The Evangelists wrote their texts to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was the expected savior. A biography with a genealogy chart of Jesus Christ has been preserved. At the same time, the data differ in different gospels. And this is a big mystery to many.
Gospel according to Luke
Luke belonged to a generation of disciples of Jesus who were not his contemporaries. He wrote the gospel around the year 80 of the 1st century. He was educated, lived in Greece or Syria, did not know the geography of Palestine. He based the story on the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. The gospel is written on the basis of the Markov gospel, collections of sayings of Jesus and other oral traditions. From his writings it becomes clear that his scheme of the genealogy of Jesus Christ from Adam is not entirely accurate. Today, most experts believe that this genealogy is a theological work, not a historical one. The family tree of Jesus Christ served a theological purpose and was designed to support readers' faith in Jesus, a necessary condition for messianism.
It descends to the first man - Adam and even to God, Jesus showed God's plan to save everythinghumanity.
The emergence of the bloodline
The Evangelist, therefore, had to create such a genealogy of Jesus Christ from Adam with descriptions in which Jesus would be a descendant of a certain kind. In total, it consisted of 77 characters. In the genealogy of almost every seventh generation there are known ancestors: Enoch (7), Abraham (3 x 7), David (5 x 7). On a very significant position, Luke placed the figure of Joseph (7 x 7).
According to some experts, Luke had an error in the data from which he created the family tree. For the most part, he drew information about entire generations between Adam and Jesus from oral sources. Some data, however, he changed so that his genealogy of Jesus Christ satisfied the traditions. Significant characters alternate in a cycle of seven generations.
Pedigree tells a lot about the religious sentiments of the people of the 1st century. But sheds little light on the real origin of Jesus.
Who was Jesus Christ?
Was he one of God's prophets? No, much more - Jesus Christ is considered the eternal God, God and man, the God who was sacrificed on the cross and resurrected for our salvation, is the last incarnation of the Lord. It is believed that there is no salvation in anyone else but him.
Jesus in the Gospel of John
Jesus Christ is the face of the eternal God, who came to people through humanity, he was received in the womb of the virgin Mother: "God sent his Son, who was born of a woman…". God, Creatorof all, became a man, one of us, so that each of us, thanks to him, could become his "brother", experience his eternal joy and bliss. And the Virgin Mary is the most important woman in the bloodline of Jesus Christ.
Though we were all plunged into the darkness of ignorance and sin, God had pity on us. God took the "parchment" of the virgin girl Mary and with the "ink" of the Holy Spirit "wrote out" his word in it, which we could read thanks to the actions of this word: every movement of it, every inhalation and exhalation, every word of it, even silence, every moment of its life, he certainly told us about God and announced his mercy and eternal love. Moreover, this God, the Creator of everything, has forever become a man, one of us.
In the end, God's incarnation, the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross and his resurrection opened the door to eternal bliss and salvation from our sins, which otherwise lead to human death. He is the way to the Eternal Kingdom, he is the shepherd of all people, he is the door to eternal bliss. He, the King and Lord, who became our servant for our sake. And the interpretation of the genealogy of Jesus Christ is considered in the Gospel from this point of view.
Questions
Until now, many are wondering: Jesus Christ is just a myth and in fact no one like that lived at all? There are people who still think so today. Many simply repeat what they heard or what they learned in school decades ago…
And vice versa, someone calls a myth the belief thatJesus Christ never lived. Interestingly, the first surviving claim that Jesus did not live at all was made less than two centuries ago. Bruno Bauer spoke with him in his book, which he published between 1841 and 1842 in Leipzig.
From the first century after Christ, enemies prescribed many things to Christians: alleged vices, hatred of the human tribe, even the fact that they allegedly set fire to the city of Rome (in 64, this was under Emperor Nero), what they eat on their gatherings of human meat (this was said by those who heard about the Eucharist - "about eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood"), that Christians are atheists (because they did not believe in the Roman gods), that Jesus was not born of a virgin, but no one ever claimed that their founder - Jesus Christ - is a fictional figure! Never claimed by their enemies.
Historical sources
The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ took place around the 30s of the 1st century. From the first and second Christian centuries, many historical sources have survived to this day that testify to his life. These are not only sources coming from the Christian environment - there are, of course, more of them, but even several pagan sources! And there is reason to believe that the genealogies of Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, as well as himself, are based on data from precisely those ancient times.
Women
In general, the women in this family tree were full of grace and morality - they showed it quite clearly. Being full of grace does not mean that a person manages to better control himself in mattersmorality, but that a person is better at working through his mistakes and that he is working on improving himself.
Evidence from Jewish sources
We are fortunate that the most ancient Jewish historian, Josephus Flavius, was born in 37 AD - thus only a few years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In his extensive historical work on Jewish Antiquities, although it describes the entire history of the Jews, there is also an era in which Jesus and the apostles lived, and he was very close to it. Thanks to him, we know very precisely what Jerusalem looked like in his time and how the Jews lived then. King Herod is described in great detail, during the reign of which Jesus, according to the Gospel of Matthew, was born. The rest of the characters, Pilate, are also described. And what is most important for us: the author writes very convincingly about Jesus Christ.
He once mentions Jesus when he talks about the murder of James, "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ." These are just brief references. But in itself this was enough to not doubt the historical existence of Christ. It should be added that the Jews used the word "brother" for relatives, and even for the most distant relatives, just as it was with the word "sister". James is a relative of Jesus who was the face of the first Christian church community in Jerusalem. This character is well known not only from the writings of Josephus, but also from the Bible. Tales with "James, the brother of the Lord" are found in the texts of the New Testament, for example, in the letter of the Apostle Paul. SoThus, this character was clearly related to the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.
In the writings of Jacob Flavius, however, there is one more place where he writes about Jesus. Historians gave it the Latin name Testimonium Flavianum, i.e., literally, the Flavian testimony. It describes that in those days “Jesus lived, a wise man, if we can call him a man at all … He was the Christ (“christ” in Greek means the same as in Hebrew “messiah”). And when Pilate, on the advice of our leading men, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him at first abandoned him. Again he appeared alive on the third day, about this and thousands of other amazing things the prophets of God predicted about him.”
This text is very strange. It looks as if Joseph Flavius was a Christian, he himself believed in the divinity of Christ and in his resurrection. But he was not a Christian… This is evidenced by other ancient Christian publications.
Or was this place later edited? This theory is also supported by the facts that there are many contradictions in the genealogy of Jesus Christ.
Some historians believed that it was enough to slightly change a few words when copying, and the text changed dramatically. And it probably wasn't done with bad intentions. The scribes simply gave the text a new, improved meaning.
The study of the works of Josephus is indeed of great interest to Israeli researchers - his texts are one of the main sources for the history of theirnation.
Recent finds of Arabic texts have confirmed: we can almost be sure that the original text is called "The Flavian Testimony". The facts in it are the same as in the Arabic texts. But they are expressed with a certain gap - exactly the kind that we can observe in a Jewish author who never believed in Jesus Christ.
The testimony of Jesus Christ was left to us by some of the Roman historians. One of them is Cornelius. He was born about 55 years of the 1st century AD. In his work in Latin, he writes very colorfully about the fire of Rome in 64 and how Emperor Nero, in order to divert attention from himself, set society against Christians.
The author then describes the ways in which Christians were tortured, including the "garden of the night", a feast in which Christians served as living torches! Emperor Nero organized conditions in the garden for this holiday.
Another Roman historian says that the suffering of Christians has finally begun to arouse sympathy among the people. These events have even become the subject of world-famous historical novels written by Henrik, the Nobel Prize winner in literature. Cornelius made an important contribution to history - one of the oldest testimonies of Christ.
Problems of the family tree
As you can see, the gospel genealogies found in Luke and Matthew seem contradictory at first glance. Not surprisingly, many Bible opponents were quick to take advantage of this situation, and many began to attack the two passages of Scripture, especially pointing out their differences. The firstthe question of the truthfulness of the tree is related to what place Joseph occupies in the genealogy of Jesus Christ. If the son of God was a descendant of David on the part of Joseph, then he must be the biological son of Joseph, but this is not so (due to the miraculous conception and birth from the Virgin). The solution of the problem with the help of the theory of adoption is unreasonable, because the Jewish law did not know such a concept. This is because the concept of adoption was not recognized by the Jews. In addition, real blood ties were recognized in Jewish culture, which, according to the Jews, could not be erased by any conditions aimed at transferring the right of the father to someone else.
Also solving this difficulty by referring to the levirate does not make sense, since the levirate suggested that the marriage could be "inherited" (meaning the wife and her new child (who would legally be considered the child of the deceased). This should have be after the appearance of the one from whom to “inherit.” In the case of Jesus, this would have been a problem, because Joseph did not “inherit” Mary after the deceased brother, and even if he did, Mary would have to give another child by natural conception.
Information about the genealogy of Jesus Christ with the Sunday before Christmas contradict each other by different authors of the same era. Matthew and Luke mention different ancestors of the son of God.
Luke lists the names of the progenitors of the tribes of Israel (Joseph, Judah, Simeon, Levi) in the context of the operation of the Jewish monarchy, although the custom of using these names as namesown was adopted from a later period, when there was no longer a monarchy in Judea. This makes his description false.
Speaking about the genealogy of Jesus Christ and his relatives in the flesh, Matthew mentions four women who "spoil" the genealogy from the point of view of ethics: Tamar (committed the sin of incest), Rahab (the harlot), Ruth, Uriah's wife.
David "left neither man nor woman alive." He took the lives of others, including Uriah, and seduced his wife. Solomon was born from this union. It is not clear what Matthew wanted to say about the genealogy of Jesus Christ, but the origin of the Messiah from one of these personalities is doubtful from the point of view of ethics. In addition, God cursed David and his descendants. And based on his point of view, this extends to the genealogy of the descendants of Jesus Christ.
Problem Solving
So, the first problem (Jesus had to be a descendant of David, and therefore the son of Joseph) is resolved like this. On the theme of this tree, researchers published a lot of different versions, they are also in the interpretation of the Gospel of Parkhomenko about the genealogy of Jesus Christ.
In the ancient scrolls it is stated that Jesus was not, however, the biological son of Joseph, but he was in the most direct sense the son of Joseph by right of adoption. Critics are aware of this argument and that is why they warn the statement about it also with descriptions in the next section.
However, it is worth first recalling Heineman's charges related to this point regarding the exposure of the reliability of the genealogy of Jesus Christ. Heinemann argues that in the case of the Jews, veryit was important to have a "crystal clear" pedigree in terms of racism, both on the mother's side and on the father's side (the ancestors of the son of God must be Jewish).
Based on these data, Heinemann concludes that “Jesus, according to Jewish law, does not have an exact origin, since in any case, under the condition of a virgin conception, his father was not his father, and the lineage from his mother was unknown ". However, other researchers believe that this issue of genealogy is related to the performance in the 1st century AD. e. specific public office and did not affect the messianic origin of Jesus. The Jewish family tree was not supposed to be "crystal clear" in terms of racism, which means that the genealogy of Jesus Christ could well be. Even imperfect.
Students of the genealogy of Jesus Christ note that "his family tree on the mother's side was unknown." The transfer of a woman's genealogy was necessary only for the wives of Jewish priests (and this is also a maximum of four to eight last generations).
Also, Heineman's claim that Jesus was not a descendant of David because we don't know his mother's lineage is based on a rather erroneous perception of that culture. The legends of those times say that if the father does not leave behind a male heir, but only a daughter (or daughters), then she becomes a full-fledged heiress after him, who, in order to maintain kinship, can only marry someone from the same family, so did she.
From this point of view, Mary was an heiress, for it is believed that her father did not have a male heir. Mary, in this case, would have to come from the same family as Joseph, that is, from the messianic family of David. Among early Christians, Mary was actually believed to be descended from the line of David. That this was indeed the case is indicated by the fact that when the Jews had to go to their places of origin, it was Mary who went to the Davidic city of Bethlehem. Thus, one can deal with the important problem of the genealogy of Jesus Christ - ignorance of the origin of the mother of Jesus, and, in addition, additionally explain that the descent of Jesus from David "according to the flesh", as Paul wrote, is carried out on the basis of a direct biological relationship with his mother.
It is also believed that Eli, the father of Mary, adopted Joseph, the son, because he only has daughters. Similar situations existed before, for example, Jacob adopted the sons of Joseph. In this situation in the New Testament, Joseph would have been a member of Mary's family, receiving full rights as his heir. This further strengthens the bond between Mary and Joseph. This is referred to in their sermons on the genealogy of Jesus Christ by those who study the Bible. And by challenging another prejudice that the father of the Mother of Jesus adopted Joseph, once again it becomes possible to understand that in reality humanity knows what her genealogical line was. In this case, Jesus is descended from David on the basis of biological relationship with his mother and on the basis of the entry into the lineage of Joseph, who becomesat the same time the Davidic lineage of Jesus. Of course, there is no historical evidence for such information. Just from the point of view of that culture, only such a hypothesis solves the problems mentioned. Sermons on the genealogy of Jesus Christ also solve another problem - that adoption was impossible in those conditions. Father's rights could not be transferred to anyone else.
Jewish tradition, according to sources since 1982, states that the concept of adoption was unknown in Jewish law. An amateur who reads such a quote in the context of Heinemann's words will immediately understand that this is nothing more than a confirmation of Heinemann's words: adoption did not exist in ancient Israel. However, the mere fact that in ancient Israel there was no clearly defined legal terminology regarding adoption does not mean that such a practice was not used at all.
On the contrary, as one of the bibliographers reports: "Adoption was known in the Old Testament period, despite the fact that there was no special technical term." There are even specific examples of adoption in the Old Testament. About Esther, for example, it is written that "she had neither father nor mother, and when her father and mother died, Mordecai took her for a daughter." As you can see, adoption took place in ancient Israel, despite the lack of strict legal definitions in this area.
Adoption was not in Antiquity also alien to the peoples among whom the Jews were supposed to live. It was used by the Romans, who were calm about such a procedure. An example of such a situation can be found atboards that have survived to this day from famous Roman families.
Also, the Arab tribes inhabiting the region not only adopted their descendants, but, on the contrary, considered them as sons of the blood, who were considered full members of the next generation in the genealogical tree. The Arabs interacted with the Jews, which is important because, of course, these cultures developed in close relationship.
Contrary to popular belief, the explanation for the difficulty associated with the inconsistencies in the description of Christ's genealogy is direct and simple, although it seems impossible in this puzzle. In order for the gospel genealogies of Jesus to be consistent, the following circumstances must have arisen:
- both genealogies of Jesus must be "hard", i.e. "act" only and exclusively along the line "father - son";
- the line from David to Jesus, which was drawn in both genealogies, should be straight, and in one direction, like a ladder, i.e. each of the fathers in both of these chains should have had only one son, which meant at the same time that none of the members of both these genealogies could have brothers and sisters;
- names in that world always had to be the same, they could not be different variations, individual people within the tree could always have only the same names.
Thus, in matters of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, disputes do not subside to this day.
