Mathetes

Right. I am no scholar, but just an outsider interested in learning. This passage surprised me while reading the gospel and I wanted to find out if it could be read as an episode attributed to an early Christian group that did not believe that Jesus was a descendant of David, in contradiction with other passages in the golpels.

I am not crazy about defending my reading, as I admit there exist others. Just trying to find if there had been some previous scholarly debate on this issue.

Kosh

So... was somebody going to explain to us what the importance of a legal, non-hereditary lineage would have had to the Jews? Does the OT imply that it could be the adopted son of Davidic descendant?

Documentation on all of the above?

Thanks.

Vorkosigan

There's an old solution to the problem: levirate marriage, first proposed by Julius Africanus, I believe, way back when. Basically, The two grandads of Jesus were brothers. The first one died, and then the second one married Joseph's mother, having Joseph as the biological son of number 2, and the legal son of number 1. This solution ultimately fails, because it requires more levirate marriages to occur further back -- just like adding epicycles to Ptolemaic theory, and finally collapses because Jesus has two lines of descent through differnent children of David, as I recall.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Further, while I am still on this marriage thing, Raymond Brown points out in Birth of the Messiah that there is a precedent in the OT for adoption into another tribe. When Zadok became high priest, he was not from a priestly family, but later was given a fake priestly lineage. This may also have application to Paul's comment in Romans about Jesus being of the "seed of David." When one thinks that Jesus was often compared to the High Priest of the Temple (1 Clement, Hebrews) the parallel becomes a possibility. Jesus may well have not had Davidic descent. Collins, in Scepter and Star, on Jewish messianism, says that he does not think Jesus was a Davidid.

Vorkosigan