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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Nancy Dawson
Hi, I’m Nancy Dawson. I’m a biblical researcher and author of a book on genealogies of the Bible. I spend a lot of time doing biblical research here at the Lanier Theological Library.
David Capes
Dr. Nancy Dawson, we are reprising your last visit here in the fall as we lead up to Christmas 2024. It’s a delight to see you again. You have written this book, “All the Genealogies of the Bible,” which is the most comprehensive book out there on the subject. I think your scientific mind, your ability to bring order out of disorder, has been very helpful in this whole project. We’re going to talk today about Mary the mother of Jesus. We’ve been looking at Matthew’s genealogy, and there’s a number of women there that are described, and the last one in that series is Mary the mother of Jesus.
Nancy Dawson
Yes, “Joseph is the husband of Mary”. You have this mention in the genealogies which are almost exclusively patrilineal in Scripture. 99.99% of all genealogies are patrilineal. So it is amazing that Matthew even mentions five of these remarkable women. They come out of relative obscurity, and yet they are the ones that hold the line. They are the ones that are going to persevere and be steadfast and cope with great difficulties in their lives. They choose to participate in God’s providential plan. We see this especially with Mary, but we also have seen it with Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba.
David Capes
I love the fact that you describe them as “holding the line”. They aren’t just secondary to the story. Let’s throw the name of a woman in here every once in a while, just to be diverse or inclusive. It’s not that at all. It’s that these women have a key role to play, and they’re signifying something very important about who Jesus is going to be and what the kingdom of God is going to be about.
Nancy Dawson
That’s a perfect description. Several years ago, my husband and I planted a jasmine vine at the base of a rock wall, and it was getting very leggy this year. I said, “Would you please go and get some eye bolts, put them in this rock wall, and then run wire so that we can draw this vine up this wall?” It’s such a poignant analogy to these women in Matthew’s genealogy. The women are like anchor points. This is where things could have gone wildly chaotic and disastrous in God’s plan. But they are the ones that are anchor points. They hold the line. What they do, how they act, their belief in the word, their actions. They don’t just understand the problem. They actually do things about the problem. Their actions show
their belief.
This is what Hebrews says. “Faith is the substance of things that are hoped for.” At the time when they’re acting, they do not really realize the import of what they’re doing, but it’s the substance faith. It’s the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. This is what you see with all the women, especially with Mary.
David Capes
Where does Mary come from? In the story, she’s introduced as the mother of Jesus, but where does she come from?
Nancy Dawson
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all say that Jesus comes from the line of David. Paul confirms in Galatians 4 that he was born of a woman. So, in this sense, she is from the line of David as well. Just like her husband Joseph, she is, from a scriptural standpoint, from the line of David as well. This is corroborated in the extra biblical literature way back to St Ignatius of Antioch. He writes around 110 that Mary was from the line of David. And then you also see the writing of Justin Martyr. This is around 165 AD, that Jesus was born of this Virgin of the family of David. This is how Jesus comes from David.
And then what’s remarkable is that her parents’ names are not given in Scripture. But there are at least two extra biblical works that give the names. One account is called the Proto-evangelium of James. It’s a tribute. Sometimes it’s called the Infancy Gospel of James. It is attributed to James, the half-brother of Jesus, but it was a work written in the mid second century, after James was a martyred.
David Capes
He didn’t have anything to do with it directly.
Nancy Dawson
Right. It preserves the names of her parents. And also, there is a fragment of a sacred genealogy that was preserved. The author was a Bishop named Hippolytus and he was a martyr in Rome. He lived around 172-235 AD. So I went back to look at things that I thought were credible sources. You have to be very, very careful. You have to know what Scripture says about Joseph and about Mary, but you also have to be conscious of where people are erring.
Now there is this book called “The Rational Illustration of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England.” It preserves this fragment of a genealogy. So, from these two sources, the Proto-evangelium of James and this other one, we know that her parents were Anne and Joachim. Joachim was from the line of David, and Anne was from the line of David on her father’s side. She is from the line of Levi because her parents were a priest, and her mother was of a Levitical line. What’s interesting you see in this sort of grandparent generation is that there’s a mixed marriage between Levites and the group in
line of David.
David Capes
We have two genealogies in the New Testament. We have one in Luke, and we have one in Matthew. And it’s often said that Joseph’s lineage is given to us in Matthew while Mary’s lineage is given to us through Luke. What did you find out when you did your book, All the Genealogies of the Bible?
Nancy Dawson
I found out that you can be assured that the genealogies in Scripture are all patrilineal. This was a major clue. Because I had done all of them, I could tell that Matthew and Luke are tracing the patrilineal descent through Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father, not through his mother, Mary. So it’s not correct to think that Luke is tracing the line through Mary. What you sense here that Jesus is called both priest and king, and he is the priest through the order of Melchizedek. It’s not really through the Aaronic priesthood. If it were to come from a human standpoint, he gets his priestly status from his mother, through her maternal side, her mother.
Jesus is born in about 3-2 BC. It’s thought that his birth occurs during the reign of King Herod. Herod the Great. When Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple, he is recognized as the long-awaited Messiah by Simeon and Anna the prophetess. Furthermore, it’s thought that Matthew and Luke are drawing upon written records, written registries, like census type registries. These were normally kept in the temple, like in Herod’s temple. But Herod the Great was a Idumean and he burned these records.
So, it’s thought that Matthew and Luke are drawing on private genealogical records of the relatives of Jesus. The term that the early church used for these relatives in Jesus’s family was the Desposyni. so, These genealogies are so long. Matthew lists 40 ancestors of Jesus. Luke lists 77 ancestors.
David Capes
Mary is betrothed to Joseph which is a legal arrangement. It’s not like an engagement would be today.
