Scandalous Christmas

Dear Friends,
It is time to read the nativity stories in the gospels of the New Testament, and guess what? Only two of the four are interested in his birth and they tell contradictory stories. In other words, we have no historical evidence of anything about his birth, except his mother's name was likely Mariam (same as Moses' sister), and she was unmarried at the time of his conception, but married Joseph later. It is unclear why he is not named as son of Joseph in the literature.

Adoption was common and even admirable in the ancient world. Caesar Augustus' name was Octavius and he was adopted by Julius. Julius was assassinated when Octavius was only 17 years old and he raised an army to defeat Antony and Cleopatra for the succession to the throne. One of Octavian's names was "son of god" ~ which was taken literally as Julius had been declared a god by the Roman senate. Oh, Greek uses different case endings on names, so you have Octavius in the nominative and Octavian in the accusative. In Greek the genitive would actually be "of Octavius" and the form is "tou Octaviou," but it doesn't work in English. Did you care? Of course not.

The point is that adoption was common and a sign of honor bestowed on the adopted son. In other words, Julius saw something remarkable in Octavius and brought him into his own lineage. If Joseph adopted Jesus we have no evidence of it. Infants were rarely adopted. The gospel of Matthew does say that Joseph named the child, so that is actually a claim of paternity. So the big question is, why is Jesus known as Jesus son of Mary or Jesus of Nazareth, but not Jesus bar Joseph? Honestly it makes no sense.

Place names were normally used either for the very famous (Herod of Judea) or the very common ~ slaves. Slaves didn't really have family names, or often their family name was lost as they entered slavery, so they became "John of Bethlehem" or whatever. Why didn't Jesus have a family name? We simply do not know the answer to that question. Actually, we don't even know for sure that he wasn't called Jesus bar Joseph during his life. We simply don't have literary evidence of it. The gospel writers do not call him that. I wonder why?

Matthew does the geneaolgy from Abraham through David to Joseph, but even Mattew doesn't use the name Jesus son of Joseph. Odd, huh? Also, take a look at the geneaology. He includes four women. That is really shocking in the ancient world. And the women he includes are not Sarah (Abraham's wife), or Rebecca, or Rachel and Leah (wives of Isaac and Jacob). They are scandolous women, all. The first is Tamar who slept with her father-in-law in order to produce an heir for her dead husband. The second is Rahab, the prostitute that helped the Israelite spies. The third is Ruth, a Moabite woman taken by Boaz after her husband Mahlon died, and finally "the wife of Uriah." We know her as Bathsheba, but Matthew wants to remind his hearers that she was someone else's wife when David took her. We have two foreign wives (Rahab and Ruth) and two sexually tainted wives (Tamar and Bathsheba). Then Matthew goes out of his way to spell out for us: Joseph is not the daddy!

Why do you suppose Matthew wants to begin his gospel in such a scandalous way? Just who did this savior come to save? The gospel ends with a call to "go and make disciples of the ethne." Ethne in Greek is a scandal word; it is a derogatory word for "those folks." In a world of inside group/outside group it was a bad word, a slang word, actually. My weak attempt at translating that would be, "go make students of the scum of the earth."

I find it exciting to worship a god who comes through scandalous women to live among and serve the scum, don't you? O Come, O Come Emmanuel ~ Come little one who is the flesh of God ~ God with us!
Merry Christmas,
Mary