I haven’t written about religion for awhile, have I? That’s supposed to be the raison d’être of this blog, or one of the main ones anyway. Perhaps it’s time to rectify that. ’Tis the season, so let’s look at the nativity stories. There are two distinct and largely incompatible nativity stories, one in Matthew and one in Luke, but they are usually smushed together so most folks don’t realize how different they are.

New Testament scholars are in general agreement that Mark was the first of the gospels to be written, but Mark doesn’t say anything about the birth of Jesus or his childhood. It begins with the story of John the Baptist and his baptism of the adult Jesus.

Matthew, however, rectifies that omission by not only including a nativity story but going all the way back to Abraham and giving a genealogy for Jesus. Here are the first seventeen verses of the first chapter of Matthew. I suspect that most folks tend to skip over the details. This is the New International translation from the BibleGateway.

1 This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham:

2 Abraham was the father of Isaac,
Isaac the father of Jacob,
Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,
3 Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar,
Perez the father of Hezron,
Hezron the father of Ram,
4 Ram the father of Amminadab,
Amminadab the father of Nahshon,
Nahshon the father of Salmon,
5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,
Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,
Obed the father of Jesse,
6 and Jesse the father of King David.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,
7 Solomon the father of Rehoboam,
Rehoboam the father of Abijah,
Abijah the father of Asa,
8 Asa the father of Jehoshaphat,
Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram,
Jehoram the father of Uzziah,
9 Uzziah the father of Jotham,
Jotham the father of Ahaz,
Ahaz the father of Hezekiah,
10 Hezekiah the father of Manasseh,
Manasseh the father of Amon,
Amon the father of Josiah,
11 and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon.

12 After the exile to Babylon:
Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel,
Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel,
13 Zerubbabel the father of Abihud,
Abihud the father of Eliakim,
Eliakim the father of Azor,
14 Azor the father of Zadok,
Zadok the father of Akim,
Akim the father of Elihud,
15 Elihud the father of Eleazar,
Eleazar the father of Matthan,
Matthan the father of Jacob,
16 and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah.

17 Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.

A few notes are in order.

This translation uses Messiah rather than the more common Christ as a translation of the Greek χριστός (chrīstós). They both mean the anointed one (with Messiah coming from Hebrew) and refer to the belief that Jesus was the prophesied deliverer of the Jews, the great warrior descendent of David who would free the Jewish people from their captors (the Jews had had many captors during the several hundred years since the death of David with Romans being the current ones).

The author (who was most certainly not named Matthew) makes much of his three groups of fourteen generations. As the instructor in my New Testament class back in Penn State pointed out, fourteen is seven times two, and seven is a special number, being the number of days of the creation (six plus a day to rest). It’s important to God to keep these numbers special. Apparently there’s no sense in bringing the Jews’ suffering to an end before you’ve run out the full cycle of three fourteen generations.

Notice that at the end of each fourteen generation cycle something important happens. First, there is the greatest king of the Jews (David), then there is the destruction of their nation by the Babylonians, and thus we are to assume that the third cycle is to end with something equally momentous.

Why did the author go through this laborious genealogy? He wanted to emphasize that Jesus was a Jew and that he was descended directly from Abraham and King David so that he could fulfill the prophecy that he was the Messiah sent to save the Jewish people. 

But wait!

In the next verses we find out that Joseph was not the father of Jesus, so Jesus wasn’t descended from King David after all!

18 This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. 19 Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

Oops!

But there’s more.

As I said, most folks probably don’t read those genealogies very closely, if at all. In most traditional translations they are rendered as begets.

Bart Ehrman has pointed out in his The New Testament: An Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings:

But is this sequence of fourteen-fourteen-fourteen actually viable? It is not difficult to check since some two-thirds of the names in the genealogy are known to us from the Jewish Scriptures, Matthew’s own source for the generations from Abraham to the deportation to Babylon. When the sequence is checked against this source, there do appear to be some problems. The most glaring one comes in verse 8, where Joram [or Jehoram] is said to be the father of Uzziah, for we know from 1 Chronicles 3:10-12 that Joram was not Uzziah’s father; he was his great-great-grandfather. (Read the 1 Chronicles passage for yourself, but bear in mind that Uzziah is called Azariah in this book, as can be seen by comparing 2 Kgs 14:21 with 2 Chron 26:1.) Why, then, would Matthew say that he was his father?
The answer should be obvious. If Matthew were to include all the generations between Joram and Uzziah (his father Amaziah, grandfather Joash, and great-grandfather Ahaziah), he would no longer be able to claim that there were fourteen generations between David and the deportation to Babylon! This would disrupt the entire notion that at every fourteen generations a cataclysmic event happens in the history of the people. And this, in turn, would compromise his implicit claim that because of when he was born, Jesus must be someone special and significant in the divine plan for Israel.

And notice that third set of fourteen. There are actually only thirteen generations named there!

We start with Shealtiel (because his father Jeconiah was the fourteenth generation of the previous set) followed by Zerubbabel(2), Abihud(3), Eliakim(4), Azor(5), Zadok(6), Akim(7), Elihud(8), Eleazar(9), Matthan(10), Jacob(11), Joseph(12), Jesus(13).

Remember when I wrote about Herbie and me taking that New Testament course together? Herbie was a fundamentalist Christian and I was the atheist that I still am today. We hadn’t even gotten through 20 verses of the Gospel of Matthew before Herbie was calling the instructor an atheist. Not to his face, of course. He wanted to pass the course. Even if he didn’t believe a word the instructor was saying.

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I watched the new Knives Out movie last evening and loved it!

Wake Up Dead Man pays homage to John Dickson Carr by having a seemingly impossible murder, more than one actually, and Benoit Blanc even mentions one of Carr’s best books, The Hollow Man (also known as The Three Coffins). The film is filled with priests and churches and all manner of religious objects, and of course, a great whodunit plot and lots of humor. Very highly recommended!