Genealogy and Pregnancy

Only Matthew and Luke have a clearly defined preamble. Mark, the shortest and most concise gospel, leaves out Jesus origins entirely, and goes straight for his interactions with John the Baptist, and John is sort of halfway between the two, leading in with a mystic account of Jesus origins as the "Word made flesh", and immediately connecting it with his interactions with John the Baptist (who we will deal with in a later post).

The Famous Begats (Mat 1:1-17)

Matthew, the most Jewish of the Gospels, opens in the most boring way possible: with a genealogy for Jesus. Immediately we bring in problems with the inerrancy of scripture - Luke also includes a genealogy of Jesus, and the two are very different. It has been suggested that Matthew's genealogy was intended to lead up to a Joseph who was the father of Mary - it is, after, all, an oddity that Matthew focuses so emphatically on the lineage of Jesus father only to announce the virginal conception - but both genealogies as they exist today explicitly state that they lead to Joseph, Mary's husband. Whichever way you look at it, there's an error in there somewhere. You might also claim that one occasionally uses the mother instead of the father (the wording is occasionally ambiguous), but to my thinking that makes the whole genealogy completely spurious anyway - using this method, after sufficient generations, more or less anyone from the tribe of Israel could trace a valid bloodline back to King David.

It gets worse on the inerrancy front however, since Matthew's genealogy explicitly tries to set up Jesus as the descendent of the Kings of Israel (Luke on the other hand has Jesus descended from the Royal Line only as far as David, the second king) - but somewhat oddly, misses out a few, so the genealogy doesn't even agree properly with the Old Testament, either. The omission may be intentional - these three kings were especially wicked, and there is apparently some precedent for "abridged" genealogies - but it raises some really hard questions for people who try to think of the bible as inerrant. Matthew also invokes some numerology in order to try and place Jesus within the greater history of the Jewish nation - fourteen generations from Abraham to the great King David, fourteen generations from David to the calamity of their exile to Babylon, and fourteen generations from the exile to the birth of Jesus. Except that since he has apparently played a bit fast and loose with the numbers here, his argument seems a little bit disingenuous.

Luke starts his gospel in a slightly different way. Addressed to "Theophilus" (which, since it means "friend of God", has been interpreted as a general term for any believer), it starts with a statement of intent - a thorough examination of the evidence presented so that the (already christian) reader may be sure of what they believe. I should state again that it is uncontroversial that Luke was not written by a contemporary of Jesus, and unlikely to have even been a contemporary of Paul; and even if he had, it would be unwise to think that his historical investigation should be considered as a dispassionate and unbiased examination of historical facts; the author of Luke had an axe to grind as much as the author of John.

A Tale of Two Babies (Luke 1)

Leaving his own genealogy until the third chapter, when Jesus is about to start his ministry, Luke opens with a contrast between the pregnancy of Elizabeth (mother of John the Baptist), and Mary (mother of Jesus). Now, I'm going to deal with both the virgin birth and John the Baptist separately, but I wanted to flag up the story of Elizabeth and Mary on it's own, since it's the first example of my major beef with religious texts, and indeed religion in general - the issue of doubt.

The story runs as follows. Elizabeth's husband, a priest called Zechariah, is visited by an Angel of the Lord in the temple, who tells him that his wife - who is considered past the age of childbirth - will bear him a son and who will be a great prophet, John the Baptist. Zechariah's response is, unsurprisingly, disbelief. He asks, "How can I be sure of this?" and points to his wife's age. For his trouble, he is struck dumb until his child is born.

Immediately follows the story of Mary, who is visited by an Angel to announce that she will bear Jesus. Mary makes a similar excalamation of surprise: "How can this be?" - the Angel outlines the miracle of the virgin birth, Mary calmly accepts the message, and is blessed.

First, I want to point out, both of these responses are just plain weird. Zechariah effectively asks for proof that the Angels prophecy will come true. Why? He was a priest; if this was a reasonable thing to expect from an Angel making a prophecy he's likely to know, so why is he punished for it? If you doubt, why ask for proof? Why not just wait and see what happens one way or another? Mary also assumes without being told that she's going to conceive RIGHT NOW; and doesn't assume, perhaps more reasonably, that this is going to happen when she marries her husband. Granted I'm not a linguist, and that might have been ferreted away in some weird grammatical construction, but this whole exchange seems pretty contrived to me. Well, that's the bible for you.

But what really bugs me about this is the message. Don't question. Listen with your heart, not your head. Don't look for evidence or guarantees from God, just accept what his messengers tell you, even when it sounds crazy.

Part of the point of this project is to revisit the Bible with critical eyes and try to dig out what the messages of the Gospels actually are. I'm aware that the stereotypical christianity that atheists often attack is actually quite alien to the reality that many christians understand, and I wanted to find out how much of the "sit down and shut up" message actually comes from the bible, and how much of it is constructed by (some) christian traditions.

It's actually quite discouraging to see that in my first post, on the first couple of chapters of the Gospels, I've not only come across a fairly tricky contradiction (aren't there supposed to be none of those in the bible?) but also one of the tropes of what I had supposed was "straw" christianity: the instruction to accept what you are told on faith alone.

It's particularily challenging, because I know that many christian traditions (my own included) teach it's followers to think critically about it's claims, to hold their leaders to account, and to make sure that all teaching is backed up with scripture - but obviously there is, enshrined in the gospels, hard limits to the skepticism you are allowed to express.

On the other hand, the lesson is not black and white. Mary does not accept blindly what she is told - "How can this be?" she exclaims. In fact, it's not immediately obvious what the difference between Mary and Zechariah is. "How can I know this is true?" is his retort. Mary responds with doubtful wonder, and is blessed. Zechariah asks for evidence, and is punished.

Note also that neither are being asked to leap out in faith here, so perhaps we should take the message that asking for proof of trivial things is to be avoided - we shall see how that fits with future lessons about doubt, faith and proof.