iv. External Evtdence. — In the absence of other evidence, the seemingly late character of the names of the suppo.sed Daviilid;e of Mt and Lk might perhajis be insutiicient to justify doubt. But the careful investigations of Af ricanus {oj). eit. ), when compared with the earliest NT treatment of the subject, and the further knowledge obtainable from Eus. [Qu. ad Steph. iii. 2), and the later Jewish theology (see Delitzsch in Ztsclir. f. Luth. Theol. 1860, iii. p. 460) as to current attempts to determine the Davidic descent of the Messian, shed a light upon the question of the origin of our pedigrees which should not be less welcome because some- what unfavourable to their historical trustworthi- ness.
Africanus' informants were in possession of the pedigrees of Mt and Lk, but could give him neither the means of reconciling their discrepancies nor of establishing the fact requiring to bo proved, because of the non-existence of public records. That such had been kept down to the time of Herod the Great they firmly believed, accounting for their disappearance by a demon- strably apocr>-phal tale of Herod's burning them in order to conceal his own base lineage, t They frankly confessed that the pedigrees in their possession were made up t* rt rrf ^'uy-cu ri» rifMp^y [>uu ix /!*»*,/**:?]. I The ^i^kot rait r.fjcipai* is doubtless the Heb. D'p;ri '"13^, i.e. Bookof Day8(=Chronicles) ; but 'memory' in the time otHerod, and later, would hardly be of jrreat service to determine the descendants of Nathan ben David. The in- dustry of pedigree-making appears as fiourishing then as to-day, and basing itself upon the same foibles. ' A few of the more careful,' says Africanus, immediately after the story of Herod's escapade, ' having procured private records of their own, either by remembering the names, or by getting them in some otlier way from the registers, pride themselves on preserving the memory of their noble extraction. Among these are those already mentioned, called Desposyni, on account of their con- nexion with the family of the Saviour.'
If the current pedigrees were indeed of thia character, we can readUy understand the attitude
• Accortiing to LXX, adopted by Kittel in Haupt's critical text, ninf, i.e. one entire decad, including Hodavian.
t Herod's lineage was not base, as represented (.\fric. ad Arist. §4), but noble (Jos. Ant. xiv. vii. 3). Moreover, the public records (which, however, related only to Aaronic families) were still in existence in Josephus' time (I'ifa, § 1 ; cf. c. Ap. i. 7).
J The bracketed words are supplied from the tr. of RufinuB, *partim memoriter, partim etiam ex dierum libris,' in accord- ance with the context (ti and the statement Chat the df^pctym were among those who made up their pedigree in this way See text).
GENEALOGY
GENERAL
141
of Jesus and the older NT writers toward the question of His Davidic descent. He Himself, in Mt 22-ii-w aiij parallels, expressly declines to base His Messianic claims on any such trivial and external, if not indeed unsafe, foundation. To be considered one of the Davididoe was an honour which He shared with his elder and younger contemporaries, Hillel and Gamaliel ; but Jesus and His first followers (includinf; St. Paul) on the one side, His opponents on the other, are equally content to let the question of descent fall into the backCTound, which would not have been possible had docu- mentary proof either for or against His heirslup been accessible to either side. The earliest of our Gospels, and that which though latest is most loftily apostolic in tone, pass by the question of Jesus' descent. One is tempted to lintl a trace of the same disposition in the dpxiepevs dyeveaXiy-qTO! of He 7'. It is the Palestinian sources of the latter part of the century, on which tlie infancy chapters of Mt and Lk are based, which first show traces of the assumption that a formal Davidic pedigTee is needful to the demonstration of His Jlessianic claims. But we have already observed that in these sources there is no consciousness of incongruity between tracing tlie pedigree of Jesus through Joseph and the story of His miraculous birth. Not until the times of .Justin Martyr do we find on the side of the orthodox a disposition to claim on this account Davidic descent for Mary, and on the part of the Ebionites to reject the narrative of Jesus' miraculous birtli, not from incredulity, but to rescue the doctrine of His Davidic descent.
It is among the Jewish Christians of Palestine in the sub-apostolic age, perhaps among the two branches of uie dcsposyni themselves, one of whose seats was at Cochaba, ne.ar the centre of Ebionisni (Epiplian. xxx. 2, 16), the other at Nazara, perhaps the centre of the other Jewish Christian sect of ' Nazarenes,' that we must look for the origins of our two genealogies. Nor have we far to seek for tlie explanation of their discrepancy. Among the current Rabbinic disputes of the 1st cent, was the question whether Messiah's descent would be of the royal line, through Solomon and his successors on the tlirone (Jer 23' 30" 33'»- ") ; or, on account of the denunciation and rejection of Jechoniah and his seed (Jer 22^- *> SG*"), through Nathan (Euseb. Qu. ad Steph. iii. 2). The first of our pedigrees represents the older and simpler idea. The second, the later reflection that Messiah's line could not include the series of ungodly kings. Of the com- poiiint elements of each we can know no more until we have more intimate acquaintance with the methods of the pedigree-makers of the time. We may, however, infer something as to the date of our evangelists' work from the manifest interval between their construction and their final adopt icm into the story, and from the further fact of Ihiir construction in decads framed with either .Iose])h or Jesus in view, implying their origin in Christian circles. That origin is certainly later than when Ji'SMs and His immediate followers were doing all in their jiower to detach current expectation from these externalities and fix it upon His spiritual Messianic claim, — to subordinate tlie title ' .Son of David according to the flesh ' to tliat of ' Son of (;<id with power according to the Spirit of Holiness' (Kol^''). k W.Bacon.