I began re-reading the gospels this week and as you might have guessed, I started in Matthew's gospel. His Jesus story begins with the ancestry of Jesus going back to Abraham - 14 generations from Abraham to King David, 14 generations from David until the Babylonian captivity, and 14 more generations to the birth of Jesus. Forty-two generations in all.
I was thinking - How did Matthew (or whoever actually wrote the Gospel According to Matthew) come up with that?
I have a few friends that are pretty deep into the ancestry stuff. I have a few family members that have traced our family history back a few generations. Even with the internet and access to old records, each generation back in time is more difficult to determine based on written records. Going back just a few hundred years is quite a task - today!
Matthew following the genealogy of Jesus back to Abraham would be like one of us tracing the genealogy of a friend back to the time of Jesus' birth nearly 2000 years ago!
And without the internet, without a lot of written records, and after the Jewish dispersion of around 70 CE.
That's quite a task!
I suppose once you make it back to King David the rest is pretty easy, but still...
Then I saw this meme yesterday.
At least it's not complicated, right?
Just weird stuff I think about.
John
1 comment:
I'll bet there are a lot of cousins in that list to make things more complicated.
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