The First Christmas

by Marcus J. Borg

  Josephus continues with this second claim: “Moreover, on my mother’s side I am of royal blood” (1.2b). He then describes his maternal connection to the Hasmonean, or Maccabean, dynasty of priest-kings who ruled Israel for a hundred years before the Romans arrived around the middle of the first century BCE and replaced them with the Herodians. He gives his royal genealogy going back five generations to his “great-grandfather’s grandfather” around 135 BCE (3–5):

  When you examine that short genealogy, certain elements jump out immediately. Josephus works forward from Simon to himself—from past to present, as Matthew does for Jesus—rather than backward from himself to Simon—from present to past, as Luke does for Jesus. And all the names are male. Even though he emphasizes his royal connections, he never names that female princess—she is simply “the daughter of Jonathan the high priest.” Nine male names are mentioned in that genealogy, but not a single female name appears there—not even that most important princess from whom alone Josephus could claim royal descent. This is surely patriarchal bias, which appears as well in both Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies.

  Finally, notice that Josephus claims ancestry from both the priestly and royal rulers of his people. That combination is the highest Jewish pedigree for that time and place. Luke—but not Matthew—gives a similar double pedigree to Jesus. He is of priestly lineage through Mary and of royal lineage through Joseph. Elizabeth “was a descendant of Aaron” (1:5) and Mary is her “relative” (1:36). Joseph “was descended from the house and family of David” (2:4).

  THE GENEALOGY OF THE SON OF DAVID

  Matthew begins his version of the gospel in 1:1 as “an account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” That gives us his immediate purpose and the content of his genealogical proclamation. He ends in 1:17 with this: “So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.” In other words, Matthew has structured Jesus’s ancestry in three time segments:

  Abraham to David (c. 750 years): 13 generations with 14 individual male names and 3 female names

  David to the Babylonian exile (c. 400 years): 14 generations with 14 new individual male names and 1 female designation

  The Babylonian exile to Jesus’s birth (c. 575 years): 13 generations with 13 new male names and 1 female name

  Even within his own names and protocols, it is not at all clear how Matthew computes those 14 generations. But, apart from his mathematical inaccuracy, his theological point is very clear. If there were around 14 generations from Abraham to David, and then 14 more from David to the Babylonian exile, one would expect something of equally transcendental importance to happen after about another 14 generations. Clearly, some divine patterning was established to indicate the appropriate time for the birth of Jesus. We are dealing, in other words, with parabolic mathematics.

  You will also notice that, even though both Matthew and Luke give wildly divergent genealogies of Joseph—even with different fathers for Joseph—they both guard against letting anyone think that he is the biological father of Jesus. As you will recall, Luke 3:23 begins with Jesus, “the son (as was thought) of Joseph son of Heli.” The corresponding line in Matthew speaks of “Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah” (1:16). In Greek, that “of whom” is feminine and refers to Mary, not Joseph.

  As you will have noticed, Matthew begins in 1:1 and ends in 1:18 with Jesus as the “Messiah.” Matthew 1:1–18 gives us the genealogy of Jesus as the “Messiah,” just as Luke 3:23b–38 gives us the genealogy of Jesus as the “Son of God.” But there is still one very special feature of Matthew. There were no female names given for Josephus’s genealogy in his Life, although there was one female designation—“the daughter of Jonathan the high priest.” There are neither female names nor designations in Jesus’s Lukan genealogy—even after all his emphasis on Mary. But Jesus’s genealogy in Matthew contains four female names and one female designation, given here literally from the Greek and italicized to emphasize their connections:

  “Judah begot Perez and Zerah from Tamar” (1:3)

  “Salmon begot Boaz from Rahab” (1:5a)

  “Boaz begot Obed from Ruth” (1:5b)

  “David begot Solomon from the [wife] of Uriah” (1:6)

  “Joseph the husband of Mary, from whom Jesus was begotten” (1:16)

  The passive voice in Mary’s begetting of Jesus means “begotten by God.” Since there were obviously unnamed females involved in every single one of those three sets of 14 generations, the first four designated females must have special purpose for Matthew especially in connection with Mary. But what exactly is it and who are those first four women?

  Tamar. Er and Onan were the sons of the Israelite Judah and the Canaanite Shua in Genesis 38. Er married a Canaanite woman named Tamar and, when he was later struck dead by God, his brother Onan should have married Tamar to create children in the dead Er’s name. (That procedure was commanded in Deuteronomy 25:5–10 most likely to prevent the alienation of family property, and you may recall it from the question put to Jesus in Mark 12:18–27.) But instead, Onan “spilled his semen on the ground” (38:9) and was also struck dead by God. Judah defaulted on marrying his third son, Shelah, to Tamar, so she took matters into her own hands. She covered her face, Judah thought her a prostitute, and bore him twin sons, whom he had to acknowledge: “‘She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah.’ And he did not lie with her again” (38:26).

  Rahab. At the end of the exodus from Egypt, Joshua sent Israelite spies ahead to reconnoiter “the land” (Josh. 2). Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute from Jericho. She hid the spies from the city’s authorities, lied about their whereabouts, and finally “let them down by a rope through the window, for her house was on the outer side of the city wall and she resided within the wall itself” (2:15). In return, Rahab asked for protection when the Israelites came to attack Jericho; the spies promised her future safety and eventually gave it to her and her family (6:22–23).

  Ruth. An Israelite couple, Naomi and Elimelech, left their home at Bethlehem and went to Moab in the book of Ruth. They had two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, who married Moabite wives, Orpah and Ruth. All three men died, and Naomi decided to immigrate to Israel, telling her daughters-in-law to stay in Moab and get new husbands for themselves. But Ruth refused to leave Naomi, saying, in these justly famous lines: “‘Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!’” (1:16–17).

  They arrive at Bethlehem to live among Naomi’s kinfolk. In a delicately described scene, Ruth, instructed by Naomi, seduces Boaz (3:1–15). Then, since Elimelech’s nearest kinsman will not marry her, Boaz agrees to do so—you will recall that kinship obligation from the similar case of Tamar above. Their firstborn son is “Obed; he became the father of Jesse, the father of David. Now these are the descendants of Perez: Perez begot Hezron, Hezron begot Ram, Ram begot Amminadab, Amminadab begot Nahshon, Nahshon begot Salmon, Salmon begot Boaz, Boaz begot Obed, Obed begot Jesse, and Jesse begot David” (4:17–22, literal translation).

  You can see the resemblance in style between David’s genealogical format there and Jesus’s genealogy in Matthew. It descends forward in strictly male lineage from father to son, and each “begetting” lacks mention of the mother. Also, despite two minor differences, that sequence of nine generations and ten male names from Perez to David is taken up as an agreement by Matthew 1:3–6 and Luke 3:31–33. Finally, Ruth is repeatedly identified as “Ruth the Moabite,” even though Deuteronomy 23:3–4 explicitly states: “No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly o
f the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord, because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey out of Egypt.” Still, despite all of that, Ruth, a Moabite woman, is the great-grand-mother of David.

  Bathsheba. David committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of a Hittite warrior, Uriah, who fought in his army (2 Sam. 11). When she conceived, David brought Uriah back from the front so that he might think his was the conception. When that failed, David ordered Uriah placed “in the forefront of the hardest fighting,…so that he may be struck down and die” (11:15). Once Uriah had been killed in action, “David sent and brought Bathsheba to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son” (11:27). It died, and Solomon, with intervention from his mother, Bathsheba, and the prophet Nathan, became king after David (1 Kings 1).

  The question is not what resemblances we might imagine between those four mothers and Mary, but what we think Matthew intended to emphasize by mentioning all five in similar language.

  A first answer is that the first four were all Gentiles—Rahab and Ruth explicitly so, Tamar and Bathsheba presumably so. You might object that that does not connect them to Mary, since she was a Jewish and not a gentile woman. However, since Matthew emphasizes the inclusion of Gentiles alongside Jews in the infancy story—the Persian Magi, for example—he may have intended to symbolize that interaction by including gentile women in the genealogy of Jesus. And that must always remain a possibility.

  A second answer has the advantage of connecting all five mothers together. In every case there was a marital abnormality, but it was precisely through those five somewhat surprising or irregular unions that God controlled the lineage of the Messiah. It has also been suggested that the women took the initiative and moved boldly to solve the irregularity. But, although that is certainly true for Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and maybe even Bathsheba with regard to Solomon’s royal ascendancy, it is hardly true for Mary—as Matthew, rather than Luke, narrates the infancy of Jesus. “It is,” concludes Father Raymond Brown in his magisterial 1993 study The Birth of the Messiah, “the combination of the scandalous or irregular union and of divine intervention through the women that explains best Matthew’s choice in the genealogy.”1

  We who live in a world that has discovered DNA think of maternity and paternity, descent and genealogy as matters of literal fact and historical actuality. We seldom think of a parabolic or symbolic genealogy and especially not one that includes specific name after specific name. We might stress a metaphorical descent, but usually without such details. For example, we might say of a too rich matriarch that she thinks her ancestors came over on the Mayflower or of a too proud president that he thinks he was born in a log cabin. In both those cases, we would immediately recognize that nothing literal was being said about ancestry on a ship or in a cabin. Those are simply sarcastic put-downs, metaphors against immodesty, and not claims on history.

  In both its generalities and specifics, Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus structures his destiny and defends his conception metaphorically and parabolically. That leaves us with another question for our next chapter. Why did Matthew find it necessary to defend Mary by linking her to those other ancestral women?

  THE GENEALOGY OF THE SON OF GOD

  As we saw above, the genealogies of Jesus could hardly be more divergent in Matthew and Luke. But the specific content and even the present position of each account is quite deliberately intentional for each author.

  Unlike Matthew 1–2, Luke 1–2 does not begin the infancy story with a genealogy. Instead, Luke locates it not only after Jesus’s coming-of-age story in 2:41–52, but after his account of John the Baptizer in 3:1–20—a full account of John from preaching to prison—and the baptism of Jesus in 3:20–23. Only then does he give Jesus’s genealogy. But if you focus on that present gospel location and concentrate on the opening and closing verses of the genealogy, you can appreciate the overall purpose of Luke. Watch especially his emphasis on Jesus’s title as “Son of God.”

  First, at the annunciation to Mary, Jesus is the “Son of God” (1:35)—and declared such by an angel. Next, at the baptism of Jesus, “when Jesus also had been baptized…the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’” (3:21–22). Once again, Jesus is Son of God—and declared such by God. Finally, Luke concludes his genealogy in 3:38 with “…son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God.” By that genealogy Luke draws a deliberate link between Jesus as “Son of God” and Adam as “Son of God.”

  Next, Luke’s conjunction of the waters of baptism and Jesus as the new Adam sends us back to Genesis 1:1–2: “When God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” That divine wind is literally the “spirit of God,” pneuma theou in Greek, and it reappears at Jesus’s baptism in Luke 3:22 as the “Holy Spirit,” to pneuma to hagion in Greek. When you combine the waters of creation and the waters of baptism, collate the Spirit of God hovering over earth and over Jesus, and watch the title “Son of God” used for Jesus in 3:22 and for Adam in 3:38, you can easily understand Luke’s theological purpose. Jesus is a new Adam, a new “Son of God,” the start of a new creation, the beginning of a transfigured earth.

  We recognize that theme from the theology of Paul, but there is no evidence that Luke gets it from Paul—or even knows of his letters or his theology. Paul wrote to the Corinthians that “‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45) and that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new” (2 Cor. 5:17). And he told the Galatians that “a new creation is everything” (6:15). Luke agrees.

  There is one more point to be made about the content and location of Luke’s genealogy outside the Christmas story proper. It opens with this line: “Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son (as was thought) of Joseph son of Heli” (3:23). That phrase “Jesus…when he began his work” is, literally, “Jesus beginning” (Iēsous archomenos), in which the second word is almost an adjectival description of him. In other words, it forcibly emphasizes that, for Jesus after his baptism by John, there was a “beginning” (archē) and not simply a continuation.

  We are back once more in Genesis. Creation opens there with the phrase: “In the beginning” (archē). Luke uses that same word for the start of Jesus’s public life both at the end of his gospel (“Galilee where he began,” 23:5) and in his Acts of the Apostles (“all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning,” 1:1; “beginning from the baptism of John,” 1:22; and “beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced,” 10:37). Jesus “begins” as a new creation. And that transformation of the earth in Jesus was destined by God from all eternity. Genealogy is destiny.

  THE GENEALOGY OF ANOTHER SON OF GOD

  Even—or especially—when all those allowances are made for metaphorical mathematics and parabolic ancestry in the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, there is one final question. Why did they even bother to invent them? Why did both of them—separately, independently, and differently—create any genealogy at all?

  After all, Jesus’s Lukan descent from Adam is not exactly unique, since we are all so descended in biblical tradition. And, Jesus’s Matthean descent from Abraham is something he held in common with all other Jews. Even descent from Abraham through David is hardly enough to make Jesus the Messiah. At most, that descent might be a necessary condition for such status, but certainly not a sufficient cause. So why, once again, did both those evangelists include a more or less invented genealogy for Jesus? In answer, we will revert to their historical context in the first century.

  We Christians think of Jesus as the divine Son of God (huios theou) by—working backward—his resurrectio
n, baptism, conception, and even genealogy. But there was also another human being in the Mediterranean world who was the divine Son of God (huios theou) by—also working backward—senatorial decree, adoption, conception, and even genealogy. We are speaking, of course, about Caesar Augustus, emperor of Rome at the time Jesus was born. And we see those genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke as countergenealogies to that of Caesar Augustus.

  Julius Caesar, along with his grandnephew and adopted son Octavian—the later Caesar Augustus—belonged to the Julian tribal family (gens). They claimed a millennium-old descent from the goddess Venus, daughter of Jupiter, and her human consort Anchises, a Trojan hero from the time of that legendary war against the Greeks. The divine son of Venus and Anchises was named Aeneas, and it is through his son, Julus, that the Julian line claimed descent.

  This genealogical claim received its pseudohistorical basis from the Augustan poet Virgil in the Aeneid, or story of Aeneas, the foundational epic of the Roman Empire, proposed by Augustus and published by him after Virgil’s death in 19 BCE. Think of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey—war followed by sea voyage—as the Old Testament of Roman imperial theology and Virgil’s Aeneid—sea voyage followed by war—as its New Testament. And it all began at the time of the Trojan War over a thousand years before the birth of Augustus.

  In the Aeneid, Aeneas successfully escaped the doomed city of Troy holding his aged and infirm father on his shoulder and his young son, Julus, by the hand. Protected by Venus, they eventually reached Italy, and from them, eventually, the Roman race and the Julian line descended. “From this noble line shall be born the Trojan Caesar [Augustus],” says Virgil, “who shall extend his empire to the ocean, his glory to the stars, a Julius name descended from the great Julus! Him [that is, Augustus], in days to come, shall you, anxious no more, welcome to heaven, laden with Eastern spoils; he, too, shall be invoked in vows” (286–90). The speaker there is the high god Jupiter and, after that apotheosis of the divine Augustus, “wars shall cease and savage ages soften” into peace on earth.