PARALLELS TO MATTHEW'S VERSION OF THE PEDIGREE OF JESUS

by

GERARD MUSSIES Utrecht

Introduction

Whoever consults Wettstein's famous collection of parallels to the New Testament on the shorter (1:1) and longer (1:2-16) in Matthew will find that he offers mostly Rabbinical materials adducing them to details of the pedigree, and that the less extensive Classical materials are here mainly of a lexicological nature. This means that no parallels are given as regards the genealogy as a whole, its form and arrangement, its initial position in the gospel, the occurrence as such of details added to its main structure, or the specific genealogical terminology which it con- tains. The following compilation is meant to supplement especially the Classical part of his notes by replacing or omitting some of his parallels which now seem less relevant, and by adding some new ones to elucidate the aspects mentioned above where he had none.

Ad 1:1 "Table of the Genealogy of Jesus Christ, the of David, the son of Abraham", a shortened pedigree as superscription followed by the fully elaborated genealogy in vv. 2-16. Aspects of this line to which parallels can be adduced are: a) the reason(s) for presenting a genealogy; b) its position at the beginning of the book; c) the sources if any on which it rests; d) its shortened form in anticipation of a longer list. a) Matthew presents the pedigree in order to show that Jesus is of royal Davidic descent, as appears from the special addition of "the " to David's name in the genealogy itself, and, since "son of David" is equivalent with "Messiah" as Wettstein abun- dantly demonstrates from Rabbinical literature (I p. 225), that 33

Jesus rightfully bears the title of "Christ", "the Anointed" ( I : 1 , 1 6 , 1 7)Hillel . the Elder, an older contemporary of Jesus, is the best known instance of a man for whom Davidic descent was also claimed (Kethubb. 62b; Gen. Rabbah 98,8). Fl. Josephus prides himself on his priestly, but also on his royal descent, though it was Hasmonean and in the female line only (Life 2-6). In Greece and Rome the mention of royal forefathers was likewise considered to add lustre to a person's reputation. Peisistratus is said to have written to Solon that, being a descendant of Codrus, the last king of Athens, he himself was rightfully tyrant of the Athenians (Diog. L. I 53). Caesar in his funeral oration on his Julia (67 B.C.) reminded his audience of the fact that she and he were maternally descended from the fourth king of Rome, Ancus Marcius (Suetonius Julius VI 1); Maecenas, the famous patron of letters, was a scion of the Etruscan (Horace Carm. III 29,1-3; cf. I 1,1 and Propertius III 9,1 ), and the same descent was claimed for the emperor Otho (Suetonius Otho 1). Here may also be quoted the lind cent. inscriptions in honour of the senator Severus at Ankara. He rose to the highest positions', but the fact first commemorated is that he stemmed from the Celtic kings of Galatia: "G. Julius Severus, descendant of kings and tetrarchs, ...(OGIS 543)", and "G. Julius Severus, descendant of King Deiotarus... (OGIS 544)". b) A genealogy opening a book occurs both in the O.T. (Zephaniah 1:1) and in Antiquity. A number of the biographies by Plutarch begin with an account of the ancestry (Agis, Alcibiades, Alexander, Pericles, Pyrrhus, Solon, Themistocles, Theseus), and so do the Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius from to Vespasian, and Fl. Josephus, too, opens his autobiography with an account of his ancestry. This is in line with the theory of composing biographies of their age as formulated by Quintilian, their contemporary: "Before (the life of) the man there have to come (descriptions of) his fatherland, and , and there are two ways of treating these, for it may be glorious either to have lived up to (one's) or to have lent honour to (one's) humbler by mighty deeds" (Inst. Orat. III 7,10). could also be

1 See for his career: PW X 811-820 (1919); D. Magie, RomanRule in Asia Minor, Princeton 1950, pp. 1486-1487; PIR pars IV fasc. 3, Berlin 1966, pp. 277-278, nr. 573.