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Senior Member
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: The cornfield
Posts: 555
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Quote:
Originally Posted by David B
Yup I have noticed that it doesn't say that Joseph was the father. But, if not to imply that he was, why give the genealogy?
What point are you thinking of, unless the point was to obfuscate?
David B
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One possible explanation is given at kosherjudaism.com (Keep in mind, the author is writing about the book of Matthew from a Jewish perspective, but if we believe the author of Matthew was Jewish, that's a good perspective to have represented IMO.)
I hope I haven't quoted too much of this.
Quote:
A Symbolic Genealogy
I will be touching briefly upon the idea of a genealogy since I will be
speaking more about this in a later chapter when I discuss Apologetics among
Christians and Jews.
I began this story with “This chapter begins with a roll of Jewish lineage”
because the next several verses will list the generations between father and son
as well as between later generations and earlier ones who are all connected
through a genetic link. Because of Jesus’ lack of a human birth father, I have
chosen to word the passage as I did by not directly linking Jesus with this family
tree, since Jesus is not literally associated with it, although one can certainly
perceive him to be connected metaphorically. This is because, according to the
story, Jesus did not have a Jewish father who sired him, and since G-d isn’t
Jewish, I have distanced him from a literal “genealogy”.
Because of this, one may want to consider the book “According to Matthew”
to contain two different expressions where there are elements that can be
interpreted literally as well as those that can only be accepted metaphorically.
This is important to keep in mind because if you take this first chapter literally,
where it speaks of a genealogy that is enumerating the actual ancestry and
progeny, with Jesus as a link in the chain, you have a problem.
When we speak of a literal genealogy, one that follows Jewish halacah, we
speak of a paternal genetic link to a specific individual, one who is a link in that
chain, and from whom the chain will continue. But Matthew tells us that Jesus
has no direct paternal link, and then ends the story where Jesus does not literally
sire any children to establishing a connection to the future. The author seems to
have considered such a legalistic connection as irrelevant. Throughout the book,
you will see that Matthew focuses on the symbolic more than the literal.
I suggest that this disconnected symbolic relationship of Jesus to David was
intentional by the author in order to make Jesus associated with a special Jewish
heritage, and at the same time, to remove Jesus from such worldly requirements.
It is an aggadic telling, a story of a legend, midrashically inserted to be part of the
Davidic line. Other bibles besides the KJV use terms such as “The scroll of the
genealogy” (MRC, ALT), “The family tree” (MSG), “The book of the genealogy”
(WEB, LITV), and so forth, in order to establish a connection between Jesus and
David.
The Trouble With Matthew
Just keep in mind that the genealogy of Jesus is a figurative one, and the
need to explain away any problems with a literal one s no longer an issue. In
addition, there are those, such as John Wesley, who indicate that any
inconsistency of genealogy only affects the Jewish tables and not those of the
Evangelist, and are only of a historical interest not of a spiritual one. That is why I
have said that there are elements in this telling that cannot be rendered literally,
however one could certainly try to understand it on the level of metaphor, or, as it
is called in Jewish literature, Midrash. © 2005, Eliyahu Grossman – All rights reserved.
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http://www.kosherjudaism.com/matt0101.pdf
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12-29-2006, 04:07 PM
