I’ve just read David Mitchell’s book Jesus – the Incarnation of the Word. I bought it after seeing the author interviewed by Seth Postell, an Israeli Christian academic whose work I reference in my own Generations of Heaven and Earth, but it turns out to be pretty seasonally appropriate for a Christmas blog.
Mitchell closely examines not only the biblical texts, but also extra-scriptural literature including early Christian and Rabbinic writings, to explore how Jesus’s birth fulfills all the Messianic hopes of Israel. This includes those promises that Jews who reject Jesus say exclude him as Messiah.
There are too many fascinating arguments to detail here, but for example he points out how various traditions within Israel expected up to four, sometimes separate and sometimes conjoined, Messiahs – not only the son of David promised in the Torah’s blessings to Judah, but a suffering Messiah from the tribe of Ephraim (gleaned from the same passages), prophetic promises of a continued Aaronic (Zadokite) priesthood, and fourthly the “prophet like Moses.”
This is useful work, for although most Christians don’t think beyond Jesus as the King of David’s line (even if they consider the matter that far after Christmas), others, including myself, have wondered how the striking typology of Joseph, and the attention drawn in Scripture to his descendants, seems to peter out inexplicably. They have also maybe noticed how promises of a perpetual Levitical priesthood (eg Jeremiah 33:18) seem to be broken if Jesus, a Judahite, initiates a new priesthood “according to Melchizedek,” as in Hebrews (see Hebrews 7:14).
Mitchell shows how Jesus’s genealogy, both by bloodline and levirite marriage through Mary, and legally through Jesus’s adoption by Joseph, gives Jesus genealogical descent not only from David, but from Zadok the priest through Mary’s priestly ancestry (remember Mary’s kinship to Aaron’s descendant Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist), and from Ephraim through the marriage of King Omri’s daughter into Judah’s royal line. Mitchell also throws in the gentile ancestry both explicit in the gospels’ genealogies, and implicit in the rest of the Bible, to show how Jesus is a suitable Saviour for the non-Israelite Adamic world too.
And so, by careful attention to every detail of biblical genealogy and external sources, Mitchell not only resolves apparent contradictions, but uses them to demonstrate how Jesus unites all the strands of Messianism in one individual. In this way he shows how the whole of Hebrew Scripture points forward to Jesus, sometimes in ways to which he does not draw specific attention in the book.
For example, the separate promises in Genesis to both Judah and Joseph (through Ephraim) only really gain importance because of the fragmentation of David’s united monarchy after Solomon into southern Judah, ruled by David’s line, and northern Israel, dominated by Ephraim. Despite their respective exiles, the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 37:15-28), writing during the Babylonian exile, prophesies the seemingly impossible reuniting of the two defunct kingdoms in one Davidic king. Mitchell points out how Galilee was a kind of melting pot of a returned remnant of the Northern Kingdom, and Judahites. That’s why the Judaean authorities looked down on Jesus’s Galilean roots almost as much as they despised the Ephraimite Samaritans (and hence used the “demon possessed Samaritan” insult on Jesus).
Yet despite this demonstration of Jesus’s genealogical legitimacy as the biblical Messiah, and his acceptance of others calling him “Son of David,” Mitchell observes how Jesus himself never refers to his human paternity. Sometimes he even goes as far as seeming to deny it, as in Mark 12:35:
“How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David?”
It is clear that, however subtly he expresses the claim, Jesus’s self identity is primarily as the Son of YHWH. Mitchell, incidentally, also deals with Rabbinical Judaism’s claim that Scripture never describes Messiah as a divine human – it is simply as false as liberal Christian assertions that Jesus never claimed to be divine.
Mitchell himself links Jesus’s divine claims to the “pre-incarnation theophanies,” such as the “angel of God” acting and speaking as God in interaction with Abraham, and particularly Melchizedek, for whom he argues a theophanic, rather than a metaphorical, prefiguring of Jesus’s unending priesthood.
This brings me to the point at which Mitchell touches on my own work in The Generations of Heaven and Earth, and consequently on Josh Swamidass’s The Genealogical Adam and Eve. For several times, in dealing with Jesus’s human genealogy, he speaks of Jesus having “DNA” from the various biblical antecedents. Scientifically speaking, this is questionable, for as Josh explains in his book, genealogy must be sharply distinguished from genetics.
I can trace some of my ancestry back to the sixteenth century, but whilst I am truly descended from many thousands of people of that time, most of them are what Josh terms “genetic ghosts,” in that I have inherited nothing, or next to nothing, of their genetic material. Johnis Tyler of Bocking in Essex may well have been my greatn maternal grandfather, making me proud to have gone back to Braintree to work once, but the chances are that every one of his genes has been diluted out of my genome.
The sole exceptions are the Y-chromosome, which passes like Davidic primogeniture reliably down the paternal line, and mitochondrial DNA, which is exclusively inherited from the maternal line. Biologically speaking, neither is of much significance in Jesus’s case, for Mary’s maternal line appears to lead nowhere in particular (if indeed it could be traced, official Jewish records, kept in the temple, being intended to prove only Israelite paternity), and the Virgin Birth rules out the natural transmission of David’s Y-chromosome.
Yet this raises the interesting (at least to me) question of the male component of Jesus’s DNA, which is not fully addressed in Mitchell’s book. For although miraculously conceived, Jesus was of like humanity with every human male. In other words, Bishop John Robertson’s sceptical claim in the 1960s, that parthenogenesis would inevitable have led to an XX or X0 female, founders on the rock of theism: the Incarnation was a miracle, not a freak of materialistic nature. And so, if it should prove possible to sequence the DNA of the man shown on the Shroud of Turin (assuming it to be the true sindon of Christ), I would expect them to find material from a Y-chromosome, not to mention other genetic material not inherited from Mary.
But in that case, whose DNA would it resemble? There is no such thing as a generic genome, just as the blood on the shroud has been typed as AB+, common in Jews of that region, and uncommon in Caucasians. The temple having never preserved a DNA database along with its genealogies, we shall of course never know for certain, even if Jesus’s tabernacling amongst us were to include humbly sharing his whole-genome sequence with the world.
One possible genetic candidate would be Adam, for Jesus is the second Adam. Yet in Genesis the prophecy of salvation is given to Eve, not to Adam, for it her seed, not his, who will bruise the serpent’s heel – we’re in Virgin Birth territory again. So my money is on a close match with the DNA of ancient King David. That, after all, was the one to whom God’s promise was given:
“When your days are fulfilled to walk with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, one of your own sons, and I will establish his kingdom.” 1 Chronicles 17:11
Yet such speculations, though interesting, are unnecessary, when all that is needed for us is to worship the Word made flesh, who dwelt amongst us and revealed his glory, as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Happy Christmas, everyone!
