It’s the most amazing work of God in human history before the resurrection. Mary, a virgin, finds out that she’s pregnant. In the ancient world, this would have been scandalous, but her fiancé Joseph has an angelic visitor telling him to stay with Mary. This young couple are the first to learn that the rest of human history is about to change forever as a prophecy from hundreds of years before is about to be fulfilled.
Tag: Gospel of Matthew
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Sermon: The King is Born – Matthew 1:1-17
The Gospel of Matthew begins with a genealogy. It can be tempting to move past this to the next section, but this genealogy is a picture of the history of God’s people. It points us to the gospel, to the mission of God, to the power of God, and to the promise of God.
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Why do Matthew and Luke give two different genealogies for Jesus
The gospels of Matthew and Luke both give genealogies for Jesus.
But they’re different.
Not just a little different.
From David to Joseph, they’re almost entirely different. Only two names are found in both genealogies in that time period. The genealogies are much more similar from Abraham to David. Matthew has an extra name. That’s not so unusual. Ancient genealogies are not always exhaustive. So person A can be referred to as the father of person B but it might actually be his grandfather or great grandfather, etc.
When you get to David, the genealogies diverge in two different directions.
Matthew’s genealogy goes from David to Solomon and through Solomon’s line.
Luke’s genealogy goes from David to another of his sons, Nathan, and Nathan’s line.
Both list Zerubbabel and both list Shealtiel and that is where the commonalities begin and end.
But why?
There are all sorts of theories.
And I’ll be honest. Any solution to this problem is purely speculative.
THEORY 1 – JOSEPH’S LINE AND MARY’S LINE
One of the oldest theories which goes back to the early church is the suggestion that they’re giving genealogies for both Joseph and for Mary.
Simple.
That’s possible but it shouldn’t be assumed, most importantly because the text never tells us that.
It would be highly unusual to give a woman’s genealogy in ancient times. Although as one scholar pointed out, a virgin birth is also highly unusual.
THEORY 2 – A ROYAL LINE AND A LEGAL LINE
Perhaps one of the genealogies is royal and one is legal.
This is ultimately where I land and what I believe is the most like scenario.
What’s that mean?
So Matthew’s genealogy goes from David to Solomon to Rehoboam to Abidjan, etc.
That is the Israelite monarchy of the Old Testament. They’re the kings.
Those people can be found in Old Testament genealogies.
Matthew gives the kings. Luke does not.
But both go through David.
So one suggestion is that Jesus is in the line of David, but while the royal line goes from David through Solomon, Jesus isn’t part of the Solomonic line.
Is that to say that Jesus is not a legitimate royal?
It’s not saying that.
Perhaps the direct royal line had died off and Joseph was next in line.
So in that, Matthew could be giving the line of the monarchy which ends up at Joseph.
Even if not, Jesus is the divinely appointed Davidic King. We see several instances in the Old Testament where God makes a choice which goes against birth order. Judah was not the oldest of the 12 tribes. Jacob was younger than Esau. Abel was favored over Cain.
Certainly we should not think that either of the gospel writers were just arbitrarily listing names. Luke’s genealogy is interesting because it goes another route off of the Davidic line. Luke is very meticulous and detail oriented in his gospel. He knew the Old Testament. Why did he do that?
I think he did it because it was true. That was the line.
That does not mean Matthew’s genealogy is wrong.
Again, the theory that I think makes the most sense is that Matthew is giving the kings. Keep in mind that the monarchy ends long before Jesus. There are people living in the world today who are descendants of monarchies that are no longer in power.
And from the line of the kings, Matthew is pointing to Jesus as the final and ultimate king. That also goes with the kingship theme in this gospel.
There are other theories.
OTHER THEORIES
Maybe it’s as simple as Matthew and Luke showing that Joseph himself was related to David from both sides of his family.
Maybe Joseph’s parents died and he was adopted and it’s giving the lines of his blood family and his adoptive family.
Jesus was adopted by Joseph. Maybe Joseph too had been adopted.
And there are other theories.
Maybe Joseph’s mom was a widow and his dad had a half brother who married the mother to give Joseph’s father a legal heir and the gospels are giving that genealogy and the genealogy of his biological father.
Again, it’s not a new thing that Matthew and Luke have different genealogies. Theologians and scholars have been wrestling with this throughout church history. We have church theologians commenting on this in the third century, but I think it’s safe to say that the question goes back further than that.
AN IMPORTANT LESSON ABOUT THE BIBLE
But here are a couple things to keep in mind.
Because sometimes skeptics will point to these different genealogies as a known on the historicity of the Bible.
People like to sometimes make it seem like way back in the early history of the church, like they edited the Bible. But the Bible gives us two different genealogies for Jesus and throughout the history of the church, both were left in the gospels because they were original to the books.
And that should mean something.
It’s a powerful reminder of the efforts throughout the history of the church to preserve the Biblical text and not be editors. But letting the text speak for itself.
The Bible is the word of God.
All scripture is God breathed (2 Timothy 3:16).
Hebrews 4:12 says:
the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword
The Word of God does not need to be explained away.
Thomas Jefferson was famous for producing his own “bible” where he cut out the parts he disagreed with. That’s not how you treat the Word of God.
Matthew and Luke gave those two genealogies, as we have them.
And they’re both God’s word.
For the skeptics and those who want to use this against the historicity of the Bible or even for the Christian who’s uncomfortable with the discrepancy, that needn’t be so. Just because we don’t know exactly why the genealogies are different does not imply that a solution doesn’t exist.
Again, there are no shortage of plausible theories.
We just don’t know exactly which one it is.
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Christ as a title. Studying Matthew 1:1
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
-Matthew 1:1At first glance, it might not catch our attention that Matthew says Jesus Christ. After all, those are both very common words we see in the Bible.
Jesus is his name. We’ll actually see him given that name at the end of this chapter in connection to his birth. Verse 21, the angel tells Joseph to name the child Jesus. It’s a name that means savior, or the Lord’s salvation.
Jesus is his name.
CHRIST – A TITLE
And Christ is his…
Officially, Christ is a title.
Jesus is the Christ. Christ comes from the Greek Christos which means anointed.
Now in our day, Jesus and Christ are often said together, almost like a first and last name.
But something that’s interesting is the names Jesus and Christ together are actually very rare in the gospels. The gospel writers use Jesus. They use Christ.
But Jesus Christ?
For his entire gospel, Matthew does it only twice. This first verse and again in 1:18. We see Jesus Christ twice in John. Once in Mark, and never in Luke.
But then it becomes common in Acts – written by Luke, and we see it throughout Paul’s letters. Part of this seems to be a simple evolution that happened in the early years of the church where Jesus Christ increasingly became used of as the full name for Jesus.
And I point this out because one of the potential consequences of this is to lose sight of the significance of Christ as a title for Jesus.
As I said, Christ comes from the Greek word Christos which means anointed. The Latin word for anointed is where we get our word “Messiah.” So Christ and Messiah are saying the same thing.
And anointing refers to when people would be anointed with oil in the Old Testament. We would see this treatment for kings and priests, and sometimes prophets. Sometimes objects were even anointed with oil. The anointing was meant to symbolize purity, consecration to God, and the Holy Spirit.
So when Jesus is called the Christ, at heart, that’s pointing to his status as the anointed one.
And we see times in the gospels where Christ is clearly being used with as a title.
EXAMPLES OF JESUS CALLED THE CHRIST
To briefly give a couple of texts which illustrate this idea.
In Luke 2, when Jesus is brought to the temple as a baby and a man name Simeon sees him. He’s an old man who’s waited years for this moment.
Luke 2:26: And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ.
Matthew 16:16, Peter confesses his belief that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
And the idea of a Christ coming into the world was something that the Israelites were anticipating in the first century.
There had been others who had claimed to even be the Christ.
Before Jesus came into the world, there were various expectations of an anointed one and what he would be like. There were views of an anointed one, of a Christ who would come from the Davidic line to save the Jews.
MESSIANIC EXPECTATIONS
To give a present day illustration.
It’s kind of like different views of end times theology today. There are all sorts of differing views for the second coming of Christ and what that will be like, when that will happen.
Well in the first century, there were lots of different ideas for what the first coming of the Christ would look like.
Some thought that the Christ would be a great king, others thought he would be a great general who would lead Israel in a military victory over Rome. Some thought of the Christ as a great moral figure of keeping and interpreting the law of Moses.
There’s some truth to all of those, but perhaps not in the ways people expected.
Some thought that there would actually be two anointed ones, that is to say, two Christs. Texts from Qumran, which is where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found indicate a belief in a Davidc Christ who would be a king of the Jews and a Priestly Christ from the line of Aaron.
And given the long-awaited for, long hoped for, Christ who was to come, Matthew opens his gospel by saying that this man Jesus is the Christ.
He’s the Messiah, he’s the anointed one.
And we’ll see in his ministry that Jesus will embody all of the offices who were anointed in the Old Testament. Prophet, priest, and king.
And so it’s fitting that Matthew begins his gospel by pointing to Jesus as the Christ. He is the long-awaited Messiah for whom Israel had hoped.
Jesus is a prophet in that he speaks the word of God.
He’s also a priest. Priests in the Old Testament were the ones who performed the sacrifices and served as the intermediaries between man and God. They had extensive moral requirements and religious rituals to be able to do this.
But Jesus is the perfect high priest, he’s the greater priest because by the nature of his moral righteousness and divine nature, he is able to serve as the true intermediary between us and God.
Jesus is a prophet, a priest, and as we’ll see in another post, he’s also a king.
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Sermon: Holy Interruption – Matthew 9:18-26
In a dramatic story, Jesus raises a young girl from the dead, but it’s a passage where there’s more than meets the eye. It’s ultimately a story about two miracles, not just one. And we see Jesus as the giver of life but also pointing to a restoration that only he can bring.
