For all the attention it gets in the world today, Christmas is not that big of a deal in the Bible. The name of Christmas is never used, the date of December 25 isn’t given and there is no record that any of the early disciples ever celebrated the anniversary of Jesus’ birth. The New Revised Standard Version that I mostly use is 1270 pages long; about one half of one percent of this text deals with the Christmas story.
(If you want to read the whole Christmas story now, go ahead; it will not take you long. The standard Protestant Christian Bible is divided into two ‘testaments’ and 66 ‘books.’ Books of the Bible are numbered into ‘chapters’ that are usually one or two pages long; each chapter is divided into verses that more or less correspond to a sentence of text. In most Bibles, whether in print or on the web, the big numbers mean chapter breaks and the small numbers mark the verses. The Christmas story is found in three of the New Testament books: Matthew, Luke and John.
In Matthew, the Christmas story and its immediate sequel runs from Chapter One, verse one through the end of Chapter Two at verse 23 [or Matthew 1:1-2:23 as this is usually written]. In Luke, home of the longest and most elaborate Christmas account, the story runs from Luke 1:5 through 3:38. In the gospel of John, 1:1-1:18 give his version of the story.
If you invest twenty minutes or so reading these accounts you will know as much as anybody else in the world about the written history of the birth of Jesus; these are all the written sources from within one hundred years or so of his birth that exist.)
The first and oldest version of the story in Matthew starts out rather strangely; it gives a 42-generation genealogical tree for Joseph, “the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born.” The purpose seems to be to link the baby Jesus to the history of the Jewish people, not only connecting him to Abraham, widely considered the father of the nation, but also to the royal line going back to the heroic Goliath-killing King David.
That’s important; one of the main themes of the New Testament is that Jesus of Nazareth was The One, the heroic savior that the Jewish scriptures that Christians refer to as the ‘Old Testament’ foretold. (The libretto of Handel’s Messiah is basically a collection of Old Testament passages which many Christians believe are fulfilled by Jesus’ life and death.) The Messiah was, Christians believed, predicted to be a descendant of the Jewish national hero King David and the ancient kings of Judah; he was also going to be born in Bethlehem, the town where David’s family had its roots.
As a literary device, starting a book with a genealogical tree strikes me as less than gripping. In the older translations instead of translating the Greek word ‘egennaysen’ as ‘was the father of,’ they used the simpler and more literal ‘begat.’ “Abraham begat Isaac; Isaac begat Jacob,” and so on. There are a lot of passages like this in the Bible, and “the begats,” as these are known, make some of the dullest reading around.
Think of these begats as ‘rolling the credits’ before the main story begins; Luke’s longer Christmas story will end with another family tree for Jesus, this one going all the way back to Adam. So one gospel rolls the credits at the beginning, the other at the end. Theologically, the point is the same: they anchor the story of Christmas and of Jesus to the larger stories of Jewish and human history.
However, the ‘begats’ in Matthew and Luke do raise two problems for readers. First, the begats trace Jesus’ ancestry through Joseph, but both Matthew and Luke make very clear that Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father. In fact, they both make the startling claim that Jesus did not have a biological father in the ordinary sense, but that God directly intervened at the moment of conception so that Mary was still a virgin when she became pregnant and that Jesus is, as the old translations say, “the only begotten Son of God.”
The second problem with the begats is that they aren’t the same: the family tree that Matthew gives for Joseph is rather different from the one that Luke gives. This is slightly disguised because Matthew gives the list in descending order from Abraham down while Luke goes the other way from Jesus up.
But however you order them, Matthew’s list of the five immediate ancestors of Joseph runs like this: Jacob, Matthan, Eleazar, Eliud, Achim. Luke’s list goes like this: Heli, Matthat, Levi, Melchi, Jannai. The two lists come together on key names like David and Abraham, but otherwise they go their merry and largely independent ways.
What do we make of these problems?
The first, I think, is relatively simple. Belonging to a royal house in those days meant being acknowledged by the house. This is how it worked for the Caesars; Octavian Caesar who reigned as Augustus was the adopted son of Julius Caesar; his successor Tiberius was also adopted and Tiberius in turn went on to adopt Caligula. More broadly, we should remember that paternity was a different thing in a pre-scientific age. In a world without DNA tests, if your ‘father’ said you were his son or his daughter, that was it. End of story. Joseph acknowledged Jesus as his son; Jesus was of the House of David. That at least is how it must have seemed to the gospel writers.
The second problem is trickier. If the Bible is a divinely inspired book without a single error or contradiction, what is Joseph doing with two incompatible family trees?
I’m not going to try to solve this one theologically. There are plenty of writers who have come up with various ingenious solutions as to how these family trees can be reconciled. Far be it from me to say that they can’t be; for the humble lay blogger like myself it’s enough to see the literary point of what’s happening.
Regardless of the details, both Matthew and Luke think it’s extremely important that Jesus was a Jew and that the story of Jesus is part of the story of God’s encounter with the Jewish people. Gentile Christians going back to the first century AD have often wished this wasn’t so. In ancient times various Greek and Roman cults grew up that detached the figure of Jesus from this Jewish context and turned him into something more like the mythical heroes and deities of the mystery religions that were so popular at the time. More recently, the Nazis in particular hated the idea of Jesus being a Jew and some of them went so far as to invent an “Aryan Christianity” with an Aryan Christ. The Nazis were picking up on a kind of anti-Semitism that flourished in the first and second centuries after Christ as theological writers like Marcion argued that the Jewish God of the Old Testament had nothing to do with the much higher, more noble and philosophically acceptable deity proclaimed by Jesus.
That is not how the Gospel writers saw it and these family trees are there to make sure that the Jesus story stays grounded in the story of the Jewish people. That reality mattered more to whoever finally assembled the gospels into their current form than the genealogical details, and this is the takeaway for those of us reading the story now.
There are two messages we should take away from the begats: first, that Jesus was Jewish and his story needs to be seen as the continuation of the Jewish religious story that starts with God’s promises to Abraham and on back to the creation of the world.
Second, the life of Jesus should be seen as part of the grounded world of history and not a free-floating myth. It’s important to the gospel writers that we approach the Christmas story as a historical event with mystic overtones. They are claiming that all this really happened, and to understand the Christmas story as we tell it, we have to acknowledge this claim.
Luke makes this even more clear in the way he starts his gospel and prefaces the story by saying that he’s writing his account after a thorough investigation. (See Luke 1:1-4)
The Christmas story may or may not be real history; that is a question each reader has to answer on his or her own. But those who first researched the story and wrote it down meant very clearly to tell us two things: the Christmas story is real, and it’s really Jewish.