Canter Bridge

In a recent post I’ve noted the resolute anchoring of the events surrounding Jesus’ emergence in identifiable details that are open to debate, dispute, and falsification. The moment’s various layers of government and governance, the geographic and political entities in which these things took place, the calendar’s framing up of chronology and sequence, all these things mattered to Luke. Indeed, they matter twenty centuries later to people whose lives derive their meaning from Jesus himself and the early testimony about him.

Yet Luke was capable at the same time of asserting that common views of Jesus’ origin were mistaken ones. In the mist of a formulaic genealogy, where the pattern of one son and one father occur in a fixed rhythm, Luke marks an exception.

Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Melchi, the son of Jannai, the son of Joseph,the son of Mattathias, the son of Amos, the son of Nahum, the son of Esli, the son of Naggai … (Luke 3:23–25 ESV)

So does Luke add genealogical weight to a claim he has already made in his narrative: Jesus’ origins were not normal.

He was the son of Mary, a matter that can be discussed with particular tenderness. He was also the son of Joseph, a father of a poignantly noble character. Yet he was not the son of Joseph in the way that people supposed.

The angel’s announcement, Mary’s question about how such things could come about ‘since I am a virgin’, and the generally momentous cadence of Luke’s story drive home a point that later theologizing would codify with enduring references to Jesus having been ‘born of a virgin’.

For now, Luke places before public opinion that claim that Jesus was born under circumstances that are familiar to anyone who cares to make a study of them. Except for one. His father was another, whose tracing lies beyond the capture of human genealogy.