This post is a direct continuation from Why did Luke trace Jesus’ genealogy through David’s son Nathan and not Solomon?
Unfortunately we cannot track down the beginning of the Jewish tradition that the messiah was to emerge from David via his son Nathan. Marshall Johnson considers suggestions that it began in the days of the later Maccabees with priests challenged the legitimacy of monarchical rule but finds them flawed.
So according to Marshall we can do nothing more than rely on the scant evidence we do have that indicates that at the time the “Old Testament” book of Zechariah was written the family of Nathan had significant prominence in Judea. Who that Nathan was at that time we do not know. He could have been David’s son or he could have been the prophet. What we do know is that at some point the Nathan in Zechariah 12:12 was identified with both the son of David and the prophet. Marshall believes that the best we can do at this point is accept Eusebius’s explanation that Nathan was given his place in Luke’s genealogy of Jesus as a result of a difference of opinion among Jews over the ancestry of the Messiah. See the previous post: Matthew’s genealogy represented one school of thought; Luke’s genealogy represented another school of thought that believed the “curse of Jeconiah” in the book of Jeremiah made any messianic line through David’s royal line impossible. Jeremiah 22
24 “As I live, says the Lord, though Coni′ah the son of Jehoi′akim, king of Judah, were the signet ring on my right hand, yet I would tear you off 25 and give you into the hand of those who seek your life, into the hand of those of whom you are afraid, even into the hand of Nebuchadrez′zar king of Babylon and into the hand of the Chalde′ans. 26 I will hurl you and the mother who bore you into another country, where you were not born, and there you shall die. 27 But to the land to which they will long to return, there they shall not return.” 28 Is this man Coni′ah a despised, broken pot, a vessel no one cares for? Why are he and his children hurled and cast into a land which they do not know? 29 O land, land, land, hear the word of the Lord! 30 Thus says the Lord: “Write this man down as childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days; for none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David, and ruling again in Judah.”
The best available explanation for Luke tracing the line of the messiah through Nathan, therefore, is that there was a division of viewpoints among Jewish scribes over the possibility of David’s royal line yielding the messiah and Luke expressed the alternative school of thought to the one represented in Matthew. Johnson also believes that the internal evidence in the Gospel of Luke indicates that the author had a strong motive to want to give Jesus a prophet as an ancestor. Nathan, identified as a prophet as well as son of David, therefore, takes on a special significance in this gospel. So what is the evidence that the author or final redactor of Luke-Acts had a particularly strong interest in giving Jesus the messiah descent from a prophet?
1. “There is throughout the Lukan corpus an appeal to the prophets of the OT as witness to the validity of the ministry of Jesus”
The OT prophets are regularly labelled as “prophets of old” (προφήτης των άρχαίων), setting Jesus apart as the new prophet:
— Luke 9:8, 19; Luke 1:70; Acts 3:21.
OT prophets are frequently referenced, sometimes called “holy”:
— Acts 3: 18, 24; 7: 42; 10: 43; 13: 40; 15: 15; 26: 27; Luke 18: 31; 24: 25, 27, 44
Individual prophets referenced, and most notably David is listed as one of the prophets:
— Isaiah: Luke 3:454: 17; Acts 8: 28; 28: 25; cf. 7: 48 — Joel: Acts 2: 16 — Samuel: Acts 3: 28; 13: 20, 27 — Moses: Luke 24: 27; Acts 3: 22 — Elijah: Luke 1: 17; 4: 25-6; 9: 8, 19, 30 ff., 54 — Elisha: Luke 4:27 — David: Acts 2: 30
Luke includes the prophets in the end-times banquet (unlike Matthew): Luke 13: 28
Luke 10:24 “For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.” Continue reading “Part 2: Why Luke traced Jesus through Nathan rather than Solomon”