The tra­di­tional doc­trine of the vir­ginal con­cep­tion is taken for granted by most Chris­tians. They are unaware that the idea dis­qual­i­fies Jesus as the son of David through Solomon, from the tribe of Judah. Indeed, try­ing to prove to Jews, who are skilled in their ancient tra­di­tions, that Jesus qual­i­fies to the throne of the King­dom leads to utter failure.

Imag­ine for a moment that we are in the first cen­tury. None of the churches have all the NT writ­ings, each of them only have a few, many of them are yet to be writ­ten, and the Greek-speaking Gen­tile churches use the LXX (Sep­tu­agint) for study, the Greek trans­la­tion of the Tanakh (OT). Now, Matthew writes a gospel, and he goes to great length to prove that Jesus is not the Mes­siah(!), for by the geneal­ogy he com­piles he shows that Jesus is not the son of David, that is, his phys­i­cal descen­dant. The Jew­ish soci­ety was patri­ar­chal, and tribal mem­ber­ship was passed on from father to son. Sadly, accord­ing to Matthew, Jesus is not from the tribe of Judah, so he is not the Mes­siah, at least this is what he proves through his geneal­ogy. We don’t yet have Luke’s gospel that deliv­ers us another, totally dif­fer­ent geneal­ogy on which we could pos­si­bly depend.

Even when we receive Luke’s gospel, we still face a prob­lem, because the lin­eage doesn’t come through Solomon, but Nathan. Sure, but, are we not told that Luke’s geneal­ogy is that of Mary? What proof do we have for that? I mean not assump­tion, but proof. All we know about Mary is that she and Eliz­a­beth were cousins, and Eliz­a­beth was the daugh­ter of Aaron. She was a Levite. If she was a Levite, Mary might have also been a Levite. Luke’s geneal­ogy cer­tainly doesn’t indi­cate that, but rather, it gives a davidic lin­eage. And the lin­eage is that of Joseph, not Mary.

So we have a prob­lem. Nei­ther genealo­gies prove that Jesus is the Mes­siah, the son of David through Solomon accord­ing to the flesh.

But what if Joseph adopted him? Doesn’t adop­tion trans­fer tribal mem­ber­ship? No, it doesn’t. Tribal mem­ber­ship and inher­i­tance came through the father, while Jew­ish­ness (which means belong­ing to the reli­gion of Judaism) came through the mother, for the moth­ers were respon­si­ble for their children’s reli­gious upbringing.

Thus, the child of a Gen­tile man and a Jew­ish mother would be Jew­ish, but would not belong to any of the tribes of Israel, and the child of a Israeli man and a Gen­tile woman would not be con­sid­ered Jew­ish, unless the child learned Judaism and con­verted to the reli­gion later on in his/her life. Jew­ish­ness is belong­ing to the reli­gion. Tribal mem­ber­ship is by phys­i­cal descent through the father.

On the other hand we have the tes­ti­mony of the apos­tles, that Jesus was indeed the son of David accord­ing to the flesh, that is, by nat­ural lin­eage. Both Peter and Paul tes­tify about what they believed was true:

Acts 2:29 “Brethren, I may say to you con­fi­dently of the patri­arch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. 30 Being there­fore a prophet, and know­ing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descen­dants upon his throne, 31 he fore­saw and spoke of the res­ur­rec­tion of the Christ…”

Rom 1:3 “… who was descended from David accord­ing to the flesh 4 and des­ig­nated son of God in power accord­ing to the Spirit of holi­ness by his res­ur­rec­tion from the dead…”

So how do we solve this huge problem?

What is the solu­tion? Is Jesus the Mes­siah or not? The writ­ers of NT tes­tify that he is. Now they are either wrong and the vir­ginal con­cep­tion is right, or they are right and we have to find a solu­tion. I can see two pos­si­ble choices here:

1. We dis­card the birth nar­ra­tives as spu­ri­ous. Indeed, the NT writ­ers out­side Matthew and Luke know noth­ing about it, while if it was impor­tant, we would cer­tainly expect at least Paul and per­haps James (cor­rectly Jacob) to dwell on it. How­ever, the silence of the NT apart from the two gospels is strik­ing. The Hebrew ver­sion of Matthew used by the Ebion­ites and the Nazarenes, the Jew­ish fol­low­ers of Jesus, also lacked the birth narrative.

We also have prob­lems with the so-called prophe­cies quoted by Matthew. They are sim­ply not prophe­cies, but ref­er­ences to his­tory or a sign given to Ahab, one only needs to read them in con­text (I will deal with them in other posts). Or we stand sur­prised by the utter his­tor­i­cal blun­der Luke makes about Quirinius in Ch 2. Why is it that there is noth­ing com­mon with his and Matthew’s account? Indeed, if we sup­pose that the orig­i­nal gospels started with John’s bap­tism — apart from the geneal­ogy of Luke — we have far fewer problems.

2. We don’t dis­card the birth nar­ra­tives as spu­ri­ous, but take into con­sid­er­a­tion the Old Latin and Old Syr­iac trans­la­tions. In their genealo­gies Jesus is the actual son of Joseph, and Matt. 1:25 (“and didn’t know her sex­u­ally until she had brought forth her first­born son.”) is miss­ing, a prac­tice alien to Jew­ish culture.

How­ever, we still have enor­mous prob­lems with Luke’s geneal­ogy, for there is no way we can rec­on­cile it with that of Luke’s. The only way I can see sense out of it is if in the ancient Roman Empire one’s lin­eage was deter­mined through the mother, but instead of her name the husband’s was inserted. How­ever, I am not aware of any proof that this was indeed the practice.

Con­clu­sion: While I leave it to the reader to make up his or her mind about the issue at hand, my con­vic­tion is that the first option is the most likely.