So often when we consider the Christmas story we think of the Virgin Birth, but often overlook the bloodline genealogies. And this makes sense because if Jesus is not Joseph’s blood child, why should we care about Joseph’s genealogy in Matthew or Luke. But, there may be more going on than meets the eye. I’ll recapitulate what I said last time about Matthew’s genealogy:

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With Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus (really of Joseph) we see Joseph adopted Jesus into a family with a Davidic royal bloodline. This fits in with the idea that Jesus was to restore the Davidic throne. God, after all, had promised the Davidic throne would be reestablished. Yet in Jesus’s time, there was little chance of that happening with Imperial Rome. But here’s a further problem. Rich Robinson notes:

According to the genealogy in Matthew 1:12, Jesus is a descendant of Jeconiah. But Jeconiah was cursed in Jeremiah 22:24 and 22:30:

As surely as I live,” declares the LORD, “even if you, Jehoiachin son of Jehoiakim king of Judah, were a signet ring on my right hand, I would still pull you off.

This is what the LORD says: “Record this man as if childless, a man who will not prosper in his lifetime, for none of his offspring will prosper, none will sit on the throne of David or rule any more in Judah.”

Since no descendant of Jeconiah could ever sit on the throne, if Jesus is a descendant of this cursed king, he is disqualified from being the Messiah.

What was Matthew doing? He was accounting for the fact that Jesus was killed instead of re-establishing the Davidic throne, but the curse was ultimately overcome because Jesus would rule in the coming kingdom of God following the apocalypse, since Jesus was not directly in the cursed bloodline but only adopted into it. This is the genius of Matthew’s genealogy. The throne of David would be resurrected because Jesus was not physically Davidic. Contrast this with Paul who said Jesus was of the seed of David (we’ll think more about this below). This fits in with the notion in the ancient world of the power of being adopted into a family, like Augustus Caesar was.

There’s another interesting feature of Matthew’s genealogy. There are women in it who are associated with sexual immorality in the Old Testament, who John Shelby Spong labeled the Shady Ladies:

The incest of Tamar, the prostitution of Rahab, the seduction of Ruth and the adultery of Bathsheba were the experiences in his ancestry through which Jesus came to be born, as shown in the story of Matthew’s genealogy. All of these women were foreign, and by the standards of that day, all of these women were sexually compromised. This is the way Matthew introduces the story of Jesus’ birth.

Sexual immorality in the bible basically suggests that you defile yourself so you can’t come into the presence of God. Interestingly, if you look at these women apart from the sexual sense that follows them, they are quite heroic.

The symbolism seems to make the obvious connection that Jesus who is born of a mother that knew no sexuality and was only adopted into the sexual immorality (including David’s sexual immorality) line of Joseph, he was heroic like the shady ladies without having sexual proclivity or acts that would defile him. This is one of the main senses Jesus was without sin. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8; cf. Psalm 24:3–4). Jesus was adopted into Joseph’s Davidic bloodline just as new Christian believers through baptism are also adopted into God’s family, Paul calling Jesus the firstborn of many brethren.

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But what about Luke’s genealogy?

Luke/Acts identifies Paul was a student of the great teacher Gamaliel in Acts 22:3.  Since the Hillelian school of thought is presented collectively, very few teachings are clearly identifiable as Gamaliel’s. There is only a cryptic dictum comparing his students to classes of fish:

A ritually impure fish: one who has memorized everything by study, but has no understanding, and is the son of poor parents

A ritually pure fish: one who has learnt and understood everything, and is the son of rich parents

A fish from the Jordan River one who has learnt everything, but doesn’t know how to respond

A fish from the Mediterranean Sea: one who has learnt everything, and knows how to respond

So, we see him as a teacher of multiple meanings of words, which was a topic in ancient Judaism.  Polysemy is the capacity for a sign, word, phrase, or sentence to bear multiple meanings in a single context. It was observed in the Hebrew Bible, both in poetry and in prose.

What we seem to see with the genealogies in Matthew and Luke are attempts to play on multiple meanings in Paul’s words to make a point about Jesus fulfilling God’s promise to re-establish the Davidic kingdom forever.  This must somehow protect against the Davidic throne being re-established but then being overtaken in the future by some later foreign power. For Matthew, we can look at Paul’s word that Jesus was from the seed/ line of David (Romans 1:3).  This could be physical bloodline, but it might also be something artificial like Jesus being adopted into David’s bloodline because the word Paul uses is ginomai which can also mean events that occur, changes in state or condition, and the fulfillment of actions or prophecies. In the New Testament, “ginomai” frequently appears in contexts where something is brought into being or where a transformation takes place.  In the Greco-Roman world, the concept of “becoming” was significant in philosophical discussions about change and existence. The use of “ginomai” in the New Testament reflects a Hebraic understanding of God’s active role in history and creation. It underscores the dynamic nature of God’s interaction with the world, where His will and purposes are realized in time and space.  So we see the idea of Jesus being Davidic, not that he always was Davidic but being transformed when adopted by Joseph to fulfill God’s promise about the line of David being restored to kingship.  We perhaps see then Matthew exploiting multiple meanings in Paul’s language.

So, we might translate Romans 1:3 in Paul that with Joseph’s Davidic adoption Jesus was transformed (genomenou) into being of the seed of David (ek spermatos Dauid) in his human nature (kata σάρκα- Human nature in its frailty and susceptibility to sin (e.g., Romans 7:18)). The New Testament writers, particularly Paul, use “sarx” to contrast the life led by the Spirit with one dominated by human desires and sinfulness. Jesus was adopted into humanity, so his fleshly aspect was subservient to his divine aspect inherently. In this way, he participated in the noble aspects of David without being subject to David’s sinful side (e.g., lustfulness/adultery).

We seem to see the same polysemy process interpreting Paul in Luke’s genealogy of Joseph. 

As Ehrman notes, Paul says Jesus was the angel of the lord.  He writes:

Christ as an Angel in Paul

Many people no doubt have the same experience I do on occasion, of reading something numerous times, over and over, and not having it register.   I have read Paul’s letter to the Galatians literally hundreds of times in both English and Greek.  But the clear import of what Paul says in Galatians 4:14 simply never registered with me, until, frankly, a few months ago.   In this verse Paul indicates that Christ was an angel.    The reason it never registered with me is because the statement is a bit obscure, and I had always interpreted it in an alternative way.  Thanks to the work of other scholars, I now see the error of my ways.

In the context of the verse Paul is reminding the Galatians of how they first received him when he was ill in their midst, and they helped restore him to health.  This is what the verse in question says:

Even though my bodily condition was a test for you, you did not mock or despise me, but you received me as an angel of God, as Jesus Christ.

I had always simply read the verse to say that the Galatians had received Paul in his infirm state the way they would have received an angelic visitor, or even Christ himself.    In fact the grammar of the Greek suggests something quite different.   As the aforementioned Gieschen has argued, and has now been affirmed in a book on Christ as an angel by New Testament specialist Susan Garrett, the verse is not saying that the Galatians received Paul as an angel or as Christ; it is saying that they received him as they would an angel, such as Christ.  By clear implication, then, Christ is an angel.

As I indicated, the reason for reading the verse this way has to do with the Greek grammar.   When Paul uses the construction “but as … as” he is not contrasting two things; he is stating that the two things are the same thing.  We know this because Paul uses this grammatical construction in a couple of other places in his writings, and the meaning in these cases is unambiguous.   For example, in 1 Corinthians 3:1 Paul says: “Brothers, I was not able to speak to you as spiritual people, but as fleshly people, as infants in Christ.”   The last bit “but as…as” indicates two identifying features of the recipients of Paul’s letter: they are fleshly people and they are infants in Christ.  These are not two contrasting statements; they modify each other.   The same can be said of Paul’s comments in 2 Cor. 2:17, which also has this grammatical feature.

But this means that in Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ to an angel; he is equating him to an angel.   Garrett goes a step further and argues that Gal. 4:14 indicates that Paul “identifies [Jesus Christ] with God’s chief angel” [p. 11].

If that’s the case, then virtually everything Paul ever says about Christ throughout his letters makes perfect sense.   As the Angel of the Lord, Christ is a pre-existent being who is divine; he can be called God; and he is God’s manifestation on earth in human flesh.   Paul says all these things about Christ, and in no passage more strikingly than in Philippians 2:6-11, a passage that is often called by scholars the “Philippians Hymn” or the “Christ Hymn of Philippians,” since it is widely thought to embody an early hymn or poem devoted to celebrating Christ and his incarnation.

My friend Charles Cosgrove, a life-long scholar of Paul who is also one of the world’s experts on music in the early Christian world, has convinced me that the passage could not have been an actual hymn that was sung, since it does not scan properly, as a musical piece, in the Greek.   And so it may be a poem or even a kind of exalted prose composition.  But what is clear is that it is an elevated reflection on Christ coming into the world (from heaven) for the sake of others and being glorified by God as a result.  And it appears to be a passage Paul is quoting, one with which the Philippians themselves may well have already been familiar.  In other words, it is another pre-Pauline tradition (see the discussion of Romans 1:3-4 on pp. xxx).

If this is the case, then why would Paul say Jesus was from the line of David?  Apparently we have polysemy again.  Paul’s word Aggelos can mean angel, but it can also just mean messenger, and is used in the Old Testament to describe both divine and human messengers.  Luke’s genealogy of Joseph’s line is that he has Joseph adopt Jesus into his bloodline but traces it all the way back to Adam as a son of God, meaning the great angel of the lord Jesus had been adopted not only into David’s bloodline but into humanity’s bloodline, as he would have to if he was an angel that would restore the Davidic throne. 

I’m assuming central topics in Paul like the seed of David passage and the angel passage would have been accessible to Matthew and Luke. For example, Mark appears to be heavily influenced by Paul so this influence certainly could have reached Luke and Matthew who each used a lot of Mark. Matthew seems to be reacting to the gentile Pauline influence on Mark by Judaizing Mark’s gospel and Paul is the great hero of Luke’s Acts. If you don’t like the idea that Matthew and Luke were aware of Paul’s thoughts on Jesus as the seed of David and an angel, a more basic argument is the genealogies show Jesus is an adopted son of David via Joseph in Matthew who escapes the curse and an angel adopted into humanity by Joseph in Luke. The 2 great strands in the OT are Mosaic covenant theology and Davidic promise theology, and Jesus allows the promise of God to David to be fulfilled.