3 - The Genealogy of the Son of God.

Instantly we notice that Luke’s genealogy is different from Matthew’s in several ways while also being somewhat similar. First, Luke introduced a valuable historical detail for the beginning of Jesus public ministry - he was 30 years old. Like Matthew, he recorded Jesus’ heritage to David and Abraham, but in reverse order beginning with Joseph and making no mention of Mary at all.

Luke also added a parenthetical note about Joseph’s presumed relationship to Jesus. Could this possibly have been to counter rumours about his illegitimate birth that had begun to circulate in the 80s? In his Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography (Doubleday, 2000) Bruce Chilton declares that Jesus would have been regarded as a mamzer in his home town of Nazareth. The word is bluntly translated "bastard."

Unlike Matthew, Luke imposed no significant pattern or order to the genealogy. The linkage with David and Abraham established Jesus as the saviour of Israel. Then by tracing Jesus’ ancestry all the way back to Enos, Seth and Adam he stated for all to know that Jesus was the Son of God and Saviour of the whole of humanity. That would have been of great significance for the Gentiles in Luke’s audience.

The term “Son of God, ” however, did not imply some sort of divine nature. In Jewish thought, it meant that,like the earlier monarchs of Israel, Jesus had been chosen for a unique role in history. It also conveyed the same sense of inclusiveness found also in Gabriel’s message to Mary in 1:35, in Simeon’s song in 2:30-32, and it confirmed what the voice from heaven had said in 3:22.

The genealogy brought to an end the introduction to the gospel. Luke’s audience would know beyond doubt exactly who this Jesus of Nazareth is and why he had been born. Sharon Hinge noted that this had been done by all that preceded it, i.e. “the angelic announcement of the birth, the prophetic precedent, human sensitivity, a heavenly voice and a catalogue of ancestors.”

Thus far in Luke’s narrative Jesus himself had played no more than a totally passive role. Yet several important themes to be developed during his ministry had already been introduced. Hinge went onto say that Luke had yet to tell what Jesus would do
with these beginnings and the working out of these claims in very specific historical contexts. She notes further that there was a mysterious "lack of hospitality toward such a project had already been reflected in the circumstances of Jesus’ birth.”

Another way these introductory passages could be interpreted is to see Jesus as a person whose life, words and work contradicted what might have been expected of Israel’s Messiah as perceived by Jews of that time. This same theme had echoes in the introduction to John’s Gospel: “He was in the world, ... yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” (John 1:10-12)

Is it too much to say that in the latter decades of the 1st century CE the traditions about Jesus in diverse Christian communities had begun to coalesce into a definitive theology about the person and work of Jesus, the Christ? This may not have been a mature Christology, but it certainly was the beginning of such theological reflection as to the person and work of Christ. If true, Luke contributed greatly to the espousing of this theology by the Gentiles of his time.