In the very first post in this series, we looked at Matthew’s curious Genealogy.
Matthew opens his gospel with a genealogy, and he tells us exactly what he’s doing. He wants to demonstrate that Jesus qualifies to be the Messiah, because he’s descended from Abraham, and a member of the House of David.
But that doesn’t explain why he includes four women, something almost unheard of in Judaism. Including a woman at all breaks the pattern, even if he had chosen Sarah, Rebekah, and other such women. But he selected four scandalous women:
- Tamar, impregnated by her father-in-law.
- Rahab, a gentile prostitute.
- Ruth, from Moab, a nation prohibited by God from joining Israel.
- And the fourth Matthew refers to delicately as “her that had been the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” Bathsheba.
For some reason, Matthew refuses to let us overlook them. He inserts them into the very genealogy which he offers to affirm his thesis. He considers it essential to his portrait of Jesus. Here’s where we ask the question, “Why did Matthew do this? Why does he include these particular women in his genealogy?”
Remember, Matthew wants to demonstrate that Jesus is the descendant of David because David is the founder of the dynasty that God promised would last forever. And when we look at this genealogy we see that David is descended from three scandalous women and then, Bathsheba is David’s wife, and it is her son Solomon who establishes the direction of the dynasty. It passes through her son Solomon, rather than his elder brother Adonijah. So, scandalous as these women may have been, they all were in the line of David.
That brings us to Mary, the mother of Jesus. In fact, Matthew himself tells us she became pregnant before her marriage to Joseph. Because of this, Joseph purposed to put her away quietly, to spare her public humiliation. Events like that cause quite a stir, especially in small towns. Salacious rumors spread fast, and memories of them linger. Matthew knew this. And I suggest that Matthew emphasized these four women, all mothers in the royal line, to protect Mary as Jesus’ mother.
If David, the founder of the royal line, could descend from a woman who bore her father-in-law’s child, a gentile prostitute, and a Moabitess; and Solomon could be descended from a woman David took from Uriah, then whatever the truth about Mary, it could not bar Jesus from being in the royal line. Matthew believes—and soon tells us—that Mary was pregnant by the Holy Spirit. He establishes Jesus’ lineage first. Then he clears Mary’s reputation.
But after all this he makes a claim which I struggled to understand for many years.
We’ll take that up next.
