An Exercise in Genealogical Documentation

I know it has been a while since I last posted.

The last year has flown by. I'm not quite sure why time speeds up as we age, but I'm pretty sure the past year has taken around 45 minutes, and the previous one only lasted a day or two. I guess I was most focused on my father's health--he's still paralyzed, quadriplegic, and the doctor says that he's reached about the limits of his recovery; my father says "Don't you believe it!"--and on our move, my daughter's high school career, my limited genealogy efforts, our volunteering work and our church. But mostly the move.

We left our "starter home," a townhouse that was to be our 5-year home. You know, we really had plans for our financial security when we got married. We rented an apartment for the first two years, then bought our 5-year townhouse. My husband and I were both working, we were putting away good savings and paying extra on the principal on the mortgage loan each month. And then life happened during those 5 years...mostly the birth of our child and our decision that it was more important to have a stay-at-home mommy there for her than to have lots of disposable income (or savings, or, it turns out, a bigger home). Well, 17 years after we bought that 5-year townhouse, we are finally in a single family home with a yard. We were mostly spurred on to the move because our daughter was going into high school and the old townhouse was in the district for a ... let's tactfully call it "less than stellar" high school. She's in a great school now (same county, different school), and we're pleased with the house, the neighbors, the traffic, the area. We could really only afford this house because of the timing in the economy. Sometime I should blog more about how we got the house, because folks who are trying to buy a short-sale property might find it encouraging.

But of course, we've been a tiny bit house-poor for a while, and I've been doing a lot of furnishing and decorating from yard sales and Craigslist. Both are a marvelous source of bargains in quite nice furniture and housewares and decor, so long as you are VERY choosy and willing to haggle a little bit. I'm pleased with the results so far, though I'm a long way from done. We have also been doing most of the handy-man and fixer-upper work ourselves--painting, installing new hardware and fixtures, refinishing, and so forth. It takes time.

In any case, I was pointing out that I hadn't blogged for a while, and I am sorry. Given the stress and upheaval of the last couple years, I'm just glad I can start back up again. I recently also started back up with a Bible study group, which I had also let slide. I was feeling guilty that I wasn't spending as much time in the Word as I ought to, even alone. Then at the beginning of this Christmas season, I was looking at some ideas for having a Jesse tree for Advent, and a thought occurred to me.

What if I were to do up Jesus' family tree? I should be doing more Bible study and I really love doing genealogy; why not mix the two? I could certainly sit down for two or three mornings and use my genealogy software to enter the names as I pulled them from the Bible. Shouldn't be too hard, right? Shouldn't take much time or effort? Well, I am finding that it is a serious exercise in genealogical documentation.

For example, there are two straightforward genealogies of Christ found in the gospels: Matthew 1 and Luke 3. Yet they are significantly different in some aspects and quite similar in others. They both name Joseph as the (apparent) father of Jesus. But they start with the conflicting information that Joseph was the son of Jacob--no, the son of Heli. And of course, Jesus wasn't the son of Joseph, anyway, right? He was conceived by the Holy Spirit. So it is hopeless from the get-go, isn't it? I thought about concluding that we don't know (and can't find out) about Mary's genealogy, and as for God's--I seem to remember some "Beginning and the End" "Alpha and Omega" "uncreated and unbegotten" thing...

And if we do decide we are going with the two accounts we have and only doing Joseph's tree, do we just assume that one is right and the other wrong? After all, Matthew was a disciple and he knew Jesus personally. So maybe he had a chat with Mary and wrote down everything she could remember about the family tree. There was a serious oral tradition among the Hebrew people, maybe she did have a bunch memorized. On the other hand, Matthew was a tax collector, not a brain surgeon. And Dr. Luke (who was writing around the same time as Matthew or very shortly later), while perhaps not a brain surgeon, was still a physician, well educated, and though he wasn't one of the 12 disciples, was at least a companion of the apostle Paul and would have had contact with the various still-living disciples and followers and family of Jesus. As a physician and historian, he had to know how to research. He probably had access to all kinds of reference material. Certainly a big chunk of the line he was researching was part of a King's lineage so would have been written about, both formally and informally. So is Matthew's take on it better, or is Luke's? Or is there any way to reconcile the two?

I'm no Biblical scholar or pastor, I don't have a background in this stuff. But I am a genealogist, so hopefully I can examine comparative genealogical documentation and get it sorted out, at least to my own satisfaction. I'll plan to use lots of help from my various study Bibles, the BibleGateway.com site which does have the full text of the various translations, the sermon notes I've made over the years, some insights from Christian writers such as (but not limited to, depending on who actually wrote what on this topic!) C.S. Lewis, Peter Marshall, Lee Strobel (the author of "The Case for..." series), and Randy Alcorn. Though primarily the info will come straight from the Bible.

I will follow up on Jesus' lineage in my next several posts.

Meanwhile for the actual dates of Jesus' life, I want to make a recommendation. Please, please, if you haven't yet seen the movie "The Star of Bethlehem," make every effort to watch it. (Including the bonus footage, which contains a real show-stopper about the date of Jesus' death.) Rick Larson has spent many years studying this topic and has, I think, made a terrific case for the dates of Christ's birth and death. I think every Christian should at least look at the movie--click on the movie name to get to the ordering website. For more background, click here. Possibly not everyone will agree with his conclusions about the dates, but Larson makes some great points. And his work definitely gets my "Wow!!!" vote.

Certainly acquiring the dates of Jesus' life by the movement of the stars and planets--astronomy, not crazy astrology stuff--is no worse (and actually is more accurate, since the stars are the ultimate perpetual calendar!) than double checking a perpetual calendar to come up with an ancestor's date of death from an undated obit cut out from a paper.

I mean, face it, haven't we genealogists all looked at something like this on a newspaper scrap: "Mr. Smith passed away last Tuesday the 18th of April after a brief stay in the hospital," and then gone to our favorite perpetual calendar website to check on which years between Mr. Smith's last appearance in the census of 1910 and his widow's remarriage in 1924 that the 18th of April fell on a Tuesday?

So whether Jesus' actual date of birth was December 25th or not, Merry Christmas. And Happy New Year!