As is clear from the genealogies of Jesus, both of which belong to Joseph, Jesus is adopted into Joseph’s bloodline (since he isn’t Jesus’ biological father), just as the new believer is adopted into the family of God through Jesus who Paul calls the first born of many brethren.

Jesus’ death is a literary pair with John the Baptist in Mark, though more painful and humiliating, as Jesus’ death is a pair with forgiving Stephen’s in Luke-Acts. We have characters wondering whether Jesus is John the Baptist raised from the dead, which is just a way of saying Jesus is the new and greater John like Matthew’s Jesus is the new and greater Moses. Shedd comments:

In our earliest portrayal of Jesus, the Gospel of Mark, the somatic violence of the beheading of John the Baptist and the crucifixion of Jesus are keyed together. Both John and Jesus, for instance, are “handed over” (e.g., 1:14; 15:1, 10, 15), “grasped” (e.g., 6:17; 14:44, 46), and “bound” (e.g., 6:17; 15:1). At Mark 9:11–13, the designation of John as the prophet Elijah functions to position John’s death as forerunning Jesus’s demise. The recounting of John’s beheading in Mark 6:14–29, moreover, comes on the heels of the Markan Jesus likening his rejection in his hometown to the rejection of the prophets (6:1–6a). The Gospel of Matthew draws an explicit attachment between John the Baptist, Jesus, and the prophets, on the one hand, and their adversaries, on the other hand. According to Matt 14:5, Herod the tetrarch wished to kill the Baptist but was unable because the crowds viewed John as a “prophet.” Likewise, according to Matt 21:46, the Pharisees and the chief priests wished to subdue Jesus but were unable because the crowds viewed Jesus as a “prophet.” Similarly in Matt 23, the city of Jerusalem, the Pharisees, and scribes are placed in a cultural lineage as the “descendants” of the killers of God’s prophets. And in Matt 27 the Jewish leadership is portrayed as persuading the Jerusalem crowd into wanting Jesus crucified instead of Barabbas (27:15–23). The local Jewish crowd in turn accepts responsibility for Jesus’s death and extends this responsibility to their children (27:25).

In a previous post I talked about how this notion of the Jews killing Jesus from Paul seems authentic and fits nicely with such things as the corrupt trial by the Jewish high council. Obviously, if the Jews killed Christ mythicism is false. Shedd further explores this line of thinking with Q:

Sara Parks has observed, “Q also seems to take a keen interest in the topic of unjustly murdered prophets… From these sayings in Q, we can observe the fault lines of a cultural schematic whereby (1) Jesus is aligned to the violent deaths of the prophets and to the kingdom of God; and (2) “this generation,” “Jerusalem,” and Jesus’s adversaries are attached to the apical past—to those who shed the blood of the prophets. Alan Kirk is right to contend that Q 11:47–51—as a retrospective reference to the crucifixion—does not merely compare Jesus’s death to the death of the prophets but incorporates Jesus’s traumatic demise “into the epic memory tapestry of Israel.”29 As such, Q “passes a moral judgment on Jesus’ death, and, accordingly, aggressively attacks the moral legitimacy of its opponents, the Romans and their local elite clients who were responsible for executing Jesus … the latter … are analogically mapped to those elites in Israel’s sacred narrative who killed God’s messengers, the prophets.”… I have argued elsewhere that both Justin Martyr and Origen harnessed the close connection in the gospels between Jesus’s crucifixion, John’s beheading, and the death of the prophets to activate these figures’ local adversaries as correlatives of “the Jews” writ large in the second and third centuries.31 This anti-Jewish pattern of thinking provided the rhetorical scaffolding that upheld Justin’s conviction that the suffering Jews encountered as refugees in the post–Bar Kokhba revolt years was divinely authorized (see Justin, Dial. 16).

The notion of wrongful death fits nicely with the idea that the wrongful death of God’s beloved (agapetos) convicts us of our sinful disposition and thereby circumcises our hearts to reveal the law written on them – as with the unjust death of Socrates, but on a grander scale of God’s murdered beloved.

Bibliography

Shedd, Nathan. Violence and Trauma in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp. 718-734). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024).