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| Image originally from http://sacredsandwich.com/ but I can't find the page. |
I've been thinking about these verses for the past week, wondering what to say. I've always found that they make for a very difficult beginning to the New Testament. I'd open the book and the first thing I'd be presented with was a dull family tree and I didn't know quite what to do with this list of names. I had plenty of choices and I've found myself wondering about four in particular, none of which have felt right. They're not wrong. They're just not right for me now or right for what I'd like this blog to become.
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It would have been easy enough to write about how the genealogy recorded in Matthew points to the inclusiveness of the message of Jesus. A radical inclusiveness in which nobody is excluded. I'd have written about the women included in the list of names - Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah, and of course Mary. Five women among forty men. I'd write of gender inclusivity. I'd have written about how those five women included foreigners, about how they included those known for sin too. Inclusiveness. But that's been done many times before.
Interestingly I've never heard anyone talk about how many of the men in that list committed grievous sins in the Old Testament men of whom it isn't recorded that they did anything good at all, just that they "did evil in the eyes of the Lord."
And while I've heard sermons about those women and been told that God accepts outcasts and people from all walks of life I never heard in those sermons about the man who was from an almost despised underclass - a shepherd. A man who was accepted and who became king of Israel.
I find that all the radically inclusive sermons I've heard - even those I've heard in inclusive churches - are not inclusive enough.
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For a day I was toying with writing about "begat". The King James Bible is known for all the begatting! On Christmas day I was listening to carols and one of them points to Jesus as being special because he's "begotten not made" echoing the words of the Nicene Creed of AD325. I could have written about how we are all begotten and how traditionally Christianity claimed that Jesus was begotten of God - so was himself God. I toyed with that idea. And hastily moved on.
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I considered talking about verse 17. A good verse for the first day of 2017. The translation linked to above reads, "So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations."
All those fourteens. Impressive the way that works. It's also interesting that Hebrew numerology ascribes numbers to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the letters of David add up to fourteen.
What I would have written about is that the verse is wrong. Plainly, patently, obviously, glaringly wrong! Count the generations for yourself if you wish. There's one missing. Why is that? Personally I think it's just a scribal error that got into the received text or that the gospel writer was mistaken in the first place. But what if there's a reason for the missing generation?
What if there is mystery in something so simple? I was all set to write about the joy of mystery and the wonder of not knowing the answers.
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Then I wondered if I wouldn't be able to turn off my scholar's head. I thought of writing about the differences between the genealogy of Jesus as recorded by Matthew and Luke and about the different reasons people have come up with for the discrepancy and how they have tried to explain it all away. I thought of writing about what Matthew was wanting to prove and what Luke was trying to prove and the things they were wanting to say about Jesus.
I am in a privileged position these days. In years gone by I believed the Bible to be the inerrant word of God. Whatever it said had to be true and I went to a great deal of trouble to try to defend it. It's an illogical quest but sometimes a conservative and monolithic faith triumphs over reason. Ultimately the inerrancy of the Bible is indefensible. I realise that now.
Today my conclusion about the two genealogies is simple: They are fabrications. They are stories to prove a religious point. They are tales to convert the unconverted, Jews and gentiles alike. They are lists of names drawn together to fulfill loose prophecies and provide a Jesus who might be worthy of adoration.
For most of my Christian life I wouldn't have been able to begin to accept such a conclusion. I found the image above, without attribution, on a page telling me that though the genealogies are very different, "sound" scholars have provided reasonable explanations. I know those explanations. I don't believe they hold up to critical analysis but I know them. And I believed that at least one of them had to be true because everything in the Bible was true.
I find that, now I am not a "Christian", my belief is far more in line with the bulk of modern biblical scholarship. I note that the Wiki page on the genealogy of Jesus mentions in its first paragraph two scholars I now respect deeply, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan - men whose work I once found reprehensible and grossly anti-Christianity. It seems that I am in broad agreement with them on this passage. The fundamentalist claims that men like Borg are not Christians. He would have claimed otherwise. Maybe his deep faith rested on something far more deeply rooted than a book. It's only now, as a post-Christian, that I find myself able to consider reading his writings.
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I could have written about any one of those topics when considering this passage. I'm not going to. As I sat in a Quaker meeting house this morning an idea arose and I knew that I had to write from that idea. It's an idea that will explain from the outset what I currently believe about Jesus. It's an idea that may give me a clue as to a reason why Jesus may still be worth following - even with my beliefs.
It's a simple idea: The passage entirely misses the point about Jesus!
Now there's a sermon I've never heard. In the next post I will write it. Or possibly in the post after that because that wasn't the only idea arising from the silence of Quaker worship today. I've just got to skip forward an entire gospel to express the other idea and to ask you questions.
Next time I'll get into the real work of this blog. The real pleasure too. I apologise that today was more a laying aside of the some of the things standing in the way of how I want to approach the gospels.
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