EssaysVolume8
From Abraham to the Present
Richard A. Stanford
Copyright 2022
CONTENTS
NOTE: You may click on the symbol <> at the end of any section to return to the CONTENTS.
1. As Far Back as Possible
Part I. The Ancient Israelites
2. The Sons of Abraham
3. The Grandsons of Lot
4. The Descendants of Levi
5. Boaz and Ruth
6. The House of David
7. David and Uriah
Part II. Jesus and his Family
8. The Father of Jesus
9. The Sons of Herod the Great
10. The Mother of Jesus
11. Sarah Damaris
12. The Magdalene Conundrum
Part III. The Dilemma
13. An Eligible Messiah?
14. Messianic Secret or Quest?
15. And Then?
16. Divine or Mortal?
Appendices
A. The Big Picture
B. Historical Fiction
C. Lineage Tracing Charts
<Blog Post Essays> <This Computer Essays>
Introduction
Ancestry research systems such as Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and MyHeritage.com use powerful search engines to access hundreds of data bases. I use MyHeritage.com, based in Tel Aviv, Israel. MyHeritage.com has access to 12.5 billion historical records. Starting with myself, I can add records for parents, grandparents, great grands, and so on, displaying them in a “family tree” that can be viewed on my computer screen.
When I research a particular name, MyHeritage lists all of the records that the search engine finds with that name or names with similar spellings or in different languages. Some of the records are repeated in family trees (so-called "smart matches"), but typically there are several records from different data-base sources ("record matches") that attest to the existence of a person of that name and vintage. The records may exhibit variations in birth and death dates and places, and identities of parents, spouses, siblings, and children, but I can usually compose a consensus profile of that named person.
As I have used the MyHeritage technology, I have gained confidence in what it reveals about my own ancestry. MyHeritage has enabled me to trace one of my ancestry lines to Antenor IV (24-67 AD), king of the Sicambrian Franks on the eastern bank of the Rhine River. Antenor's wife is recorded as Sarah Damaris. There are multiple stories about how a nice Jewish girl named Sarah got to Gaul to meet and marry a Germanic tribal chieftain.
An ancestry tree and accompanying commentary is a form of story telling. It is the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and whence we came. An ancestry story can be revealing, or it can be told to hide essential truths. An ancestry story can amuse and entertain, or it can be terminally boring. It can reveal national heroes or horse thieves among the relatives. It can surprise, and it may even shock to discover who is up one’s family tree. Ancestry research educates with respect to language, culture, history, geography, economics, mathematics, and even theology. Often it is possible to find more information about an ancestor by searching the name on-line. Ancestry research is factual, but it may become fiction if the researcher is tempted to extend the story beyond what can be confirmed. All of these possibilities surface in the telling of the Stanford Family ancestry story.
Ancestry of course descends through time which progresses linearly from earlier dates toward the present, but ancestry tracing necessarily "ascends" from the present back in time. An ancestry line search is conducted record-by-record by identifying a subject's parents and then checking the information in the parents' records to confirm that the subject indeed is their child. The parents then become the subjects in the next step. This process may continue stepwise until a dead-end is reached, i.e., when neither parent of a subject is identified. When a dead-end is reached in one subject's ancestry line, it often is possible to shift to the spouse's ancestry line to continue tracing ancestry. In this way, I have been able to trace my ancestry back to the patriarchs of ancient Israel. A horizontal arrow that points up at the end (---^) in any of the ancestry listings or display charts in this book indicates a shift to the ancestry of a spouse.
While ancestry research typically is conducted by tracing paternal ancestry lines, maternal ancestry lines have turned out to be crucial to Stanford family ancestry research. In the ascending ancestry research process, four women have served as ancestry portals to Viking, Celtic, and continental European ancestry lines: my grandmother Etta Avarilla Polk, my 8th-great grandmother Annabel Stewart, my 14th-great grandmother Egidia Stewart, and my 17th-great grandmother Isabell de France.
Rather than proceeding in the ascending order of ancestry tracing, I have chosen to organize the chapters in this book as a lineage trace in descending order from the ancient patriarchs down to the present. This seems to be a less confusing way to present the lineages that I am tracing. (For those who might prefer a chapter organization from the present back to the patriarchs, an alternate version of this book may be viewed at https://dickstanfordlegacy.blogspot.com/2020/09/ancestry-tracing-bible-back-in-time.html.)
As we proceed chapter-wise ever farther toward the present, we will encounter five dynasties: Judahite, Levite, Davidian, Hasmonean, and Herodian. The central question that encompasses the entire project is the eligibility of Jesus to be an authentic Jewish messiah.
MyHeritage ancestry trees are presented in this book in charts which are composites of screen shots of MyHeritage displays. All charts pertaining to the ancestry of Jesus were derived from a single large chart that is too big to display in these pages. It has been divided into two parts that are presented in Appendix A. Ancestry records displayed in these charts are consensus profiles of the MyHeritage ancestry records for each named person. Birth and death dates necessarily are approximations in many cases, signified by “ca” (circa).
1. As Far Back as Possible
Chart 72E shows one of my maternal ancestry sequences. It is much too long to display in a tree. It covers the range from Richard A. Stanford (born 1943) to Akim Ben Zadoc (born circa 274 BC), and it actually extends much farther back in time beyond that which is shown in Chart 72E. The reader should start at the bottom of the left-hand column, read upward to the top, follow the arrow to the bottom of the right-hand column, and read upward to Akim Ben Zadoc. An arrow (---^) indicates a shift to the ancestry of a spouse or partner. Entries denoted by (f) are females. Names above Antenor Iv des Francs (24-67) in the right-hand column of Chart 72E are Hebrew names.
Imagine my surprise (and shock) when I noticed that Akim Ben Zadoc’s fifth great grandson is Yeshua Ben Yossef (born circa 4 BC) whom we know by his Greek name, Jesus. The names above Yeshua Ben Yossef track perfectly with the genealogy listed in the first chapter of the biblical book of Matthew.
With an exception that I will mention below, it should not be possible with data taken only from authentic data bases to start with myself and deliberately trace to an ancient. Nor should it be possible to start with an ancient character and work forward in time, intending to link the ancestry line to myself or some other current party. The ancestry tracing procedure requires starting with a known party, oneself or some other party, and then working back in time to add information for parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. In tracing this ancestry sequence, I arrived at the record for Yeshua Ben Yossef quite unintentionally and by following only standard ancestry tracing procedures.
When a new parent record is added to a MyHeritage ancestry tree, the MyHeritage search engine does an automatic search of the data bases to which it has access, and very soon it may identify one or more record matches to that party. Record matches are found in the data bases to which MyHeritage has access. I can choose whether to add a record match to my ancestry tree.
It is also possible to add records to my ancestry tree from external sources to which I am privy (e.g., family Bibles, family histories, etc.). However, this option leaves open the possibility of gaming the system by making-up information or even fabricating fictional characters to add to the ancestry tree. Any fictional character records then will be available to other ancestry trees.
While it is not possible using only authentic data-base information to target an ancient character like Yeshua, an ancestry researcher bent on making his ancestry trace reach a target character may be tempted to supply a missing parent or a false specification of a parent in an otherwise authentic record. Or the researcher may even fabricate an ancestry record to reach a target character. A false parent specification or a fabricated record could be added to the researcher’s ancestry sequence to link to a party in the target’s ancestry sequence a few steps short of the target character. If other ancestry researchers neglect to check that the falsified or fabricated record party is indeed a child of the party in the authentic record, the falsified or fabricated record may be confirmed as a match by other ancestry researchers. It then would appear to be validated and could appear multiple times in an ancestry search.
In the case of an ancestry sequence linked to Yeshua Ben Yossef, it would have been possible for an ancestry researcher to fabricate ancestry records for Yeshua and his ancestors back to Abraham using the genealogies reported in the books of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament of the Bible as the de facto data base.
I do not know and have no evidence that record falsification or fabrication has occurred in other ancestry trees to create records that reach Yeshua Ben Yossef. But this imagined possibility leads me to take great care in assessing records to add to my ancestry listing.
______
*The maternity of Captain Robert Bruce Polk III (1625-1703, "The Immigrant" to the American Colonies) is confusing because his father, Robert Bruce Pollock II (1597-1660), is recorded in family ancestry records as having had two wives, Jean Crawford (1600-1625) whom he married in 1620, and Annabel Stewart (1565-1648) whom he married in 1630. Family ancestry records indicate that Jean Crawford may have had as many as five children with Robert Bruce II before she died in 1625, the birth year of Robert Bruce III, suggesting the possibility that she died in childbirth. Several family ancestry records for Robert Bruce III indicate that Annabel Stewart was his mother, but the marriage dates suggest that she probably was his adoptive mother. Jean Crawford's ancestry is uncertain; family ancestry records suggest that she may have been the daughter of Hew (or Hugh) Crawford (1586-1621) and Elizabeth Stirling (1575-1616). Family ancestry records indicate that Annabel was the daughter of James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray (1533-1570), and Agnes Keith (1530-1588), who married Colin Campbell after James Stewart's death in 1570. Some family ancestry records indicate that Colin was Annabel's father, but he is more likely to have been Annabel's adoptive father. The ancestry connection of the Polk Family to English royalty is based on the presumption that Robert Bruce Polk III's mother (adoptive) was Annabel Stewart, and that Annabel's father was James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray.
Part I. The Ancient Israelites
2. The Sons of Abraham
We begin our ancestry exploration with some of the earliest ancestry records that can be identified. The biblical story of the Israelite tribe of Judah begins in Ur of Mesopotamia with Terah ben Nahor. His son, Abram ben Terah was renamed Abraham by God. Abraham married Sarah bat Haran who was his niece, the daughter of his brother, Haran ben Terah. These relationships are shown in Chart 63.
Ishmael, Abraham's first son, was born to Abraham and Sarah's Egyptian handmaiden Hagar when Sarah could not conceive. Islamic tradition considers Ishmael to be the ancestor of the Arabians. According to Muslim tradition, the Islamic patriarch Ishmael and his mother Hagar are buried next to the Kaaba at the Great Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
In her old age, Sarah finally did conceive a son that they named Isaac. God tested Abraham's faith, telling him to sacrifice Isaac, but God intervened at the last minute to avert the sacrifice. Isaac married Rebekah bat Ethuel who bore two sons, Esau and Jacob. These are depicted in Chart 63.
Descendants of Esau, the first-born, settled south of the Dead Sea in
Edom and became known as Edomites or Idumeans. Jacob, with two wives and
their handmaids, had twelve sons who fathered the twelve tribes of
Israel that settled in Canaan after a period of exile in Egypt. Jacob
and Leah’s sons are depicted in Chart 61. Jacob’s other wives, their
handmaids, and sons are depicted in Chart 62. In order to marry Rachel,
Laban’s younger daughter, Jacob had to work for Laban for seven years.
Laban insisted as a matter of custom that Jacob first had to marry his
older daughter Leah, and then work another seven years to marry younger
sister Rachel. Both Leah and Rachel appear in Charts 61 and 62.
Chart 62 includes Rachel's son Joseph who was sold into slavery by his
brothers but eventually became an Egyptian official who saved Jacob’s
family from famine.
After Sarah's death, Abraham took another wife, Keturah. Keturah bore him six sons, including Midian from whom the Midianites descended. The Midianites settled south of the Dead Sea in the northern part of the Arabian peninsula to the east of the Red Sea and the Sinai peninsula. We will visit the land of Midian again in Chapter 4.
After Sarah's death, Abraham took another wife, Keturah. Keturah bore him six sons, including Midian from whom the Midianites descended. The Midianites settled south of the Dead Sea in the northern part of the Arabian peninsula to the east of the Red Sea and the Sinai peninsula. We will visit the land of Midian again in Chapter 4.
Here are maps showing places mentioned in Chapters 2-4.
3. The Grandsons of Lot
Before we explore the lineages of Jacob’s sons, we need to take a brief side-trip to Sodom and Gomorrah.
As described in Chapters 18 and 19 of the book of Genesis, after God revealed to Abraham that he intended to destroy those wicked cities, he sent two angels who met a righteous man named Lot at the Sodom city gate. Lot insisted that they spend the night at his home. During the night, men of Sodom demanded that Lot make his guests available to have sex with them. Lot refused but offered his two virgin daughters (unnamed) in their stead, but they were refused by the men of Sodom.
That night the two angels revealed to Lot that they had been sent by God to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. At dawn they told Lot to take his wife and daughters and flee, and never to look back. As they were fleeing, the wife did look back and was turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and the two daughters fled to the mountains above the burning Sodom and Gomorrah.
Since all of the men of Sodom and Gomorrah had been killed in the destruction and none were available to give the daughters children to preserve the family line, they conspired to get their father drunk on wine and have intercourse with him while he slept. Both became pregnant, and when their children were born the older daughter named her child Moab; the younger daughter named her child ben-Ammi.
Genesis 19 does not identify the ancestry of Lot, but a couple of ancestry records indicate that Lot may have been the son of Haran who was the son of Terah ben Nahor, the king of Agade. Since Abraham is also identified as a son of Terah, this would make Lot’s grandfather the brother of Abraham. And as related in Genesis 19, Lot became both the father and grandfather of Moab and ben-Ammi.
The descendants of Moab and ben-Ammi became the Moabites who settled to the west of the Dead Sea, and the Ammonites who settled to the north of the Moabites and to the west of the River Jordan. These peoples were descendants of Haran, Abraham’s brother, so they were not descendants of Abraham’s son Jacob, the father of the Israelite tribes. Since Moab and ben-Ammi appear to share a common first-great grandfather and second-great grandfather with Jacob’s sons, they would be second or third cousins of Jacob’s sons. Their importance to the Israelite story will be revealed in the next chapters.
Although Lot’s ancestors are identified in a few ancestry records, these identifications are tenuous at best since they are not identified in Genesis 19. Assuming these identities to be valid, a mockup of these relationships is depicted in Chart 63 (Chapter 2). Note that Lot ben Haran appears three times in this chart.
4. The Descendants of Levi
Levi was a son of Jacob and Leah. His grandson, Aaron ben Amram, became the first High Priest of Israel. A passage from the Wikipedia entry explains Aaron's role and describes the functions of the high priest and the subordinate priests of the Levi tribe:
The books of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers maintain that Aaron received
from God a monopoly over the priesthood for himself and his male
descendants (Exodus 28:1). The family of Aaron had the exclusive right
and responsibility to make offerings on the altar to Yahweh. The rest of
his tribe, the Levites, were given subordinate responsibilities within
the sanctuary (Numbers 3). Moses anointed and consecrated Aaron and his
sons to the priesthood, and arrayed them in the robes of office
(Leviticus 8; cf. Exodus 28-29). He also related to them God's detailed
instructions for performing their duties while the rest of the
Israelites listened (Leviticus 1–7, 11-27). Aaron and his successors as
high priest were given control over the Urim and Thummim by which the
will of God could be determined (Exodus 28:30). God commissioned the
Aaronide priests to distinguish the holy from the common and the clean
from the unclean, and to teach the divine laws (the Torah) to the
Israelites (Leviticus 10:10-11). The priests were also commissioned to
bless the people (Numbers 6:22-27).
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron)
When the Israelites finally arrived in the "Promised Land" after
wandering for 40 years in the wilderness, the land was apportioned among
eleven of the twelve tribes, but none was allocated to the Levi tribe
because Levites served as priests who would be supported by the eleven
landed tribes. High priests of Israel were appointed and removed by kings, but most high priests came from the ancestry line of Aaron. The Tanakh names most of Israel's high priests, but there are gaps in the sequence due to missing information, and upon occasion the office was unfilled. A few high priests came from other tribes. Because high priests were appointed by kings who occasionally chose non-Levites, it is not possible to trace a continuous Levite high priest ancestry from Aaron to the time of Jesus.
Levi's daughter Jochebed married her brother's son Amram ben Kohath and gave birth to Miriam, Aaron, and Moses as related in Exodus Chapter 2 and depicted in Chart 53. Aaron's elder sister was Miriam bat Amram who as a child watched over her baby brother Moses who had been set adrift on the River Nile to be found by the Pharaoh's daughter. Moses grew up to become the great Israelite "law-giver" who led the Israelites out of exile in Egypt. Aaron became spokesman for Moses, and Myriam and Aaron served as Moses advisors during the Israelite's time in the wilderness en route to the "Promised Land."
As related in Exodus 2:11-22, after Moses killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, Pharaoh tried to kill Moses. Moses escaped to the land of Midian where he stayed with Reuel, a Midian priest, who had seven daughters. Reuel gave one of the daughters, Zipporah, to Moses in marriage. Zipporah birthed two sons whom they named Gershom and Eliezer. In Exodus 3, Moses' father-in-law is identified as Jethro, the priest of Midian. As Moses was tending Jethro's flock of sheep in the Midian wilderness, an angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a burning bush and told him to go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt.
The tribe of Levi is important to the eligibility of an Israelite to become an authentic messiah. The expectation of the first century AD was that a messiah must have descended from the House of David of the Judah tribe. Jesus would qualify if his biological father was Joachim bat Heli. However, as noted in Chapter 8, Joseph Raymond contends that Joachim was Myriam's adoptive father, and that Myriam's biological father was Antipater ben Herod, descended from Isaacs' elder son Esau, and Myriam bat Antigonus, a Hasmonean descended from the Levi tribe.
5. Boaz and Ruth
Boaz ben Salmon was descended from the Israelite tribe of Judah. The story of Boaz and Ruth should be familiar to any Christian or Jewish child who has been to Sunday School or Hebrew School. Boaz, the son of Salmon ben Nahshon and Rahab bat Bezale'el, was a wealthy landowner in Bethlehem. He was a relative of Elimelech, the late husband of Naomi. The biblical narration in the book of Ruth is unclear about the relationship, but it appears from historical and ancestry records that Elimelech was a great uncle of Boaz.
In the biblical narration, Boaz notices Ruth, the widowed Moabite daughter-in-law of Naomi, gleaning grain in his fields. He learns of the difficulties suffered by Naomi's family and Ruth's loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi. Boaz instructs his workers to leave grain at the margins of the fields for Ruth to glean. Ruth approaches Boaz and asks him to exercise his right of kinship to marry her. In marrying Ruth, Boaz restores Elimelech's lineage and preserves his assets for Naomi's family.
The importance of the Boaz and Ruth story is that their son, Obed ben Boaz, was the father of Jesse ben Obed and grandfather of David ben Jesse. Some dispersion occasionally is cast upon Boaz’s marriage to a Moabite woman, but Ruth adopted the god of her mother-in-law Naomi, implying that she converted to Judaism. Under Talmud law, male Moabites were not allowed to marry born female Jews or legitimate converts, but female Moabites who converted to Judaism were permitted to marry male Jews. This application of the law legitimized the marriage of Boaz and Ruth so that the House of David was not tainted by the Moabite identity of his paternal great grandmother. After all, Moabites and Israelites are cousins because they share a common ancestor, Terah ben Nahor, the father of Abraham and Haran. Ancestry records identify ten generations from Judah ben Jacob to Boaz ben Salmon as displayed in Chart 56.
6. The House of David
Chart 55 depicts the lineage from Boaz ben Salmon to David ben Jesse.
Around 1065 BC, at God's direction the prophet Samuel anointed a shepherd boy named David of the tribe of Judah to be the second King of Israel (following King Saul). In 2 Samuel 7:16, God promised that David's throne would be established forever. But as recorded in Jeremiah 33:20-21 and affirmed in Psalm 132:11-12, God stipulated a proviso, i.e., that if Israel broke the covenant with God, the throne would no longer be occupied by a member of the House of David.
Over
the course of the next four centuries, Israel's covenant with God was
broken as reported in Jeremiah 22:24-30. When Babylonian King
Nebuchadnezzar conquered Israel in 597 BC, the Jerusalem royalty was
packed off to exile in Babylon, never again to occupy the throne of
David.
King Jeconiah (616-597 BC) was the last nominal occupant of David's throne. Some Israelites and their descendants did return to Judea fifty years later when the Persians conquered Babylon and Cyrus the Great released them, but many chose to remain in Babylon. The lineage from David to Jeconiah is depicted in Chart 52.
The returnees may have included descendants of David, but none of them or their descendants occupied the throne of David. Chart 65 lists the generations from Jeconiah to Yossef.
King Jeconiah (616-597 BC) was the last nominal occupant of David's throne. Some Israelites and their descendants did return to Judea fifty years later when the Persians conquered Babylon and Cyrus the Great released them, but many chose to remain in Babylon. The lineage from David to Jeconiah is depicted in Chart 52.
The returnees may have included descendants of David, but none of them or their descendants occupied the throne of David. Chart 65 lists the generations from Jeconiah to Yossef.
The tribe of Judah is important to the eligibility of Jesus to be an authentic messiah because the conventional wisdom of the first century, AD, was that a messiah must descend from the House of David of the Judah tribe. Jesus would qualify if the ancestry of his adoptive father Joseph would count and if Solomon was the biological son of King David of the Judah tribe.
7. David and Uriah
Joel Baden is professor of Old Testament in the Yale Divinity School. In his book, The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (HarperCollins, 2013), Baden applies the tools of historical analysis to the story of David as recounted in the Hebrew Tanakh (the Christian Old Testament), in the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings, and the two books of Chronicles.
The goal of historical analysis of biblical literature is to penetrate the legend and reveal the true nature of the flesh-and-blood character. Applying tools of historical analysis to the biblical narratives of David, Baden effectively cuts through the mystique of the David legend to reveal a gritty historical figure.
Baden argues that David usurped Saul's throne and disposed of all of Saul's children to end Saul's ancestry line. Although David already had several wives, he desired the beautiful Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of David's elite soldiers. Hittites were present in Canaan ("the Promised Land") prior to the arrival of the Israelites, so an ethnic Hittite was not an Israelite.
David "lay with" Bathsheba. When he learned that Bathsheba was pregnant, David schemed to have Uriah sent to the Ammonite battle front to be killed so that David could marry Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11). After Uriah's death, the pregnant Bathsheba delivered a child, but there was uncertainty about the paternity of the child. As it was the mother's right to name a child, Bathsheba chose the name Solomon, meaning in English "his replacement." But this was an ambiguous and politically inconvenient name that required explanation.
Baden says that in order to assure the dynastic continuance of the House of David, Samuel needed to convince readers that the child was David's son, not Uriah's. Baden argues that Samuel contrived a story (a "literary creation") about the child dying after seven days to assure that a second child conceived after David and Bathsheba's marriage, i.e., the "replacement," was indeed David's child. Baden doubts the veracity of the second-child story and argues that Bathsheba birthed only one child. "His replacement" referred to Uriah himself, not to a fictional first child who died. This leads Baden to conclude that Solomon was Uriah's son, not David's, and it puts the lineage of the "House of David" in dispute. The mockup of the ambiguity concerning the paternity of Solomon is depicted in Chart 43.
Although David's eldest surviving son Adonijah was crown price, Solomon was anointed king when Bathsheba lied to the aged and infirm David that he had promised the throne to Solomon. Baden says that after David's death, Solomon eliminated David's children to end David's ancestry line. This implies that subsequent Israelite kings descended not from David, but rather from Solomon, the son of Uriah the Hittite.
Baden says that, "The legendary David is more a marble statue than a living personality, more a symbol than a man. The historical David, by contrast, is ambitious and clever, persuasive and threatening, not always in power but almost always in control. He is not someone we might want to emulate, but he is someone that we might recognize" (p. 13).
The consequential conclusion that Baden reaches in regard to the David narratives is that Solomon is more likely to have been the son of Uriah the Hittite than David the son of Jesse of the Judah tribe. If true, the twenty-seven generations form Solomon to Yossef ben Jacob as listed in Chart 64 descend from Uriah the Hittite, not from the House of David.
Part II. Jesus and his Family
8. The Father of Jesus
I have thought the virgin birth narrative in the early chapters of Matthew's and Luke's Gospels to be incredible in the sense that a virgin birth would violate all known scientific knowledge about procreation.
Stephen Mitchell suggests in his book The Gospel According to Jesus (Harper Perennial, 1993) that Mary either may have been a harlot, any of whose clients may have impregnated her, or she may have been raped by a
Roman soldier. In either case, Jesus would have been illegitimate, a condition
abhorrent in first-century Jewish society. Mitchell argues that this
fact, widely known by the local Jewish society of the day, haunted Jesus
throughout his lifetime. Mitchell finds hints of this likelihood in
challenges to Jesus, in a number of Jesus' harsher pronouncements about
his mother, his family, and women, and in the fact that Jesus never
mentions an earthly father.
Aside from Mitchell's suggestions and in the belief that a human must have been involved in impregnating Mary,
the mother of Jesus, I have explored alternate explanations. This exploration is not to deny the possibility that God may have initiated Mary's pregnancy through a human. There
appear to be four possibilities: Joseph ben Jacob, Joachim Heli
ben Matthat, Joseph ben Matthat, and Antipater ben Herod.
Matthew's genealogy of Jesus that stretches back to King David implies that Jesus' father was Joseph (Yossef) ben Jacob. Chart 57 depicts the ancestry records indicating that there were twenty-seven generations from David to Yossef ben Jacob. But if the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, Yossef is only the adoptive father of Jesus. The Matthew genealogy may well be that of Yossef ben Jacob, but the fact that biological ancestry cannot be established by adoption renders the Matthew genealogy irrelevant to Jesus' ancestry unless Yossef ben Jacob was in fact the biological father of Jesus.
Matthew's genealogy of Jesus that stretches back to King David implies that Jesus' father was Joseph (Yossef) ben Jacob. Chart 57 depicts the ancestry records indicating that there were twenty-seven generations from David to Yossef ben Jacob. But if the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, Yossef is only the adoptive father of Jesus. The Matthew genealogy may well be that of Yossef ben Jacob, but the fact that biological ancestry cannot be established by adoption renders the Matthew genealogy irrelevant to Jesus' ancestry unless Yossef ben Jacob was in fact the biological father of Jesus.
The genealogy of Jesus in Luke's Chapter 3 begins with the rather uncertain statement, "He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph the son of Heli." (NIV) This statement may refer to Joachim Heli ben Matthat who was Mary's father. Luke simply may have picked the wrong Joseph, Joseph ben Matthat (of Arimathea) to identify as Jesus' father. This Joseph was the brother of Joachim Heli ben Matthat and thus was Mary's uncle. Although the Luke genealogy is that of Jesus' mother rather than his father, it avoids the ambiguity of Solomon’s paternity because it stretches back to Nathan ben David, the third son of David and Bathsheba. This ancestry is further discussed in the next chapter.
In his 2010 book, Herodian Messiah: Case for Jesus as Grandson of Herod (https://www.amazon.com/Herodian-Messiah-Jesus-Grandson-Herod/dp/0615355080), Joseph Raymond makes a case that the actual father of Jesus was Antipater ben Herod. Raymond, a lawyer, conducted meticulous research into ancient sources as if preparing a legal brief. Raymond refers to Jesus by his Hebrew name, Yeshua. To get the sense of Raymond's argument, we take up the story in the fourth century BC.
By the middle of the fourth century BC, the Macedonian Philip II and his son Alexander had conquered Greece, Egypt, and territories to the east as far as the Indus River. After Alexander ("the Great") died in 323 BC, the ensuing war between his generals divided the Macedonian Empire. General Ptolemy took Egypt and north Africa, and General Seleucus Nicator established the Seleucid Empire spanning Alexander's eastern territories, including Israel. The Selucid overlords imposed Hellenistic culture and religious practices in Israel. But by the second century BC the Seleucid Empire was experiencing pressures from the Romans to the west and the Parthians to the East. After Hasmonean brothers Judas and Simon Maccabeus led a Jewish revolt against the Seleucids in 142 BC, Simon ruled as high priest and ethnarch of Judea and was succeeded by Hasmonean priest-kings over the course of a century as depicted in Chart 44.
Antipater, governor of Idumea, was an Edomite who had converted to Judaism. In 38 BC, his son Herod recaptured Jerusalem and was appointed Roman client king of Judea.*
Raymond says that Herod bribed Roman general Marc Antony to end a hundred years of Hasmonean rule of Judea by executing all known high royals of the Hasmonean dynasty who posed threats to what would become the Herodian dynasty. Some lower-ranking Hasmonean priests may have escaped the massacre.
Around 4 BC, Herod's eldest surviving son Antipater married a Hasmonean princess, Myriam bat Antigonus, and she soon became pregnant. But Herod suspected Antipater of plotting to kill him and so had Antipater executed just five days before the very ill Herod himself died. Raymond speculates that a Temple priest rescued Myriam from Herod's palace to avert her assassination and negotiated the betrothal of Myriam to an unmarried Temple priest named Yossef ben Jacob.
Betrothal contracts often were negotiated without the parties ever having met or even seen each other. Yossef may have been unaware of Myriam's condition, but with some reluctance he accepted the betrothal contract. After their marriage and flight to Bethlehem to escape Herod's sons, Myriam delivered a male child whom they named Yeshua ben Yossef. Raymond argues that Yeshua ben Yossef thus was the son of Antipater ben Herod and the grandson of Herod the Great. This is depicted in Chart 45.
*Norman Kotker, in his book When Rome Ruled Palestine (Horizon, NewYork, 2016), provides an excellent description of the transition of Judean rule from Antigonus to Herod.
9. The Sons of Herod the Great
Little is known about Doris, the first wife of Herod the Great that he divorced and banished so that he could marry a Hasmonean princess, Mariamne bat Alexander. Edomite Herodian kings often sought Hasmonean princesses for wives to convey an appearance of legitimacy to their reigns. But when his sister Salome intimated that Mariamne was plotting to poison him, Herod had Mariamne and her sons Aristobulus and Alexander executed. He then recalled Doris and remarried her, after which they had a son Antipater who then became first in royal succession. The recall and remarriage suggested to Raymond that Doris too may have been a royal (but lower-level than Mariamne) and possibly descended from King David. These relationships are depicted in Chart 45 (Chapter 8).
Upon the death of Herod (now "the Great"), sons Herod Archelaus and Herod Antipas sailed for Rome to participate in the adjudication of Herod's will by Caesar Augustus, leaving the kingdom in charge of brother Herod Philip. Suspecting that his father's Hasmonean daughter-in-law had escaped execution and may have birthed a child by his half-brother Antipater, Herod Philip decreed that all male children recently-born in Bethlehem should be killed. Raymond speculates that Yossef and Myriam fled with baby Yeshua to the Therapeudae commune near Alexandria in Egypt. While in residence at Therapeudae, Yossef may have become an Essene monk who learned the trade of carpentry.
Rather than appointing one of Herod's sons the new king of Judea, Caesar divided the kingdom among them. Herod Philip was appointed the tetrarch of Jordan, Herod Antipas the tetrarch of Galilee, and Herod Archelaus the ethnarch of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea. Sister Salome was given a toparchy including the cities of Jabneh, Ashdod, and Phasaelis. The sons of Herod the Great are depicted in Chart 47. Raymond argues that Yeshua ben Yossef thus was the son of Antipater ben Herod and the grandson of two kings, Herod the Great whose father was an Edomite, and Antigonus Mattathias, a Hasmonean of the Levi tribe.
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10. The Mother of Jesus
The New Testament books of Matthew and Luke identify the mother of Jesus as a peasant girl named Mary who became impregnated by the Holy Spirit. Ancestry records identify her as Myriam bat Heli.
The name "Heli" is pertinent because the lineage of Jesus traced in Luke's Chapter 3 begins, "He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph the son of Heli." (NIV) This statement may refer to Joachim Heli ben Matthat who ancestry records indicate was Myriam's father. As noted in Chapter 8, Luke may have picked the wrong Joseph, Joseph ben Matthat to identify as Jesus' father. This Joseph was the brother of Joachim Heli ben Matthat and thus was Myriam's uncle. The Luke genealogy stretches back to Nathan ben David of the Judah tribe, a fact that rendered Jesus an authentic candidate to become a Jewish messiah. This genealogy is depicted in Chart 48.
Another
of Myriam's uncles was a temple priest, Zachariah ben Matthat, "the
Zadok." Zachariah's wife was Elisabeth bat Sobe. Luke's Chapter 1
relates the story of how the elderly Zachariah and Elisabeth were
informed by an angel that she would become pregnant and birth a baby
that they should name Joanan. The pregnant Myriam visited her aunt
Elisabeth in Elisabeth's sixth month of pregnancy and stayed with her
for three months until the birth of Elisabeth's child. Although it was
thought that the child would be named after his father, Zachariah
affirmed that the child would be named Joanan. Joanan grew up to become
the character that we know as "John the Baptist." John the Baptist,
though Jesus' first cousin removed by one generation, was only about six
months older than Jesus.
But Myriam bat Heli may not have been the biological daughter of Joachim Heli ben Matthat. As described in Chapater 8, Joseph Raymond makes a case that Myriam was a Hasmonean princess who had been adopted by Joachim Heli ben Matthat. Raymond notes that in Antiquities (XVII 5:2), Jewish historian Josephus referred to an unnamed daughter of Antigonus who survived the massacre. Raymond speculates that this daughter was rescued from Herod's palace by a Temple priest, Joachim Heli ben Matthat, and that Joachim and his wife Anna raised her in the Temple precincts. Her birth name would have been Myriam bat Antigonus. Her adoptive name became Myriam bat Heli, the mother of Yeshua. This is depicted in Chart 46.
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Now we can take up the lineage from Yossef ben Jacob and Myriam bat Heli to the present. One of my ancestry lines is depicted in Chart 72E (repeated from Chapter 1).
How Antenor IV, king of a tribe on the east bank of the Rhine River, might have encountered a Jewish girl named Sarah Damaris in the south of France is unknown. Some ancestry records indicate that Antenor married "Sarah France (born de Marsella)" (https://www.myheritage.com/names/antenor_france). “Sarah” is a Jewish name; “Damaris” may be either Latin or French. "Marsella" is the Roman name of today's French port Marseille.
So how did a Hebrew girl named Sarah get to the south of France? The mother of Sarah Damaris is identified in ancestry records a Maria bat Syrus ("the Yairite") who was married to one Yeshua ben Yossef. Readers of the Christian "New Testament" may recognize these two as Mary Magdalene and Jesus the son of Joseph.
By some means the boat made its way westward across the Mediterranean and eventually landed in the Roman province of Gaul near Marsella, what today is Marseille, France. According to French tradition, Mary Magdalene preached the gospel and lived an ascetic lifestyle in a limestone cave in the Languedoc region of the south of France until she died. Maximin began the evangelization of Aix-en-Provence together with Mary Magdalene and became the first bishop of Aix-en-Provence. Locals have venerated various sites associated with Mary Magdalene, and today there are numerous religious sites in the south of France dedicated to Mary Magdalene.
If Sarah Damaris indeed accompanied her mother Mary Magdalene to Gaul and married Antenor IV, does my ancestry line stretch to Jesus? The website "The Larger Picture: The Intertwining of Seemingly Unrelated Threads Back to Abraham" (https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~wgg/Genealogy/relatedthreads.pdf) offers some confirmation of the ancestry line descent in Chart 13. One problem is that the ancestry lines that I have traced do not include names of siblings. This means that the lines of descent that I traced may be from a sibling of a party included in the "The Larger Picture" ancestry lines. Another problem is that name spellings vary in different ancestry records that were recorded in different languages (some in English, others in French or German), and it is often difficult to establish correspondence between them. I was very careful to match each party's individual ancestry record in an ancestry line to its parent's records, and parents to their children, so I am confident that the ancestry line of descent from Antenor IV is authentic.
1. Did Jesus marry Mary Magdalene and father a child with her? If Jesus was born some time around 4 BC, he was nearly 40 years old when he was crucified between 32 and 36 AD. Life expectancy in Palestine during the first century AD probably was less than 50 years, so Yeshua was past early manhood and heading toward old age. By that age, most Jewish men would have married and fathered most of their children. Assuming that Jesus was at least partially human and reasonably virile, it is not unreasonable to presume that he may have experienced normal human urges, engaged in typical male human activity, married his most devoted female follower, and fathered a child with her. Legends suggest the possibility, but there is no incontrovertible evidence that he did so. So, we just don't know.
2. Did Mary Magdalene and daughter make their way to the south of France to escape persecution in Jerusalem? There are two competing traditions about where Mary Magdalene went after the crucifixion of Jesus, but there is no documentary evidence that supports either tradition.
In what I shall refer to as the “Ephesus tradition,” while on the cross Jesus said to the disciple “whom he loved,” presumably John (but possibly Mary Magdalene), “Here is your mother.” The passage continues, “From that time on, this disciple took her into his home” (John 19:27). Tradition has it that John took Mary with him to Ephesus and built a stone house for her on a hillside overlooking Ephesus. A house in that region was identified as Mary’s in 1881 by Abbé Gouyet, a French priest, following directions in a vision by Anne Catherine Emmerich, a bedridden Augustinian nun in Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_the_Virgin_Mary). The tradition also maintains either that Mary Magdalene accompanied Mary to Ephesus (no mention of a daughter) or that Mary Magdalene retired to Ephesus to live in Mary’s house after Mary died. In either case, according to tradition, Mary Magdalene lived out her years and died there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene#Speculations). Locals in Ephesus have venerated the site through the ages.
In the “Marsella tradition,” Mary Magdalene (conflated by some with Mary of Bethany), Mary of Bethany, her sister Martha, her brother Lazarus, Maximin (one of the 72 disciples appointed by Jesus in Luke 10:1), and others escaped persecution in a boat on the Mediterranean Sea. The boat made its way westward across the Mediterranean and eventually landed on the south coast of Gaul near Marcella, the modern city of Marseille, France. Tradition has it that Mary Magdalene was accompanied by her daughter who was named Sarah Damaris. “Sarah,” a Hebrew name, was unusual in the south of France. In Latin, “maris,” the genitive case of “mare,” translates into English as "belonging to the sea." In French, “de Marie” translates into English as “of Mary.” Either might fit the name “Damaris.”
Biblical scholars generally favor the Ephesus tradition, probably because it meshes with the John 19:27 passage. They reject the Marsella tradition for lack of any scriptural or early church history references to it. While locals in the south of France may have venerated purported Magdalene sites for centuries, the tradition came to prominence only around the middle of the eleventh century when two monks at Vézelay in Burgundy claimed to have discovered Mary’s skeleton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene). How the boat got from Palestine to Marsella is unknown (a miracle?), and the story about the group being towed out to sea in a rudderless boat without sail or oars, and somehow making it to the south coast of France, is suspect. The “St. Mary Magdalene” entry in the on-line edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica says that “French tradition spuriously claims that she evangelized southeastern France and spent her last 30 years in an Alpine cavern.” (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Mary-Magdalene).
Today, Magdalene veneration and religious sites dedicated to her in the south of France are extensive. And ancestry records indicating that a “Sarah Damaris” married a member of the Frank nobility would seem to support the Marsella tradition. An old adage may apply: “where there’s smoke there must be fire,” or a variation, “there are too many cinders for there to have been no fire.” Did Mary Magdalene die at Ephesus in modern Turkey or bring a daughter with her to France? Again, we just don't know on either count.
3. If a daughter accompanied Mary Magdalene to the south of France, did she marry into a Frankish dynasty? Several ancestry records indicate that Sarah Damaris married Antenor IV, but we simply can't know for certain where Sarah Damaris was born or whether she was the daughter of Mary Magdalene.
The first century AD expectation was that a messiah must be a descendant of King David of the Judah tribe. The apostle Paul, in letters written to churches in the Jewish diaspora of Asia Minor, insisted that Jesus was a descendant of David which qualified him to be an authentic Jewish messiah who could occupy the throne of David. Today, religious Jews who dismiss the Christian claim that Jesus was the long-expected messiah still await the “real” messiah.
If Solomon was David’s biological son and Ruth was David’s paternal great grandmother, then Moabite blood flowed in Jesus’ veins. If, as Baden contends, Solomon was not David's son, then Yeshua descended from the son of a Hittite whose blood flowed in Yeshua's veins. If Yeshua indeed was the grandson of Herod the Great, then Edomite blood flowed in his veins.
Solomon's paternity may be uncertain, but there is no question that Nathan, the third of four sons born to David and Bathsheba, was an actual son of David. This means that if Myriam bat Heli was daughter of Joiachim ben Matthat, Yeshua would be an authentic descendant of David through his mother's ancestry that stretched to Nathan. But if Myriam bat Heli actually was the daughter of Antigonus ben Mattathias as argued by Joseph Raymond, Jesus' ancestry is of the Levi tribe rather than of the House of David of the Judah tribe.
Raymond makes the case that even if Yeshua was not descended from David, his Hasmonean Levite ancestry qualified him to be an authentic Jewish messiah.
By the time he reached adulthood, Yeshua may have become aware of his identity as grandson of two Judean kings. Yeshua began to follow his cousin John "the baptizer," an itinerant preacher who was attracting a large rural following. John alienated Antipas by criticizing as incestuous his marriage to Herodias, his brother's wife and also his niece. After Antipas had John executed, Yeshua took up John's ministry preaching a gospel of universal love and care for fellow humans, and that the Kingdom of God was near at hand, a message that made the Roman authorities nervous. But Raymond asks why the Romans took seriously the rantings of an itinerant preacher.
When he began his "ministry" around the age of 30, Jesus took his principal mission to be preaching that the "Kingdom of God is near at hand" and advocating love of and care for fellow humans. He is portrayed in the Gospels as somewhat of an unintentional Jewish "messiah" who admonished his disciples to keep his incipient messiahood a secret. A "messianic quest" seems incidental to his preaching ministry, at least until he decided to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, a signal of the arrival of a messiah as predicted in ancient scriptures.
In Raymond's telling, Yeshua's preaching ministry seems secondary to his deliberate quest to fulfill the role of a Jewish messiah who would precipitate popular uprising to overthrow the Roman occupation of Judea. It is not clear that Yeshua himself was a so-called "zealot," but some of his followers can be so identified. As his preaching ministry continued to attract an ever-growing following, Yeshua attracted the attention of the Roman authorities. Raymond says that the reason that the Romans took Yeshua's preaching seriously was his known identity as a dynastic Jewish royal. His preaching about the coming Kingdom of God was taken by Rome to be seditious.
During his preaching ministry, Yeshua criticized the Jewish Temple authorities for engaging in corrupt practices. As the possible long-expected Jewish messiah, Yeshua threatened the authority of the Sanhedrin, the Jerusalem Temple governing body. Sanhedrin head Caiaphas appealed to the Roman authorities to have Jesus executed. Raymond explains that the appeal to Roman authority was necessary because as a member of a Jewish royal dynasty, Yeshua was a Roman citizen who could be executed only on the authority of the emperor. Raymond speculates that Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, may have been bribed by the Sanhedrin to authorize the execution even without approval from Rome.
The narratives in the New Testament Gospels indicate that after his execution and burial, Jesus rose from the dead, was seen by numerous people, and after 40 days ascended to Heaven.
Jesus' time on the cross was much shorter than usually required to cause death. Mark 15:44 tells that Pilate sent a centurion to see if Jesus was dead, and Pilate was surprised when told by the centurion that Jesus had already died.
Michael Baigent conjectures that Jesus may have been drugged by the sponge which contained, not wine vinegar that would have revived him (Mark 15:36), but some combination of drugs so that he appeared to have died (The Jesus Papers, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). He then could be removed from the cross in a sedated (perhaps even comatose) state and taken to a nearby tomb so that he could recover and his wounds could be treated. Baigent argues that this may be implied in John 19:39 which indicates that Joseph and Nicodemus took with them to the tomb a large amount of aromatic spices (myrrh and aloes) that also had healing properties. This theme is also pursued in Howard Brenton's play "Paul" that was first produced at the National Theatre in London in 2005 (Paul, NHB Books, London, 2006).
Bart Ehrman says that it is inconceivable that Jesus received a decent burial since his disciples had fled, he had no family living in Jerusalem, and no one else in Jerusalem would have been able or willing to provide proper burial for a peasant executed for sedition (How Jesus Became God, HarperCollins, 2014). In Ehrman's opinion, the story about Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus likely was a later fabrication to enable a resurrection narrative. If there had been no decent burial in a grave, there also could have been no resurrection from a grave. Ehrman doubts that either burial or resurrection could have occurred as described in Matthew's and Luke's gospels.
John Dominic Crossan says that Jesus' corpse likely was left on the cross, as was the usual Roman practice, to be eaten by dogs (The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, HarperCollins, 1992). However, Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino have published a book claiming to have found the Jesus family tomb in Jerusalem (The Jesus Family Tomb: the Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence that Could Change History, HarperCollins, 2007).
Ehrman argues that soon after his death and perceived resurrection, Jesus' followers presumed that he had been exalted by God to divine status since he was no longer present and his body was missing.
After the reputed resurrection, Jesus was "seen" on the road to Emmaus and by various disciples and disciple groups. This might have been possible if Jesus had survived the crucifixion and recovered as hypothesized by Baigent. Ehrman says that Jesus probably did die in the crucifixion, and that the "appearances" of Jesus after his crucifixion more likely were visions experienced by the various parties. Jim Vincent says that "The most convincing interpretation of the resurrection accounts is that they describe, in figurative form, the dawning of a gradual realisation on the part of the disciples of the significance of Jesus and of his continuing existence" (Should the Church Abandon the Bible?, aSys Publications, 2018).
So we have five identifiable theories of how Jesus may have been seen by people after the crucifixion:
Patrick Goggins asserts that even if the resurrection narrative is a myth, Jesus' message does not depend on his resurrection from the dead for its truth. Goggins says that "Islam teaches that Mohammad died and was buried, yet his earthly message lives on. Perhaps Jesus's words can likewise survive the death of his earthly body" (A Reader's Guide to Reza Aslan's "Zealot," Kindle e-book).
By his Davidian or Levite ancestry, Jesus may have met the first-century requisite to become a Jewish messiah. With respect to local Jewish expectations at the time, his messianic quest appeared to fail. Latter-day Christians may argue that his prophetic and teaching ministry succeeded. But twenty-first-century Christians face a dilemma: to worship Jesus as a divine, or to revere him as a mortal who was a great teacher and prophet.
In the New Testament Gospel accounts, Jesus' life and ministry occur primarily among the Jewish peasantry but with intervention by God to effect a virgin birth that rendered Jesus the divine Son of God. In contrast, Joseph Raymond's account of the life of Yeshua is a matter of palace and Temple intrigue among Jewish royals and high-ranking priests. If indeed he was conceived by two human mortals, Yeshua himself was a mortal. He may have been tapped by God to serve as a prophet, but Old Testament prophets were mortals who were not considered divine.
Raymond's research does not address the resurrection issue, likely because from a legal standpoint its nature is essentially a matter of hearsay and belief with no substantive historical evidence for a lawyer to research. Even so, the implication in the Gospels that God raised Yeshua from the dead and exalted him to divine status cannot be ruled out.
So, which variant of the Jesus story seems more credible, the New Testament narratives about the virgin birth that rendered Jesus the Son of God, or the Raymond story about palace and temple intrigue that produced a mortal, Antigonus ben Antipater, i.e., the adopted Yeshua ben Yossef?
There is a dearth of extra-biblical historical matter to authenticate the New Testament narratives. The early part of the Raymond variant is attested only by the Hebrew Tanakh, i.e., the Christian "Old Testament," from patriarchs Abraham and Isaac through the Babylonian exile in 597 BC. Historical information of the story from Alexander the Great's death in 323 BC through Herod's execution of Antipater in 4 BC is reliably attested in historical documents. But the identification of Antipater ben Herod as Yeshua ben Yossef's actual father, and Antipater's wife Myriam Bat Heli as Yeshua's birth mother, is Raymond's speculation and inference based on his research of ancient documents. Much of the rest of the story encompassing John the Baptizer's execution, Yeshua's ministry and messianic pursuit, and his execution by the Romans is attested or alluded to by Josephus and other writers of first and second century AD.
Aside from the speculative nature of the linkage of Yeshua to Antipater and Myriam, the Raymond story avoids an unscientific virgin birth narrative that rendered Yeshua divine, and it provides an explanation of why the Romans took seriously the ministry and messianic pursuit of an itinerant Jewish preacher that led to his execution.
Does it matter that the New Testament Gospels portray Jesus as a peasant who was divine by virgin birth and who preached a message of universal love, but the Raymond story portrays Yeshua as a royal mortal on a messianic quest? Modern Christianity seems to obsess on the "bookends" of Jesus' life, i.e., the circumstances of his birth and death, rather than what's between the bookends, the example of his life and the content of his teachings. In the long run, even into the twenty-first century, the details of Jesus'/Yeshua's birth and death may be of lesser significance than his message of universal love and care for fellow humans.
But, yes, it does matter whether Jesus was/is the divine Son of God or Yeshua was the mortal son of Antipater and Myriam. It matters as to whether humans should worship Jesus as divine or revere him as a mortal, possibly as a prophet whom God commissioned to bring a message to humanity. If the latter, then the concept of "trinity" is a myth, but only one among many that humans have relied upon in their efforts to understand the nature of divinity.
It cannot be ruled-out that God may have exalted the human Yeshua to divine status after his execution. But without historical facts or scientific data to authenticate this possibility, it must remain a matter of belief. Worship Jesus or revere Yeshua as you wish and as you believe.
It might be helpful to be able to see how the charts pertaining to Jesus’ ancestry are connected. The charts in this book that depict Jesus’ ancestry were derived from a single large chart that is too big to present here. It has been divided into two parts, Chart 41 Left and Chart 41 Right.
Often it is the intent of writers of historical fiction to pose alternate facts in the stories that they write. Writers of biblical fiction may describe alternate facts that may seem to be credible. Bible passages represent certain events as historical facts that to some people seem incredible, most notably the virgin birth and resurrection narratives.
Both Krishna Rose and Sue Monk Kidd recently have published novels that portray Jesus as having been married. Rose, in her novel The Woman in Red: Magdalene Speaks*, introduces alternate facts with respect to Mary Magdalene, one of the principal characters in the biblical Jesus story. The Rose novel loosely follows the Antipiter ancestry sequence. In contrast, Sue Monk Kidd, in her novel The Book of Longings**, centers her story on an entirely fictitious character named Ana. The Kidd novel follows more closely the Joseph ben Jacob ancestry sequence.
Most of the events in the Ana story are shoehorned into the information void between two major events in the Jesus story, his 12-year-old visit to the Jerusalem Temple around 8 or 9 A.D. and his baptism by John around 30 A.D. This is the period in Jesus' life for which there is no recorded information. Using this literary device, Kidd portrays Ana's life events without contradicting or intruding upon the essential biblical narration of Jesus' life and ministry period up to his execution.
Rose offers alternate scenarios with respect to the biblical virgin birth and resurrection narratives, but Kidd does not disabuse readers of these narratives. Kidd does introduce alternate facts in Ana's engagement with two biblical characters in the Jesus story: Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Judas who betrays Jesus. Both Kidd and Rose introduce Salome as a fictional sister of Jesus.
Kidd tells an excellent story which, although fictional, seems all too believable. There is no writer better than Kidd for conveying setting, dialog, and presence. The opportunity foregone in this novel was to have centered it on a real person rather than a fictional creation, as for example how Krishna Rose's novel was centered on Mary Magdalene. There is no tradition that Jesus married an Ana, but there is a non-biblical tradition that he may have married Mary Magdalene and fathered children with her. As I read Kidd's novel I thought how an excellent story was wasted on a fictional character when it might have been based on a biblical character such as Mary Magdalene. Perhaps this is because I first read Rose's novel, The Woman in Red: Magdalene Speaks. Even so, Kidd is the superior writer and story teller.
*https://www.amazon.com/Woman-Red-Magdalene-Krishna-Rose-ebook/dp/B08281FB8Z/ref=sr_1_1?crid=B3QUJUY7RB8M&dchild=1&keywords=woman+in+red+magdalene+speaks&qid=1590868337&sprefix=Magdalene+speaks%2Caps%2C179&sr=8-1
**https://www.amazon.com/Book-Longings-Sue-Monk-Kidd/dp/052542976X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=GCJ7CXQ47MRS&dchild=1&keywords=kidd+longings&qid=1592500081&sprefix=Kidd+Longings%2Caps%2C188&sr=8-1
But Myriam bat Heli may not have been the biological daughter of Joachim Heli ben Matthat. As described in Chapater 8, Joseph Raymond makes a case that Myriam was a Hasmonean princess who had been adopted by Joachim Heli ben Matthat. Raymond notes that in Antiquities (XVII 5:2), Jewish historian Josephus referred to an unnamed daughter of Antigonus who survived the massacre. Raymond speculates that this daughter was rescued from Herod's palace by a Temple priest, Joachim Heli ben Matthat, and that Joachim and his wife Anna raised her in the Temple precincts. Her birth name would have been Myriam bat Antigonus. Her adoptive name became Myriam bat Heli, the mother of Yeshua. This is depicted in Chart 46.
11. Sarah Damaris
Now we can take up the lineage from Yossef ben Jacob and Myriam bat Heli to the present. One of my ancestry lines is depicted in Chart 72E (repeated from Chapter 1).
Ancestry
records indicate that Antenor IV, King of the Francs in the Sicambri
region of western Germany, married a Sarah Damaris of Nazareth. Chart 9
depicts this relationship.
How Antenor IV, king of a tribe on the east bank of the Rhine River, might have encountered a Jewish girl named Sarah Damaris in the south of France is unknown. Some ancestry records indicate that Antenor married "Sarah France (born de Marsella)" (https://www.myheritage.com/names/antenor_france). “Sarah” is a Jewish name; “Damaris” may be either Latin or French. "Marsella" is the Roman name of today's French port Marseille.
So how did a Hebrew girl named Sarah get to the south of France? The mother of Sarah Damaris is identified in ancestry records a Maria bat Syrus ("the Yairite") who was married to one Yeshua ben Yossef. Readers of the Christian "New Testament" may recognize these two as Mary Magdalene and Jesus the son of Joseph.
For several years following the
crucifixion of Jesus around 33 AD (some put it later, in 36 AD), his
followers were persecuted by both Jews and Pagans. After the execution
of James (the son of Zebedee) in Jerusalem, Mary Magdalene (conflated by
some with Mary of Bethany), Mary of Bethany, her sister Martha, her
brother Lazarus, Maximin (one of the 72 disciples appointed by Jesus in
Luke 10:1), and others escaped persecution in a boat on Mare Nostrum
(the Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea). Tradition has it that Mary
Magdalene was accompanied by her daughter who was named Sarah Damaris. A
version of this story is that Pagans towed them out to sea in a
rudderless boat without sail, oars, or supplies to die at sea
(http://www.magdalenepublishing.org/about/).
By some means the boat made its way westward across the Mediterranean and eventually landed in the Roman province of Gaul near Marsella, what today is Marseille, France. According to French tradition, Mary Magdalene preached the gospel and lived an ascetic lifestyle in a limestone cave in the Languedoc region of the south of France until she died. Maximin began the evangelization of Aix-en-Provence together with Mary Magdalene and became the first bishop of Aix-en-Provence. Locals have venerated various sites associated with Mary Magdalene, and today there are numerous religious sites in the south of France dedicated to Mary Magdalene.
If Sarah Damaris indeed accompanied her mother Mary Magdalene to Gaul and married Antenor IV, does my ancestry line stretch to Jesus? The website "The Larger Picture: The Intertwining of Seemingly Unrelated Threads Back to Abraham" (https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~wgg/Genealogy/relatedthreads.pdf) offers some confirmation of the ancestry line descent in Chart 13. One problem is that the ancestry lines that I have traced do not include names of siblings. This means that the lines of descent that I traced may be from a sibling of a party included in the "The Larger Picture" ancestry lines. Another problem is that name spellings vary in different ancestry records that were recorded in different languages (some in English, others in French or German), and it is often difficult to establish correspondence between them. I was very careful to match each party's individual ancestry record in an ancestry line to its parent's records, and parents to their children, so I am confident that the ancestry line of descent from Antenor IV is authentic.
12. The Magdalene Conundrum
When several years ago I first read the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (Random House, 1982), I dismissed their hypothesis as pure speculation and maybe some wishful thinking. But given my ancestry research, I now am not so sure. In their research, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln (BLL) stumbled onto a possibility that they had not been looking for.
On the basis of their research findings, BLL shifted the focus of their research to a new hypothesis, i.e., that Jesus fathered a child with Mary Magdalene, that she and daughter along with a number of other believers escaped persecution by fleeing in a boat across the Mediterranean Sea to land on the south coast of France, and that the daughter married into the Frankish dynasty to promulgate a sacred bloodline that persists to this day. The corollary of the BLL hypothesis is that the "Holy Grail" is not a vessel that may have contained Jesus' blood and which has been the object of search through the ages by Templar knights and others, but rather it is the sacred blood line itself. The BLL hypothesis became a central theme in Dan Brown’s 2003 book, The Da Vinci Code.
As to whether I might be descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and begging the question of the divinity/humanity of Yeshua, there are at least three questions, none of which can be answered definitively.
On the basis of their research findings, BLL shifted the focus of their research to a new hypothesis, i.e., that Jesus fathered a child with Mary Magdalene, that she and daughter along with a number of other believers escaped persecution by fleeing in a boat across the Mediterranean Sea to land on the south coast of France, and that the daughter married into the Frankish dynasty to promulgate a sacred bloodline that persists to this day. The corollary of the BLL hypothesis is that the "Holy Grail" is not a vessel that may have contained Jesus' blood and which has been the object of search through the ages by Templar knights and others, but rather it is the sacred blood line itself. The BLL hypothesis became a central theme in Dan Brown’s 2003 book, The Da Vinci Code.
As to whether I might be descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and begging the question of the divinity/humanity of Yeshua, there are at least three questions, none of which can be answered definitively.
1. Did Jesus marry Mary Magdalene and father a child with her? If Jesus was born some time around 4 BC, he was nearly 40 years old when he was crucified between 32 and 36 AD. Life expectancy in Palestine during the first century AD probably was less than 50 years, so Yeshua was past early manhood and heading toward old age. By that age, most Jewish men would have married and fathered most of their children. Assuming that Jesus was at least partially human and reasonably virile, it is not unreasonable to presume that he may have experienced normal human urges, engaged in typical male human activity, married his most devoted female follower, and fathered a child with her. Legends suggest the possibility, but there is no incontrovertible evidence that he did so. So, we just don't know.
2. Did Mary Magdalene and daughter make their way to the south of France to escape persecution in Jerusalem? There are two competing traditions about where Mary Magdalene went after the crucifixion of Jesus, but there is no documentary evidence that supports either tradition.
In what I shall refer to as the “Ephesus tradition,” while on the cross Jesus said to the disciple “whom he loved,” presumably John (but possibly Mary Magdalene), “Here is your mother.” The passage continues, “From that time on, this disciple took her into his home” (John 19:27). Tradition has it that John took Mary with him to Ephesus and built a stone house for her on a hillside overlooking Ephesus. A house in that region was identified as Mary’s in 1881 by Abbé Gouyet, a French priest, following directions in a vision by Anne Catherine Emmerich, a bedridden Augustinian nun in Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_the_Virgin_Mary). The tradition also maintains either that Mary Magdalene accompanied Mary to Ephesus (no mention of a daughter) or that Mary Magdalene retired to Ephesus to live in Mary’s house after Mary died. In either case, according to tradition, Mary Magdalene lived out her years and died there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene#Speculations). Locals in Ephesus have venerated the site through the ages.
In the “Marsella tradition,” Mary Magdalene (conflated by some with Mary of Bethany), Mary of Bethany, her sister Martha, her brother Lazarus, Maximin (one of the 72 disciples appointed by Jesus in Luke 10:1), and others escaped persecution in a boat on the Mediterranean Sea. The boat made its way westward across the Mediterranean and eventually landed on the south coast of Gaul near Marcella, the modern city of Marseille, France. Tradition has it that Mary Magdalene was accompanied by her daughter who was named Sarah Damaris. “Sarah,” a Hebrew name, was unusual in the south of France. In Latin, “maris,” the genitive case of “mare,” translates into English as "belonging to the sea." In French, “de Marie” translates into English as “of Mary.” Either might fit the name “Damaris.”
Biblical scholars generally favor the Ephesus tradition, probably because it meshes with the John 19:27 passage. They reject the Marsella tradition for lack of any scriptural or early church history references to it. While locals in the south of France may have venerated purported Magdalene sites for centuries, the tradition came to prominence only around the middle of the eleventh century when two monks at Vézelay in Burgundy claimed to have discovered Mary’s skeleton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene). How the boat got from Palestine to Marsella is unknown (a miracle?), and the story about the group being towed out to sea in a rudderless boat without sail or oars, and somehow making it to the south coast of France, is suspect. The “St. Mary Magdalene” entry in the on-line edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica says that “French tradition spuriously claims that she evangelized southeastern France and spent her last 30 years in an Alpine cavern.” (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Mary-Magdalene).
Today, Magdalene veneration and religious sites dedicated to her in the south of France are extensive. And ancestry records indicating that a “Sarah Damaris” married a member of the Frank nobility would seem to support the Marsella tradition. An old adage may apply: “where there’s smoke there must be fire,” or a variation, “there are too many cinders for there to have been no fire.” Did Mary Magdalene die at Ephesus in modern Turkey or bring a daughter with her to France? Again, we just don't know on either count.
3. If a daughter accompanied Mary Magdalene to the south of France, did she marry into a Frankish dynasty? Several ancestry records indicate that Sarah Damaris married Antenor IV, but we simply can't know for certain where Sarah Damaris was born or whether she was the daughter of Mary Magdalene.
So, where does that leave us? It is unlikely that I am a blood descendant of Mary Magdalene and Yeshua ben Yossef, but there is no way to confirm this with confidence. But even if I could be confident that I am so related, would that mean that the bloodline from Yeshua to me is sacred as implied in Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln's book Holy Blood, Holy Grail? This depends upon whether Jesus was fully human, fully divine, or both simultaneously (a divine mystery, but a logical impossibility).
Part III. The Dilemma
13. An Eligible Messiah?
The first century AD expectation was that a messiah must be a descendant of King David of the Judah tribe. The apostle Paul, in letters written to churches in the Jewish diaspora of Asia Minor, insisted that Jesus was a descendant of David which qualified him to be an authentic Jewish messiah who could occupy the throne of David. Today, religious Jews who dismiss the Christian claim that Jesus was the long-expected messiah still await the “real” messiah.
If Solomon was David’s biological son and Ruth was David’s paternal great grandmother, then Moabite blood flowed in Jesus’ veins. If, as Baden contends, Solomon was not David's son, then Yeshua descended from the son of a Hittite whose blood flowed in Yeshua's veins. If Yeshua indeed was the grandson of Herod the Great, then Edomite blood flowed in his veins.
Solomon's paternity may be uncertain, but there is no question that Nathan, the third of four sons born to David and Bathsheba, was an actual son of David. This means that if Myriam bat Heli was daughter of Joiachim ben Matthat, Yeshua would be an authentic descendant of David through his mother's ancestry that stretched to Nathan. But if Myriam bat Heli actually was the daughter of Antigonus ben Mattathias as argued by Joseph Raymond, Jesus' ancestry is of the Levi tribe rather than of the House of David of the Judah tribe.
Raymond makes the case that even if Yeshua was not descended from David, his Hasmonean Levite ancestry qualified him to be an authentic Jewish messiah.
14. Messianic Secret or Quest?
By the time he reached adulthood, Yeshua may have become aware of his identity as grandson of two Judean kings. Yeshua began to follow his cousin John "the baptizer," an itinerant preacher who was attracting a large rural following. John alienated Antipas by criticizing as incestuous his marriage to Herodias, his brother's wife and also his niece. After Antipas had John executed, Yeshua took up John's ministry preaching a gospel of universal love and care for fellow humans, and that the Kingdom of God was near at hand, a message that made the Roman authorities nervous. But Raymond asks why the Romans took seriously the rantings of an itinerant preacher.
When he began his "ministry" around the age of 30, Jesus took his principal mission to be preaching that the "Kingdom of God is near at hand" and advocating love of and care for fellow humans. He is portrayed in the Gospels as somewhat of an unintentional Jewish "messiah" who admonished his disciples to keep his incipient messiahood a secret. A "messianic quest" seems incidental to his preaching ministry, at least until he decided to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, a signal of the arrival of a messiah as predicted in ancient scriptures.
In Raymond's telling, Yeshua's preaching ministry seems secondary to his deliberate quest to fulfill the role of a Jewish messiah who would precipitate popular uprising to overthrow the Roman occupation of Judea. It is not clear that Yeshua himself was a so-called "zealot," but some of his followers can be so identified. As his preaching ministry continued to attract an ever-growing following, Yeshua attracted the attention of the Roman authorities. Raymond says that the reason that the Romans took Yeshua's preaching seriously was his known identity as a dynastic Jewish royal. His preaching about the coming Kingdom of God was taken by Rome to be seditious.
During his preaching ministry, Yeshua criticized the Jewish Temple authorities for engaging in corrupt practices. As the possible long-expected Jewish messiah, Yeshua threatened the authority of the Sanhedrin, the Jerusalem Temple governing body. Sanhedrin head Caiaphas appealed to the Roman authorities to have Jesus executed. Raymond explains that the appeal to Roman authority was necessary because as a member of a Jewish royal dynasty, Yeshua was a Roman citizen who could be executed only on the authority of the emperor. Raymond speculates that Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, may have been bribed by the Sanhedrin to authorize the execution even without approval from Rome.
15. And Then?
The narratives in the New Testament Gospels indicate that after his execution and burial, Jesus rose from the dead, was seen by numerous people, and after 40 days ascended to Heaven.
Jesus' time on the cross was much shorter than usually required to cause death. Mark 15:44 tells that Pilate sent a centurion to see if Jesus was dead, and Pilate was surprised when told by the centurion that Jesus had already died.
Michael Baigent conjectures that Jesus may have been drugged by the sponge which contained, not wine vinegar that would have revived him (Mark 15:36), but some combination of drugs so that he appeared to have died (The Jesus Papers, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). He then could be removed from the cross in a sedated (perhaps even comatose) state and taken to a nearby tomb so that he could recover and his wounds could be treated. Baigent argues that this may be implied in John 19:39 which indicates that Joseph and Nicodemus took with them to the tomb a large amount of aromatic spices (myrrh and aloes) that also had healing properties. This theme is also pursued in Howard Brenton's play "Paul" that was first produced at the National Theatre in London in 2005 (Paul, NHB Books, London, 2006).
Bart Ehrman says that it is inconceivable that Jesus received a decent burial since his disciples had fled, he had no family living in Jerusalem, and no one else in Jerusalem would have been able or willing to provide proper burial for a peasant executed for sedition (How Jesus Became God, HarperCollins, 2014). In Ehrman's opinion, the story about Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus likely was a later fabrication to enable a resurrection narrative. If there had been no decent burial in a grave, there also could have been no resurrection from a grave. Ehrman doubts that either burial or resurrection could have occurred as described in Matthew's and Luke's gospels.
John Dominic Crossan says that Jesus' corpse likely was left on the cross, as was the usual Roman practice, to be eaten by dogs (The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, HarperCollins, 1992). However, Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino have published a book claiming to have found the Jesus family tomb in Jerusalem (The Jesus Family Tomb: the Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence that Could Change History, HarperCollins, 2007).
Ehrman argues that soon after his death and perceived resurrection, Jesus' followers presumed that he had been exalted by God to divine status since he was no longer present and his body was missing.
After the reputed resurrection, Jesus was "seen" on the road to Emmaus and by various disciples and disciple groups. This might have been possible if Jesus had survived the crucifixion and recovered as hypothesized by Baigent. Ehrman says that Jesus probably did die in the crucifixion, and that the "appearances" of Jesus after his crucifixion more likely were visions experienced by the various parties. Jim Vincent says that "The most convincing interpretation of the resurrection accounts is that they describe, in figurative form, the dawning of a gradual realisation on the part of the disciples of the significance of Jesus and of his continuing existence" (Should the Church Abandon the Bible?, aSys Publications, 2018).
So we have five identifiable theories of how Jesus may have been seen by people after the crucifixion:
1. Jesus actually was God (or God’s Son, a version of God himself) who contrived a death-by-crucifixion charade, and thus by divine prerogative could appear to humans after the crucifixion.
2. Jesus was a human who actually died in the crucifixion but was resurrected by God and exalted to divine status, and who then could appear as a living human until his ascension to heaven.
3. Jesus was a human who actually died in the crucifixion but whose “appearances” after the crucifixion were visions experienced by various parties.
4. Jesus was a human who actually died in the crucifixion so that his “appearances” after the crucifixion were a figurative description of a gradual realization by disciples of his significance.
5. Jesus was a human who was crucified but who survived the crucifixion and recovered enough to actually be seen by other humans.
These are theories that can neither be proved nor disproved by historical or scientific evidence, so the question boils down to which seems more credible. Orthodox theology believers may choose theory (1) or theory (2). The most credible alternative may be theory (5). If Baigent's, Ehrman's, or Vincent’s takes on these stories are true, then the biblical birth, death, and resurrection narratives are myths.2. Jesus was a human who actually died in the crucifixion but was resurrected by God and exalted to divine status, and who then could appear as a living human until his ascension to heaven.
3. Jesus was a human who actually died in the crucifixion but whose “appearances” after the crucifixion were visions experienced by various parties.
4. Jesus was a human who actually died in the crucifixion so that his “appearances” after the crucifixion were a figurative description of a gradual realization by disciples of his significance.
5. Jesus was a human who was crucified but who survived the crucifixion and recovered enough to actually be seen by other humans.
Patrick Goggins asserts that even if the resurrection narrative is a myth, Jesus' message does not depend on his resurrection from the dead for its truth. Goggins says that "Islam teaches that Mohammad died and was buried, yet his earthly message lives on. Perhaps Jesus's words can likewise survive the death of his earthly body" (A Reader's Guide to Reza Aslan's "Zealot," Kindle e-book).
16. Divine or Mortal?
By his Davidian or Levite ancestry, Jesus may have met the first-century requisite to become a Jewish messiah. With respect to local Jewish expectations at the time, his messianic quest appeared to fail. Latter-day Christians may argue that his prophetic and teaching ministry succeeded. But twenty-first-century Christians face a dilemma: to worship Jesus as a divine, or to revere him as a mortal who was a great teacher and prophet.
In the New Testament Gospel accounts, Jesus' life and ministry occur primarily among the Jewish peasantry but with intervention by God to effect a virgin birth that rendered Jesus the divine Son of God. In contrast, Joseph Raymond's account of the life of Yeshua is a matter of palace and Temple intrigue among Jewish royals and high-ranking priests. If indeed he was conceived by two human mortals, Yeshua himself was a mortal. He may have been tapped by God to serve as a prophet, but Old Testament prophets were mortals who were not considered divine.
Raymond's research does not address the resurrection issue, likely because from a legal standpoint its nature is essentially a matter of hearsay and belief with no substantive historical evidence for a lawyer to research. Even so, the implication in the Gospels that God raised Yeshua from the dead and exalted him to divine status cannot be ruled out.
So, which variant of the Jesus story seems more credible, the New Testament narratives about the virgin birth that rendered Jesus the Son of God, or the Raymond story about palace and temple intrigue that produced a mortal, Antigonus ben Antipater, i.e., the adopted Yeshua ben Yossef?
There is a dearth of extra-biblical historical matter to authenticate the New Testament narratives. The early part of the Raymond variant is attested only by the Hebrew Tanakh, i.e., the Christian "Old Testament," from patriarchs Abraham and Isaac through the Babylonian exile in 597 BC. Historical information of the story from Alexander the Great's death in 323 BC through Herod's execution of Antipater in 4 BC is reliably attested in historical documents. But the identification of Antipater ben Herod as Yeshua ben Yossef's actual father, and Antipater's wife Myriam Bat Heli as Yeshua's birth mother, is Raymond's speculation and inference based on his research of ancient documents. Much of the rest of the story encompassing John the Baptizer's execution, Yeshua's ministry and messianic pursuit, and his execution by the Romans is attested or alluded to by Josephus and other writers of first and second century AD.
Aside from the speculative nature of the linkage of Yeshua to Antipater and Myriam, the Raymond story avoids an unscientific virgin birth narrative that rendered Yeshua divine, and it provides an explanation of why the Romans took seriously the ministry and messianic pursuit of an itinerant Jewish preacher that led to his execution.
Does it matter that the New Testament Gospels portray Jesus as a peasant who was divine by virgin birth and who preached a message of universal love, but the Raymond story portrays Yeshua as a royal mortal on a messianic quest? Modern Christianity seems to obsess on the "bookends" of Jesus' life, i.e., the circumstances of his birth and death, rather than what's between the bookends, the example of his life and the content of his teachings. In the long run, even into the twenty-first century, the details of Jesus'/Yeshua's birth and death may be of lesser significance than his message of universal love and care for fellow humans.
But, yes, it does matter whether Jesus was/is the divine Son of God or Yeshua was the mortal son of Antipater and Myriam. It matters as to whether humans should worship Jesus as divine or revere him as a mortal, possibly as a prophet whom God commissioned to bring a message to humanity. If the latter, then the concept of "trinity" is a myth, but only one among many that humans have relied upon in their efforts to understand the nature of divinity.
It cannot be ruled-out that God may have exalted the human Yeshua to divine status after his execution. But without historical facts or scientific data to authenticate this possibility, it must remain a matter of belief. Worship Jesus or revere Yeshua as you wish and as you believe.
Appendix A. The Big Picture
It might be helpful to be able to see how the charts pertaining to Jesus’ ancestry are connected. The charts in this book that depict Jesus’ ancestry were derived from a single large chart that is too big to present here. It has been divided into two parts, Chart 41 Left and Chart 41 Right.
Appendix B. Historical Fiction
A couple of recent historical fiction novels have followed the ancestry listings of Yeshua ben Jacob.
Often it is the intent of writers of historical fiction to pose alternate facts in the stories that they write. Writers of biblical fiction may describe alternate facts that may seem to be credible. Bible passages represent certain events as historical facts that to some people seem incredible, most notably the virgin birth and resurrection narratives.
Both Krishna Rose and Sue Monk Kidd recently have published novels that portray Jesus as having been married. Rose, in her novel The Woman in Red: Magdalene Speaks*, introduces alternate facts with respect to Mary Magdalene, one of the principal characters in the biblical Jesus story. The Rose novel loosely follows the Antipiter ancestry sequence. In contrast, Sue Monk Kidd, in her novel The Book of Longings**, centers her story on an entirely fictitious character named Ana. The Kidd novel follows more closely the Joseph ben Jacob ancestry sequence.
Most of the events in the Ana story are shoehorned into the information void between two major events in the Jesus story, his 12-year-old visit to the Jerusalem Temple around 8 or 9 A.D. and his baptism by John around 30 A.D. This is the period in Jesus' life for which there is no recorded information. Using this literary device, Kidd portrays Ana's life events without contradicting or intruding upon the essential biblical narration of Jesus' life and ministry period up to his execution.
Rose offers alternate scenarios with respect to the biblical virgin birth and resurrection narratives, but Kidd does not disabuse readers of these narratives. Kidd does introduce alternate facts in Ana's engagement with two biblical characters in the Jesus story: Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Judas who betrays Jesus. Both Kidd and Rose introduce Salome as a fictional sister of Jesus.
Kidd tells an excellent story which, although fictional, seems all too believable. There is no writer better than Kidd for conveying setting, dialog, and presence. The opportunity foregone in this novel was to have centered it on a real person rather than a fictional creation, as for example how Krishna Rose's novel was centered on Mary Magdalene. There is no tradition that Jesus married an Ana, but there is a non-biblical tradition that he may have married Mary Magdalene and fathered children with her. As I read Kidd's novel I thought how an excellent story was wasted on a fictional character when it might have been based on a biblical character such as Mary Magdalene. Perhaps this is because I first read Rose's novel, The Woman in Red: Magdalene Speaks. Even so, Kidd is the superior writer and story teller.
*https://www.amazon.com/Woman-Red-Magdalene-Krishna-Rose-ebook/dp/B08281FB8Z/ref=sr_1_1?crid=B3QUJUY7RB8M&dchild=1&keywords=woman+in+red+magdalene+speaks&qid=1590868337&sprefix=Magdalene+speaks%2Caps%2C179&sr=8-1
**https://www.amazon.com/Book-Longings-Sue-Monk-Kidd/dp/052542976X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=GCJ7CXQ47MRS&dchild=1&keywords=kidd+longings&qid=1592500081&sprefix=Kidd+Longings%2Caps%2C188&sr=8-1
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