Here are some items from last Sunday’s church service and Sunday school class:
A. The church service at the LCMS church was about Jesus being the
son of David. The pastor focused on Matthew 1, which contains Matthew’s
genealogy of Jesus through his father Joseph. Matthew 1 highlights
Davidic kings in Jesus’ ancestry up to the time of the exile, which was
when the Davidic kingship ended. Jesus is to be the restoration of the
Davidic monarchy.
B. And what kind of king is Jesus? The pastor noted the few women
mentioned in Jesus’s genealogy: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Uriah’s wife.
The first three are outsiders: non-Israelites who became part of the
community of Israel. Uriah’s wife was part (perhaps unwillingly) of a
shameful act on David’s part. Jesus includes outsiders, as he did with
tax-collectors and sinners, including Matthew (Matthew 9:9-13). And
Jesus takes on our shame, the sorts of things that Satan brings to our
minds at 3 a.m., or on long road-trips.
C. The pastor said that the Rahab of the genealogy may or may not be
the Rahab of the Book of Joshua, but her name in Matthew 1 still evokes
the Rahab of the Bible. I think that Matthew 1 does present its Rahab as
the Rahab of the Book of Joshua. Matthew 1:5-6 states: “And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse; And
Jesse begat David the king; and David the king begat Solomon of her
that had been the wife of Urias” (KJV). Salmon, who bore Boaz through
Rahab, was the son of Nahshon the son of Amminadab. Nahshon son of
Amminadab lived in the time of Moses (Numbers 1:7; 2:3; 7:12, 17;
10:14). His son, Salmon, could have married the Rahab of the Book of
Joshua, since they lived at the same time. And Rahab could have given
birth to the Boaz of the Book of Ruth, since the Book of Ruth is set in
the time of the judges (Ruth 1:1), which started soon after the time of
Joshua.
The question would then be whether Rahab could have been David’s
great-great grandmother. Does the chronological math fit? However one
dates Joshua (1400 BCE or 1200 BCE), there are two centuries or more
between his time and that of David. Is that too much time for Rahab to
have been David’s great-great grandmother? Well, perhaps it would work
if one accepted a 1200 BCE date for Joshua: four generations at forty
years each is almost two hundred years. Another argument that has been
made is that biblical genealogies do not always include every single
person in the line but can skip generations.
D. A question occurred to me. It is a question that people have asked
before, so I did not come up with it. It is: “How could Jesus be the
son of David through Joseph, when Joseph was not his actual father, due
to the virgin birth?” I first heard this question on a Jews for Judaism
cassette, in which the rabbi said that Matthew shoots himself in the
foot by saying Jesus is descended from David through Joseph, only to
deny that Joseph was Jesus’s literal father.
One Christian response to that was that Joseph was Jesus’s adoptive
father, meaning Jesus was the son of David through adoption. Does that
argument work, though? There are passages that seem to present Jesus as a
biological descendant of David. Acts 2:30: “Therefore being a prophet,
and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of
his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on
his throne” (KJV). Romans 1:3: “Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our
Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh” (KJV).
II Timothy 2:8: “Remember that Jesus Christ of the seed of David was
raised from the dead according to my gospel” (KJV).
Another Christian response is that Jesus was a descendant of David through his mother Mary. The Catholic Encyclopedia refers to ancient Christian sources that go with that view:
“Tradition tells us that Mary too was a descendant of David.
According to Numbers 36:6-12, an only daughter had to marry within her
own family so as to secure the right of inheritance. After St. Justin (Adv. Tryph. 100) and St. Ignatius (Letter to the Ephesians 18),
the Fathers generally agree in maintaining Mary’s Davidic descent,
whether they knew this from an oral tradition or inferred it from
Scripture, e.g. Romans 1:3; 2 Timothy 2:8. St. John Damascene (De fid. Orth.,
IV, 14) states that Mary’s great-grandfather, Panther, was a brother of
Mathat; her grandfather, Barpanther, was Heli’s cousin; and her father,
Joachim, was a cousin of Joseph, Heli’s levirate son. Here Mathat has
been substituted for Melchi, since the text used by St. John Damascene,
Julius Africanus, St. Irenæus, St. Ambrose, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus
omitted the two generations separating Heli from Melchi. At any rate,
tradition presents the Blessed Virgin as descending from David through
Nathan.”
A third suggestion is that God took Joseph’s seed and used it to form
Jesus in Mary’s womb, meaning that Jesus literally and physically was a
descendant of David. See these Triablogue posts: here, here, and here. The posts offer a biblical basis for that as a possibility, at least. I was reading the Athanasian Creed
in the church hymnal, however, and I was wondering whether that would
fit ancient Christian orthodoxy about the nature of Jesus: “that our
Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the Substance
[Essence] of the Father; begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the
Substance [Essence] of his Mother, born in the world.” Is that saying
that Jesus’s humanity is through his mother, not his physical father?
E. Moving on to the Sunday School class. The teacher was wrapping up
his series on patristic views on the Trinity and the nature of Jesus in
the incarnation. Athanasius, he said, believed that Jesus had a divine
mind and a human body. The church later deemed that position heretical,
but the teacher said that it was all right, where Athanasius was. In
Athanasius’s time, the fourth century CE, the debate was over whether
Jesus was God, and Athanasius affirmed that he was. The next two
centuries would try to iron out how Jesus was God and human, the
relationship of his divine and human natures.
F. The teacher said that Jesus came to restore human nature. We were
made to love God and neighbor. He tells his students that, when they do
community service while thinking only about God and neighbor and not
themselves, their heart sings. Jesus came to make us that way all of the
time. But we are weighed down by sin, brought about when Adam and Eve
chose themselves over God. The teacher may have said that Jesus’s human
will was in accord with God. Was it entirely, though, if Jesus said “Not
my will, but thine” (Matthew 26:42; Luke 22:42), implying that, on some
level, his will was different from that of the Father? Jesus still
could have been like pre-Fall Adam and Eve in that he had free choice:
he could say “no” to the Father’s plan, but, unlike Adam and Eve, he
chose to submit. But would pre-Fall Adam and Eve have had fear, as Jesus
seemed to have in the Garden of Gesthemane? The text does not
explicitly say that he had fear, but something motivated him to ask God
to take away the cup from his lips.
G. The teacher got into a back and forth with one of the church
members in the class about the soul. He said that people then determined
whether a person was dead by seeing if they had breath: was there
breath on the mirror? His implication may have been that they saw the
breath as what gave life, since they did not know of brain waves or
think to check the pulse.
I will leave the comments open, in case anyone wants to add anything.