BibleBackInTime
Ancestry Tracing the Bible
CONTENTS
NOTE: You may click on the symbol <> at the end of any section to return to the CONTENTS.
1. As Far Back as Possible
2. Extension
3. Sarah Damaris
4. The Father of Jesus
5. The Mother of Jesus
6. Messianic Quest
7. The Proviso
8. David and Uriah
9. Boaz and Ruth
10. The Tribe of Judah
11. The Descendants of Levi
12. An Eligible Messiah?
13. Divine or Mortal?
Appendix
The Big Picture
<Blog Post Essays>
Note: This post is structured as an ancestry that traces sequence from parties in the current generation back in time to ancient parties. A version that reveals the lineage trace from ancient parties forward in time to parties in the current generation may be viewed by clicking HERE.
Introduction
Ancestry research systems such as Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and
MyHeritage.com use powerful search engines to access hundreds of data
bases. I use MyHeritage.com, based in Tel Aviv, Israel. MyHeritage.com
has access to 12.5 billion historical records. Starting with myself, I
can add records for parents, grandparents, great grands, and so on,
displaying them in a “family tree” that can be viewed on my computer
screen.
When I research a particular name, MyHeritage lists all of the records
that the search engine finds with that name or names with similar
spellings or in different languages. Some of the records are repeated in
family trees (so-called "smart matches"), but typically there are
several records from different data-base sources ("record matches") that
attest to the existence of a person of that name and vintage. The
records may exhibit variations in birth and death dates and places, and
identities of parents, spouses, siblings, and children, but I can
usually compose a consensus profile of that named person.
As I have used the MyHeritage technology, I have gained confidence in
what it reveals about my own ancestry. MyHeritage has enabled me to
trace one of my ancestry lines to Antenor IV (24-67 CE), king of the
Sicambrian Franks on the western bank of the Rhine River. Antenor's wife
is recorded as Sarah Damaris. There are multiple stories about how a
nice Jewish girl named Sarah got to Gaul to meet and marry a Germanic
tribal chieftain.
An ancestry tree and accompanying commentary is a form of story telling.
It is the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and whence we
came. An ancestry story can be revealing, or it can be told to hide
essential truths. An ancestry story can amuse and entertain, or it can
be terminally boring. It can reveal national heroes or horse thieves
among the relatives. It can surprise, and it may even shock to discover
who is up one’s family tree. Ancestry research educates with respect to
language, culture, history, geography, economics, mathematics, and even
theology. Often it is possible to find more information about an
ancestor by searching the name on-line. Ancestry research is factual,
but it may become fiction if the researcher is tempted to extend the
story beyond what can be confirmed. All of these possibilities surface
in the telling of the Stanford Family ancestry story.
Lineage of course "descends" through time which progresses linearly from
earlier dates toward the present, but ancestry tracing necessarily
"ascends" from the present back in time. An ancestry line search is
conducted record-by-record by identifying a subject's parents and then
checking the information in the parents' records to confirm that the
subject indeed is their child. The parents then become the subjects in
the next step. This process may continue stepwise until a dead-end is
reached, i.e., when neither parent of a subject is identified. When a
dead-end is reached in one subject's ancestry line, it often is possible
to shift to the spouse's ancestry line to continue tracing ancestry. In
this way, I have been able to trace my ancestry back to the patriarchs
of ancient Israel. A horizontal arrow that points up at the end (---^)
in any of the ancestry listings or display charts in this book indicates
a shift to the ancestry of a spouse.
While ancestry research typically is conducted by tracing paternal
ancestry lines, maternal ancestry lines have turned out to be crucial to
Stanford family ancestry research. In the ascending ancestry research
process, three women have served as ancestry portals to Viking, Celtic,
and continental European ancestry lines: my grandmother Etta Avarilla
Polk, my 14th-great grandmother Egidia Stewart, and my 17th-great grandmother Isabell de
France.
This book is organized starting with myself, born in 1943, and then describing my ancestors by ascending back in time with family tree segments following the direction of ancestry research. This may make the narrative confusing at times because we are conditioned to following the sequence of events in linear time from earliest to latest.
As we proceed ever farther back in time with the ancestry tracing process,
we will encounter five dynasties: Herodian, Hasmonean, Davidian, Judahite, and
Levite. The central question that will encompass the entire project is the
eligibility of Jesus to be an authentic Jewish messiah.
1. As Far Back as Possible
During my retirement I have taken up ancestry research as a hobby. Six months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to identify anyone in my ancestry earlier than my grandfathers and grandmothers. Once I got into the ancestry research process with MyHeritage.com, the compelling challenge became how far into the past I could trace my ancestry. I was surprised to discover that I could trace my ancestry lines back to the BCE era. I now know that I have ancestors who were Vikings, Barbarians, Romans, Greeks, and Trojans, and they include Scottish, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Habsburg monarchs. My ancestry list may even include divine entities.
An ancestry sequence search can continue back in time until a record is reached that does not identify either parent. But it is often possible then to shift to the spouse’s ancestry line and continue tracing the ancestry. Such spousal line shifts may occur numerous times in extending the trace ever farther back in time.
Chart 72E shows one of my MyHeritage.com ancestry sequences. It covers the
range from Richard A. Stanford (born 1943) to Akim Ben Zadoc (born circa 274
BCE), and it actually extends much farther back in time beyond that which is
shown in Chart 72E. The reader should start at the bottom of the left-hand
column, read upward to the top, follow the arrow to the bottom of the
right-hand column, and read upward to Akim Ben Zadoc. An arrow (---^) indicates
a shift to the ancestry of a spouse or partner. All entries not denoted by (f)
are males. Names above Antenor Iv des Francs (24-67) in the right-hand column
of Chart 72E are Hebrew names.
Imagine my surprise (and shock) when I noticed that Akim ben Zadoc’s 4th-great grandson is Yeshua ben Yossef (born circa 4 BCE) whom we know by his Greek name, Jesus. The names above Yeshua ben Yossef track perfectly with the genealogy listed in the first chapter of the biblical book of Matthew. Chart 9 is a MyHeritage screen shot of ancestry connections around Yeshua ben Yossef (3/1/4 BCE - 4/3/33 CE) who would be my 63rd-great grandfather.
It is not possible with data taken only from authentic data bases to start with myself and deliberately target an ancient character with an ancestry line that I am tracing. Nor is it possible to start with an ancient character and work forward in time, hoping to link the ancestry line to myself or some other current party. The ancestry tracing procedure requires starting with a known party, oneself or some other party, and then working back in time to add information for parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. In tracing this ancestry sequence, I arrived at the record for Yeshua ben Yossef quite unintentionally and by following only standard ancestry tracing procedures.
2. Extension
When a new parent record is added to a MyHeritage ancestry tree, the MyHeritage search engine does an automatic search of the data bases to which it has access, and very soon it may identify one or more record matches to that party. Record matches are found in the data bases to which MyHeritage has access. I can choose whether to add a record match to my ancestry tree.
It is also possible to add records to my ancestry tree from external sources to which I am privy (e.g., family Bibles, family histories, etc.). However, this option leaves open the possibility of gaming the system by making-up information or even fabricating fictional characters to add to the ancestry tree. Any fictional character records then will be available to other ancestry trees.
It is entirely fortuitous that one of the ancestry lines that I traced reached Yeshua Ben Yossef. With an exception that I will mention following, it should not be possible to start with myself and deliberately target an ancient character with an ancestry line that I am tracing. Nor should it be possible to start with an ancient character and work forward in time through the lineage, hoping to link the line to myself or some other current party. The ancestry tracing procedure requires starting with a known party, oneself or some other party, and then working back in time to add information for parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. So, it was a surprise (and shock) that one of my ancestry traces reached Yeshua.
However, while it is not possible using only authentic data-base information to target an ancient character like Yeshua, an ancestry researcher bent on making his ancestry sequence reach a target character may be tempted to supply a missing parent or a false specification of a parent in an otherwise authentic record. Or the researcher may even fabricate an ancestry record to reach a target character. A false parent specification or a fabricated record could be added to the researcher’s ancestry sequence to link to a party in the target’s ancestry sequence a few steps short of the target character. If other ancestry researchers neglect to check that the falsified or fabricated record party is indeed a child of the party in an authentic record, the falsified or fabricated record may be confirmed as a match by other ancestry researchers. It then would appear to be validated and could appear multiple times in an ancestry search.
In the case of an ancestry sequence linked to Yeshua ben Yossef, it would have been possible for an ancestry researcher to fabricate ancestry records for Yeshua and his ancestors back to Adam using the genealogies reported in the books of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament of the Bible as de facto data bases.
I do not know and have no evidence that record falsification or fabrication
has occurred in other ancestry trees to create records that reach Yeshua ben
Yossef. But this imagined possibility leads me to be wary of apparent linkages
to ancient characters.
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3. Sarah Damaris
One of my ancestry lines is depicted in Chart 72E (repeated from Chapter 1).
When several years ago I first read the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (Random House, 1982), I dismissed their hypothesis as pure speculation and maybe some wishful thinking. But given my ancestry research, I now am not so sure. In their research, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln (BLL) stumbled onto a possibility that they had not been looking for.
On the basis of their research findings, BLL shifted the focus of their research to a new hypothesis, i.e., that Jesus fathered a child with Mary Magdalene, that she and daughter along with a number of other believers escaped persecution by fleeing in a boat across the Mediterranean Sea to land on the south coast of France, and that the daughter married into the Frankish dynasty to promulgate a sacred bloodline that persists to this day.
The corollary of the BLL hypothesis is that the "Holy Grail" is not a vessel that may have contained Jesus' blood and which has been the object of search through the ages by Templar knights and others, but rather it is the sacred bloodline itself. The BLL hypothesis became a central theme in Dan Brown’s 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code.
How Antenor IV, king of a tribe on the east bank of the Rhine River, might have encountered a Hebrew girl named Sarah Damaris in the south of Gaul is explored in Alternate Views #2. If Sarah Damaris indeed accompanied her mother Mary Magdalene to Gaul and married Antenor IV, does my ancestry line stretch to Jesus? A problem is that name spellings vary in different ancestry records that were recorded in different languages (some in English, others in French or German), and it is often difficult to establish correspondence between them. I was very careful to match each party's individual ancestry record in an ancestry line to its parent's records, and parents to their children, so I am confident that the lineage line of descent from Antenor IV is authentic. Whether my ancestry line stretches to Jesus depends upon whether Sarah Damaris was the daughter of Maria bat Syrus and Yeshua ben Jacob. Bible scholars generally dismiss this possibility.
4. The Father of Jesus
Having traced the ancestry of Richard A. Stanford to Yeshua ben Yossef, we can continue the trace to Jesus’ forebears and examine aspects of his eligibility to become a king of Israel.
I have thought the virgin birth narrative in in the early chapters of Matthew's and Luke's Gospels to be incredible in the sense that a virgin birth would violate all known scientific knowledge about procreation. In the belief that a human must have been involved in impregnating Mary, the mother of Jesus, I have explored alternate explanations. There appear to be four possibilities: Yossef ben Jacob, Joachim Heli ben Matthat, Yossef ben Matthat, and Antipater ben Herod.
Matthew's genealogy of Jesus that stretches back to King
David implies that Jesus' father was Yossef ben Jacob. Chart 57 depicts ancestry
records indicating that there were twenty-seven generations from David to
Yossef ben Jacob. But if the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, Joseph is only the
adoptive father of Jesus. The Matthew genealogy may well be that of Joseph ben
Jacob, but the fact that biological ancestry cannot be established by adoption
renders the Matthew genealogy irrelevant to Jesus' ancestry unless Joseph ben
Jacob was in fact the biological father of Jesus.
The genealogy of Jesus in Luke's Chapter 3 begins with the rather uncertain statement, "He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph the son of Heli." (NIV) This statement may refer to Joachim Heli ben Matthat who was Mary's father. As noted in Chapter 6, Luke simply may have picked the wrong Joseph, Yossef ben Matthat (of Arimathea), to identify as Jesus' father. This Joseph was the brother of Joachim Heli ben Matthat and thus was Mary's uncle.
Joseph Raymond makes a case that the actual father of Jesus was Antipater ben Herod. Raymond refers to Jesus by his Hebrew name, Yeshua. He takes up the story in the 4th century BCE.
By the middle of the fourth century BCE, the Macedonian Philip II and his son Alexander had conquered Greece, Egypt, and territories to the east as far as the Indus River. After Alexander ("the Great") died in 323 BCE, the ensuing war between his generals divided the Macedonian Empire. General Ptolemy took Egypt and north Africa, and General Seleucus Nicator established the Seleucid Empire spanning Alexander's eastern territories, including Israel. The Selucid overlords imposed Hellenistic culture and religious practices in Israel. But by the second century BCE the Seleucid Empire was experiencing pressures from the Romans to the west and the Parthians to the East.
Hasmonean brothers Judas and Simon Maccabeus were Levite tribe descendants who led a Jewish revolt against the Seleucids in 142 BCE. Judas was killed in battle, but the revolt liberated Israel from Selucid control. Simon then ruled as high priest and ethnarch of Judea and was succeeded by Hasmonean priest-kings over the course of a century as depicted in Chart 44.
In 63 BCE Judea was conquered by Roman forces under
General Gnaeus Pompey "the Great." But by 39 BCE the Parthians had
pushed the Romans out of Judea and appointed a Hasmonean, Antigonus Mattathias,
as puppet king of Judea. Antigonus ruled for three years during which he led
the Jewish struggle for independence against the Romans.
Antipater, an Edomite descendant of Esau, was governor of Idumea. He had converted to Judaism, but this did not render him or his offspring Israelites. His son Herod had been a mercenary client of the Romans in purging the Judean hills of bands of thieves. In 38 BCE, Herod's forces recaptured Jerusalem and he was appointed Roman client king of Judea.* According to Raymond, Herod bribed Roman general Marc Antony to end a hundred years of Hasmonean rule of Judea by executing all known high royals of the Hasmonean dynasty who might pose threats to Herod's rule. Some lower-ranking Hasmonean priests may have escaped the massacre.
Doris was the first wife of Herod that he
divorced and banished so that he could marry a Hasmonean princess,
Mariamne bat Alexander. Edomite Herodian kings sought Hasmonean
princesses for wives to convey an appearance of legitimacy to their
reigns. But when his sister Salome intimated that Mariamne was plotting
to poison him, Herod had Mariamne and her sons Aristobulus and
Alexander executed. He then recalled Doris and remarried her, after
which they had a son whom they named Antipater after his grandfather.
Antipater then became first in royal succession. These relationships
are depicted in Chart 45.
Around 4 BCE, Antipater
married a Hasmonean princess, Myriam bat Antigonus, and she soon became
pregnant. But Herod suspected Antipater and his mother Doris of plotting to
kill him and so had Antipater and Doris executed just five days before the very
ill Herod himself died. Raymond speculates that a Temple priest rescued Myriam
from Herod's palace to avert her assassination and negotiated the betrothal of
Myriam to an unmarried Temple priest named Yossef ben Jacob.
Betrothal contracts often were negotiated without the
parties ever having met or even seen each other. Yossef may have been unaware
of Myriam's condition, but with some reluctance he accepted the betrothal
contract. After their marriage and flight to Bethlehem to escape Herod's sons,
Myriam delivered a male child whom they named Yeshua ben Yossef.
Upon the death of Herod "the Great" (a term identifying the head of a household or
the procreator of a dynasty), sons Herod Archelaus and Herod Antipas
sailed for Rome to participate in the adjudication of Herod's will by Caesar
Augustus, leaving the kingdom in charge of brother Herod Philip. Suspecting that his
father's Hasmonean daughter-in-law had escaped execution and may have birthed a
child by his half-brother Antipater, Herod Philip decreed that all male children recently
born in Bethlehem should be killed. Raymond speculates that Yossef and Myriam fled with baby
Yeshua to the Therapeudae commune near Alexandria in Egypt, thus enabling application
to Yeshua the prophesy in Hosea 1:1 that God called his son out of Egypt (Matthew 2:15).
Rather than appointing one of Herod's sons the new king
of Judea, Caesar divided the kingdom among them. Herod Philip was appointed the
tetrarch of Jordan, Herod Antipas the tetrarch of Galilee, and Herod Archelaus
the ethnarch of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea. Sister Salome was given a toparchy
including the cities of Jabneh, Ashdod, and Phasaelis. The sons of Herod the
Great are depicted in Chart 47.
Raymond argues that Yeshua ben Yossef thus was the son of Antipater and the
grandson of two kings, Herod the Great whose father was an Edomite, and
Antigonus Mattathias, a Hasmonean of the Levi tribe. Jesus’ Edomite ancestry
might qualify him to become a Herodian king of Judea, but it would not qualify him
to become a Jewish King of Israel. Levi was a son of Jacob and thereby an Israelite, so Jesus'
Levite
ancestry would qualify him to become a king of Israel.
The New Testament books of Matthew and Luke identify the mother of Jesus as a peasant girl named Mary who became impregnated by the Holy Spirit. Ancestry records identify her as Myriam bat Heli. The name "Heli" (with silent “H,” sounds like “Eli”) is significant because the lineage of Jesus traced in Luke's Chapter 3 begins with some uncertainty, "He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph the son of Heli." (NIV) This statement may refer to Joachim Heli ben Matthat who ancestry records indicate was Myriam's father.
Bible scholars long have suspected that the Luke 3 genealogy actually is that of Jesus' mother, Myriam (Mary), but it has been difficult to explain. Here are five theories:
1. The deceased half-brother theory: According to Eusebius, a church historian writing during the 4th century CE, Melchi [Mary's grandfather] and Matthan [Joseph's grandfather] were married at different times to the same woman (tradition names her Estha). This would make Heli [Mary's father] and Jacob [Joseph's father] half-brothers. Heli then died without a son, and so his half-brother Jacob married Heil’s widow, who gave birth to Joseph. This would make Joseph the legal “son of Heli” and the biological “son of Jacob.” Thus, Matthew and Luke are both recording the same genealogy (Joseph’s), but Luke follows the legal lineage [of Mary's mother] while Matthew follows the biological lineage [of Mary's father].
2. The nearest-male-ancestor theory: Luke's text says that Jesus was "the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli, ...." The qualification has traditionally been understood as acknowledgment of the virgin birth, but some instead see a parenthetical expression: "the son, (so it was thought, of Joseph,) the son of Heli, ...." In this interpretation, Jesus is called a son of Heli because Heli was his maternal grandfather, his nearest male ancestor. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_of_Jesus)
3. The father-in-law theory: A variation on this idea is to explain "Joseph, son of Heli" as meaning a son-in-law, perhaps even an adoptive heir to Heli through his only daughter Mary. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_of_Jesus)
4. The Hebrew paternalism theory: According to R. A. Torrey, the reason Mary is not mentioned by name is because the ancient Hebrews never permitted the name of a woman to enter the genealogical tables, but inserted her husband as the son of him who was, in reality, his father-in-law. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_of_Jesus)
So Luke, a Greek (i.e., not a Jew) who was researching the life of Jesus (a Jew) more than 50 years after Jesus' death, may have landed on the wrong Joseph, Joseph ben Matthat (a.k.a. Joseph of Arimathea), to identify as Jesus' father. Ancestry records identify this Joseph as the brother of Joachim Heli ben Matthat who was Myriam's uncle. The Luke lineage listing stretches from Nathan ben David of the Judah tribe to Myriam's father, Joachim Heli ben Matthat, a fact that would render Jesus an authentic candidate to become a Jewish messiah. This genealogy is depicted in Chart 48.
Another of Myriam's uncles was a temple priest, Zachariah ben Matthat, "the Zadok." Zachariah's wife was Elisabeth bat Sobe. Luke's Chapter 1 relates the story of how the elderly Zachariah and Elisabeth were informed by an angel that she would become pregnant and birth a son that they should name Joanan. The pregnant Myriam visited her aunt Elisabeth in Elisabeth's sixth month of pregnancy and stayed with her for three months until the birth of Elisabeth's child. Although it was thought that the child would be named after his father, Zachariah affirmed that the child would be named Joanan. Joanan grew up to become the character that we know as "John the Baptist" or “John the Baptizer.” Joanan, though Jesus' first cousin removed by one generation, was only about six months older than Jesus.
But Myriam bat Heli may not have been the biological daughter of Joachim Heli ben Matthat. Joseph Raymond in his 2010 book, Herodian Messiah: Case for Jesus as Grandson of Herod (https://www.amazon.com/Herodian-Messiah-Jesus-Grandson-Herod/dp/0615355080) makes a case that Myriam was a Hasmonean princess who had been adopted by Joachim Heli ben Matthat. Raymond, a lawyer, conducted meticulous research into ancient sources as if preparing a legal brief.
To understand the sense of Raymond's argument, we take up the story in 142 BCE. Hasmonean brothers Judas and Simon Maccabeus led a Jewish revolt against their Seleucid overlords. After Judas was killed in battle, Simon gained control over Judea, ritually cleansed the Jerusalem Temple, and returned Judea to the Jewish religion and life. The family name Hasmonean originated with Simon's 3rd-great grandfather Asmoneus, a Temple priest descended from the Israelite tribe of Levi. Simon, ruling as high priest and ethnarch of Judea, was succeeded by Hasmonean priest-kings over the course of a century during which Judea enjoyed relative independence. This is depicted in Chart 44 in Chapter 5.
In 63 BCE Judea was conquered by Roman forces under General Gnaeus Pompey "the Great." But by 39 BCE the Parthians had pushed the Romans out of Judea and appointed a Hasmonean, Antigonus Mattathias, as puppet king of Judea. Antigonus ruled for three years during which he led the Jewish struggle for independence against the Romans.
Antipater the Idumean was an Edomite who had converted to Judaism. In 38 BCE, his son Herod recaptured Jerusalem and was appointed Roman client king of Judea. Raymond says that Herod bribed Roman general Marc Antony to end a hundred years of Hasmonean rule of Judea by executing all known high royals of the Hasmonean dynasty who posed threats to what would become the Herodian dynasty. Some lower-ranking Hasmonean priests may have escaped the massacre.
Raymond notes that in Antiquities, Jewish historian Josephus referred to an unnamed daughter of Antigonus who survived the massacre. Raymond speculates that this daughter was rescued from Herod's palace by a Temple priest named Joachim Heli ben Matthat, and that Joachim and his wife Anna raised her in the Temple precincts. Her birth name would have been Myriam bat Antigonus. Her adoptive name became Myriam bat Heli. This is depicted in Chart 46.
6. Messianic Quest
By the time he reached adulthood, Yeshua may have become aware of his identity as grandson of two Judean kings. Yeshua began to follow his cousin Joanan (John, "the baptizer"), an itinerant preacher who was attracting a rural following. Joanan alienated Antipas by criticizing as incestuous his marriage to Herodias, his brother's wife and also his niece. After Antipas had Joanan executed, Yeshua took up Joanan's ministry preaching a gospel of universal love and care for fellow humans, and that the Kingdom of God was near at hand, a message that made the Roman authorities nervous. But Joseph Raymond asks why the Romans would take seriously the rantings of an itinerant preacher.
The conventional Jewish wisdom of the first century CE was that the long-expected messiah must be a descendant of King David of the Judah tribe. Raymond notes that Paul, in letters written to churches in the Jewish diaspora of Asia Minor, insisted that Jesus was a descendant of David which would qualify him to be an authentic Jewish messiah who could occupy the throne of David. However, in Matthew 22, Mark 12, and Luke 20, Jesus implicitly rejected the contention that a messiah could descend only from the tribe of Judah.
When he began his "ministry" around the age of 30, Yeshua took his principal mission to be preaching that the "Kingdom of God near is at hand" and advocating love of and care for fellow humans. He is portrayed as somewhat of an unintentional Jewish "messiah" who admonished his disciples to keep his incipient messiahhood a secret. A "messianic quest" seems incidental to his preaching ministry, at least until he decided to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, a signal of the arrival of a messiah as predicted in ancient scriptures.
In Raymond's telling, Yeshua's preaching ministry seems secondary to his deliberate quest to fulfill the role of a Jewish messiah who would precipitate popular uprising to overthrow the Roman occupation of Judea. It is not clear that Yeshua himself was a so-called "zealot," but some of his followers can be so identified. As his preaching ministry continued to gain an ever-growing following, Yeshua attracted the attention of the Roman authorities. Raymond says that the reason that the Romans took Yeshua's preaching seriously was his known identity as a dynastic Jewish royal. To the Romans, Yeshua was a dangerous pretender who might make a claim to the Jewish throne in Judea. His preaching about the coming Kingdom of God was taken by Rome to be seditious.
During his preaching ministry, Yeshua criticized the Jewish Temple
authorities for engaging in corrupt practices. As the possible long-expected
Jewish messiah, Yeshua threatened the authority of the Sanhedrin, the Jerusalem
Temple governing body. Sanhedrin head Caiaphas appealed to the Roman
authorities to have Yeshua executed. Raymond explains that the appeal to Roman
authority was necessary because as a member of a Jewish royal dynasty, Yeshua
was a Roman citizen who could be executed only on the authority of the emperor.
Raymond speculates that Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, may have been
bribed by the Sanhedrin to authorize the execution even without approval from
Rome.
7. The Proviso
As noted in Chapter 5, Matthew's genealogy of Jesus that
stretches back to King David implies that Jesus' father was Yossef ben Jacob. Having
traced Richard A. Stanford’s ancestry to Yossef ben Jacob, we can continue the
ancestry trace to Yossef’s ancestors through King David to the Jewish
Patriarchs. Ancestry records indicate that there were twenty-seven generations
from David to Yossef ben Jacob. Chart 57 in Chapter 5 depicts this ancestry
listing.
Around 1065 BCE, at God's direction the prophet Samuel
anointed a shepherd boy named David of the tribe of Judah to become the second
King of Israel (following King Saul). In 2 Samuel 7:16, God promised that
David's throne would be established forever. But as recorded in Jeremiah
33:20-21 and affirmed in Psalm 132:11-12, God stipulated a proviso, i.e., that
if Israel broke the covenant with God, the throne would no longer be occupied
by a member of the House of David.
Over the course of the next four centuries, Israel's
covenant with God was broken as reported in Jeremiah 22:24-30. When Babylonian
King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Israel in 597 BCE, the Jerusalem royalty was
packed off to exile in Babylon, never again to occupy the throne of David. King
Jeconiah (616-597 BCE) was the last nominal occupant of David's throne.
Some Israelites and their descendants did return to Judea
fifty years later when the Persians conquered Babylon and Cyrus the Great
released them, but many chose to remain in Babylon. The returnees may have
included descendants of David, but none of them or their descendants occupied
the throne of David. This fact and God’s proviso would seem to militate against
Jesus’ eligibility to become a King of Israel even if he was of the House of
David. The lineage from David to Jeconiah is depicted in Chart 52.
8. David and Uriah
Although the Stanford ancestry can be traced even farther
back from King David’s reign, we first need to consider a troubling aspect of
David’s life.
Joel Baden is professor of Old Testament in the Yale
Divinity School. In his book, The Historical David: The Real Life of an
Invented Hero (HarperCollins, 2013), Baden applies the tools of historical
analysis to the story of David as recounted in the Hebrew Tanakh (the Christian
Old Testament), in the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings, and the two
books of Chronicles.
The goal of historical analysis of biblical literature is
to penetrate the legend and reveal the true nature of a flesh-and-blood
character. Applying tools of historical analysis to the biblical narratives of
David, Baden cuts through the mystique of the David legend to reveal a gritty
historical David. Baden says that
The legendary David is more a marble statue than a living personality, more a symbol than a man. The historical David, by contrast, is ambitious and clever, persuasive and threatening, not always in power but almost always in control. He is not someone we might want to emulate, but he is someone that we might recognize. (p. 13)
Baden argues that David usurped Saul's throne and
disposed of all of Saul's children to end Saul's ancestry line. Although David
already had several wives, he desired the beautiful Bathsheba, wife of Uriah
the Hittite, one of David's elite soldiers. Hittites were present in Canaan
("the Promised Land") prior to the arrival of the Israelites, so an
ethnic Hittite was not an ancestral Israelite.
David "lay with" Bathsheba. When he learned
that Bathsheba was pregnant, David schemed to have Uriah sent to the Ammonite
battle front to be killed so that David could marry Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11).
After Uriah's death, the pregnant Bathsheba delivered a child, but there was
uncertainty as to the paternity of the child. As it was the mother's right to
name a child, Bathsheba chose the Hebrew name Solomon, meaning in English
"his replacement." But this was an ambiguous and politically
inconvenient name that required explanation. Chart 43 illustrates the ambiguity
of Solomon's paternity.
Baden says that in order to assure the dynastic continuance of the House of David, Samuel needed to convince readers that the child was David's son, not Uriah's. Baden argues that Samuel contrived a story (a "literary creation") about the child dying after seven days to assure that a second child conceived after David and Bathsheba's marriage, i.e., "the replacement," was indeed David's child. Baden doubts the veracity of the second-child story and argues that Bathsheba birthed only one child. "His replacement" referred to Uriah himself, not to a fictional first child who died. This leads Baden to conclude that Solomon was Uriah's son, not David's, and it puts the lineage of the "House of David" in dispute.
Although David's son Adonijah was crown price, Solomon
was anointed king when Bathsheba lied to the aged and infirm David that he had
promised the throne to Solomon. After David's death, Solomon eliminated David's
children to end David's ancestry line. This implies that subsequent Israelite
kings descended not from David, but rather from Solomon, the son of Uriah the
Hittite.
The consequential conclusion that Baden reaches in regard
to the David narrative is that Solomon is more likely to have been the son of
Uriah the Hittite than David the son of Jesse of the Judah tribe. If true, no
descendant of the House of David through Solomon would be eligible to become a
King of Israel.
9. Boaz and Ruth
The Stanford ancestry may be traced further back in time from King David’s reign. Chart 55 depicts the
lineage from Boaz ben Salmon to David ben Jesse.
The story of Boaz and Ruth should
be familiar to any Christian or Jewish child who has been to Sunday School or
Hebrew School. Boaz, the son of Salmon ben Nahshon and Rahab bat Bezale'el, was
a wealthy landowner in Bethlehem. He was a relative of Elimelech, the late
husband of Naomi. The biblical narration in the book of Ruth is unclear about
the relationship, but it appears from historical and ancestry records that
Elimelech was a brother of Boaz.
In the biblical narration, Boaz notices Ruth, the widowed Moabite daughter-in-law of Naomi, gleaning grain in his fields. He learns of the difficulties suffered by Naomi's family and Ruth's loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi. Boaz instructs his workers to leave grain at the margins of the fields for Ruth to glean. Ruth approaches Boaz and asks him to exercise his right of kinship to marry her. In marrying Ruth, Boaz restores Elimelech's lineage and preserves his assets for Naomi's family.
The importance of the Boaz and Ruth story is that Obed ben Boaz, their son, was the father of Jesse ben Obed and grandfather of David ben Jesse as illustrated in Chart 55. Dispersion occasionally is cast upon Boaz’s marriage to a Moabite woman, but Ruth adopted the god of her mother-in-law Naomi, implying that she converted to Judaism. Under Talmud law, male Moabites were not allowed to marry born female Jews or legitimate converts, but female Moabites who converted to Judaism were permitted to marry male Jews. This application of the law legitimized the marriage of Boaz and Ruth so that the House of David was not tainted by the Moabite identity of his paternal grandmother.
Further back in time from Boaz
ben Salmon, ancestry records indicate that there were seven generations from
Judah ben Jacob to Boaz as illustrated in Chart 56. Jacob was the eldest son of
Patriarch Jacob ben Isaac and wife Leah.
10. The Tribe of Judah
The biblical story of the tribe of Judah begins with Esau
and Jacob, sons of Hebrew patriarch Isaac and grandsons of "Father
Abraham." Descendants of Esau, the first-born, settled south of the Dead
Sea in Edom and became known as Edomites or Idumeans. Jacob, with two wives and
their handmaids, had twelve sons who fathered the twelve tribes of Israel that
settled in Canaan after a period of exile in Egypt. Judah and Levi were two of
Jacob's sons by wife Leah. The tribes of Levi and Judah are depicted in Chart
51a.
The other sons of Jacob are depicted in Chart 51b which includes Rachel's son Joseph who was sold into slavery by his brothers but eventually became an Egyptian official who saved them from famine.
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The tribe of Judah is important to the eligibility of Yeshua to be an authentic messiah because the conventional wisdom of the first century CE was that a messiah must descend from the House of David of the Judah tribe. Yeshua would qualify if the ancestry of his adoptive father Joseph would count and if Solomon was the biological son of King David of the Judah tribe. Or Yeshua would qualify if Myriam's father was Joachim bat Heli whose ancestry may be traced to Nathan, the third son of David and Bathsheba.
But these contentions have been disputed. Joseph Raymond argues that Joachim Heli ben Matthat was Myriam's adoptive father. As noted in Chapter 5, Raymond speculates that Jesus' biological father was Antipater ben Herod, an Edomite descended from Isaacs' elder son Esau, and that his biological mother was Myriam bat Antigonus, a Hasmonean descended from the tribe of Levi. Joel Baden has argued that Solomon was Uriah's son, not David's. Raymond makes the case that even if Solomon's father was Uriah the Hittite, Jesus' Hasmonean Levite ancestry through his mother qualified him to be an authentic Jewish messiah.
11. The Descendants of Levi
High priests of Israel were appointed and removed by kings, but most high priests came from the ancestry line of Aaron. The Tanakh names most of Israel's high priests, but there are gaps in the sequence due to missing information, and upon occasion the office was unfilled. A few high priests came from other tribes. Because high priests were appointed by kings who occasionally chose non-Levites, it is not possible to trace a continuous Levite high priest ancestry from Aaron to the time of Jesus.
The tribe of Levi is important to the eligibility of an Israelite to become an authentic messiah. The conventional wisdom of the first century CE was that a messiah must have descended from the House of David of the Judah tribe. Yeshua would qualify if his biological father was Joachim bat Heli. However, Joseph Raymond contends that Joachim was Myriam's adoptive father, and that Yeshua's biological father was Herod's son Antipater, descended from Isaacs' elder son Esau, and Myriam bat Antigonus, was a Hasmonean descended from the Levi tribe.
12. An Eligible Messiah?
If Ruth was David’s paternal great grandmother, then Moabite blood flowed in Yeshua’s veins. If, as Baden contends, Solomon was not David's son, then Yeshua descended from the son of a Hittite whose blood flowed in Yeshua's veins. If Yeshua indeed was the grandson of Herod the Great, then Edomite blood flowed in his veins.
Solomon's paternity may be uncertain, but there is no question that Nathan, the third of four sons born to David and Bathsheba, was an actual son of David. This means that if Myriam bat Heli was daughter of Joachim ben Matthat, Yeshua would be an authentic descendant of David through his mother's ancestry that stretched to Nathan, bypassing Solomon. But if Myriam bat Heli actually was the daughter of Antigonus ben Mattathias as argued by Raymond, Jesus' ancestry is of the tribe of Levi rather than of the House of David of the Judah tribe.
Joseph Raymond makes the case that even if Yeshua was not descended from David, his Hasmonean Levite ancestry qualified him to be an authentic Jewish messiah. In Matthew 22, Mark 12, and Luke 20, Jesus implicitly rejected the contention that "the Christ" had to descend only from the House of David.
13. Divine or Mortal
In the New Testament Gospel accounts, Yeshua's life and ministry occur primarily among the Jewish peasantry but with intervention by God to effect a virgin birth that rendered Yeshua the divine Son of God. In contrast, Raymond's account of the life of Yeshua is a matter of palace and Temple intrigue among Jewish royals and high-ranking priests. If indeed he was conceived by two human mortals, Yeshua himself was a mortal. He may have been tapped by God to serve as a prophet, but Old Testament prophets were mortals who were not considered divine.
Raymond's research does not address the resurrection issue, likely because from a legal standpoint its nature is essentially a matter of hearsay and belief with no substantive historical evidence for a lawyer to research. Even so, the implication in the Gospels that God raised Yeshua from the dead and exalted him to divine status cannot be ruled out.
So, which variant of the Yeshua story seems more credible, the New Testament narratives about the virgin birth that rendered Yeshua the Son of God, or the Raymond story about palace and temple intrigue that produced a mortal, Antigonus ben Antipater, i.e., the adopted Yeshua ben Yossef?
There is a dearth
of extra-biblical historical matter to authenticate the New Testament
narratives. The early part of the Raymond variant is attested only by the
Hebrew Tanakh, i.e., the Christian "Old Testament," from patriarchs
Abraham and Isaac through the Babylonian exile in 597 BCE. Historical
information of the story from Alexander the Great's death in 323 BCE through
Herod's execution of Antipater in 4 BCE is reliably attested in historical
documents. But the identification of Antipater ben Herod as Yeshua ben Yossef's
actual father, and Antipater's wife Myriam bat Heli as Yeshua's birth mother,
is Raymond's inference based on his research of ancient documents. Much of the
rest of the story encompassing the execution of Joanan the Baptizer, Yeshua's
ministry and messianic pursuit, and his execution by the Romans is attested or
alluded to by Josephus and other writers of first and second century CE.
Aside from the speculative nature of the linkage of Yeshua to Antipater and
Myriam, the Raymond story avoids an unscientific virgin birth narrative that
rendered Yeshua divine, and it provides an explanation of why the Romans took
seriously the ministry and messianic pursuit of an itinerant Jewish preacher
that led to his execution.
Appendix. The Big Picture
It might be helpful to be able to see how the charts pertaining to Jesus’ ancestry are connected. The charts in this book that depict Jesus’ ancestry were derived from a single large chart that is too big to present here. It has been divided into two parts, Chart 41 Left and Chart 41 Right.
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