewish Seder Olam Zuta, based on the much earlier Seder Olam Rabbah, similarly organized the data from the biblical genealogies from Adam to Jehoiakim into five sets of ten generations each. By any of these approaches, it might have been deemed desirable to omit mention of less noteworthy ancestors in the service of some mnemonic or symbolic arrangement.

These three patterns are reproduced here for the sake of comparison:

Finally, and especially in the biblical context, a generation might be passed over due to moral or spiritual failure. This is almost certainly a factor in Matthew, where four generations are omitted from the descendants of King David. The first three omissions come in a row as the descendants of Joram: Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah. Joram’s wife was Athaliah, daughter of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who in fact ruled briefly—and is remembered none too fondly—as queen of Judah after Joram’s death. It is probable that Matthew omitted the next three names as a statement of God's judgment "to the fourth and fifth generations" on the deeds of that wicked couple. The fourth omission is Jehoiakim, a wicked king associated with the sins that eventually brought about the Babylonian exile. Once again, moral stigma may have been responsible for deleting his name from the list of the ancestors of the Messiah. Indeed, perhaps Jechoniah himself was only grudgingly included to bring in the detail of the exile.

After David, Matthew traced the genealogy through the royal line of Solomon while Luke traced through the non-royal (but still Davidic) line of Nathan. The two lines converge once more in Shealtiel and his son Zerubbabel.

Ahead to PART TWO
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