Hey everybody, welcome back to the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. I'm Matt, and this week of the podcast is brought to you by Dwell. It's an audio Bible app that I love, and there are details about that down in the show notes so you can try it out for yourself. All right, my friends, we are in the home stretch on Matthew chapter one, but there's one glaring question that I want to tackle before we move on to a summary of that, and then into Matthew chapter two next week, and that's this. If Jesus was adopted by Joseph, and Joseph is not his physical father, then wouldn't that invalidate Jesus' claim to sit on the throne of David? I think this is a really fair question. And I think there's a few different ways that we can respond to that. And the first is this it's possible that Jesus is actually double descended from David, descended by adoption on his dad's side, and descended by blood on his mom's side. Now we don't know this for sure, but a lot of people think that Luke chapter 3 is the genealogy of Mary. I don't know if the genealogy in Luke chapter 3 is actually Mary, per our discussion in an earlier episode, but that is one possible answer to the question. I think the far better answer to the question is just to think about the nature of adoption itself. Okay, let's say you go out and adopt a kid, right? And then, you know, it's horrible and tragic and sad, but your spouse dies, and then you die in a tragic sheep shearing accident. And well, would there be any legal question remaining about who gets all your stuff? I mean, it's a kid you adopted, right? And it's actually your kid. I mean, surely none of us view adoption as some sort of second-class thing. Legally, an adopted kid is your kid, a biological kid is your kid, and the biological kid might get all of your strengths and weaknesses and genetic disorders, while the adopted kid might not get all of those same things. But in every other sense, in terms of love and affection and inclusion and all of the rights and titles that come with your family, they're both fully in. And that's not a new idea. That's how adoption has always worked. And if anything, I might argue that it more so worked that way in the past because adoption didn't necessarily have all of the hoops, it was a matter of the volition of the parents, full stop. Now you gotta fill out the paperwork and do all the things, and there's a very long process to all of this, but at the time of Jesus, it would have been very simple. If Joseph divorced Mary quietly as he'd originally intended to do, then he didn't adopt Jesus. If he goes ahead and marries Mary, as he did end up doing, then the moment he does that, he's adopted Jesus, and Jesus effectively and legally becomes his firstborn son. At that moment, if Joseph were to die, Jesus would be the inheritor of all of Joseph's stuff. A relatively contemporary supporting example that I can throw out here is one that doesn't even have quite as strong a claim to adoption as what we're looking at with Joseph and Jesus, but it does involve, to use the phrase again, kings and succession, is Julius Caesar and his godson Octavian. Julius Caesar didn't have any kids, let alone sons, and he was uh effectively godman emperor before there were emperors of Rome at the very end of the Roman Republic. And when he dies in 44 BC, having sort of named an heir, I mean, it's this kid Octavian, this political genius, but not ever fathering an heir. Well, a whole lot of people are like, well, this isn't a debate at all. That kid right there, even as godson, is inheritor of all of the rights and privileges and titles that Caesar has. Now, in fairness, a bunch of other people were like, no, it shouldn't work that way at all, and we should have a giant civil war and kill each other, and eventually that does get sorted out. Once again, we've talked about this before, with Octavian winning and taking the title Caesar of Victory, Caesar, Augustus the Great, and Marc Antony and his girlfriend Cleopatra dying by snake bite suicide down in Egypt. So, while I have to admit that there were people who wanted to seize the opportunity upon Caesar's death to claim power for themselves, the biggest empire in the history of the world to date was cool with acknowledging the legality of the claim of Octavian. So if that was good enough there, Jesus' claim through Joseph is probably good enough in the minds of all of the original audience as well. And further, in support of this idea that adoption is more than good enough, is that it's clearly more than good enough for God. The whole idea of what Jesus is doing here in the Gospel of Matthew is that he's building a new family of faith that goes beyond ethnic boundaries. And Ephesians chapter one and verse five nails down this point even further. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. So if adoption is legit enough in the mind of God for him to use the title sons and daughters for people who used to not know God and even be enemies of God, but are now made Christians, then this is kind of a giant vote of confidence for the officiality of the notion of adoption in the mind of God as well. Now, another question that might come up here when it comes to this whole genealogy thing and stepping back and looking at a big picture is just the question of how do we know this thing is even right? Where do you get these names? Do people just make stuff up? Was this all on reputation or rumor? But we know from the contemporary historian Josephus, who again I've talked about before, he was a Jewish historian who had been doggedly Jewish and then found himself on the wrong side of the war when there was a rebellion and Rome came to shut things down. That's the rebellion that ultimately culminated in the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D., Josephus kind of jumped over to Rome at the last minute and wrote a bunch of histories. So he's a fascinating character, and some people came at him and criticized him pretty hard. And so in Josephus' autobiography, so a biography he writes about himself, there's a line in there, I should have looked it up, I don't remember exactly where it is, where basically he says, Look, if anybody's not sure about my pedigree, you can just go and check the records. They're right there. So apparently, according to Josephus, who people of all religious stripes and not religious stripes regard as a pretty reliable source from the first century, Josephus is saying there were records that were kept. So Luke, in his gospel, leads the thing off by describing his historical methodology and saying, well, I went, I dug this stuff up and I looked around because I wanted to give you, you know, an accurate representation of this stuff. You know, he's talking to his his uh, I don't want to say mentor, what's the word? Um, um, um, benefactor, his benefactor, Theophilus. And so we can assume that Luke did research and went and checked public records to get his genealogy. That probably supports the idea that this is Mary's genealogy, because it discounts the idea that Luke just made stuff up or whiffed on everything. Uh, he'd do a really good job of embarrassing himself quickly if he got the genealogy wrong. It also supports the idea that Matthew probably went and was able to easily grab Joseph's genealogy as well. Those records do not persist to this day, and I don't know this for sure, but I think the suspicion is that somewhere in the destruction of the temple, there was also a destruction of records. It looks like a lot of things that we knew and would have had on hand that are alluded to in contemporary and later sources are no longer present after that big to-do around 70 AD with Titus and Vespasian crushing the Jewish rebellion. Whether you think Jesus is the Son of God or not is that's a hard question. That's why we're taking our time here. There's a lot to think about. If you do think Jesus is the son of God, but you also think that the Bible's a complicated book and you're kind of wrestling with what to do with these genealogies, or if you're in a place with, hey, I am great with all of this and it makes perfect sense to me and I'm tracking with what's going on here, no matter how you slice it, the claim that Jesus had to the throne checks out historically. It would have worked in the minds of his contemporaries, uh, both those who liked him and those who didn't. And the records that would be needed to establish this, we know from extra biblical sources. We know that those records would have been in place. I'm also excited that Dwell has chosen to put their name next to our name. Look, this is the best audio Bible app I've ever come across. The voices that they picked are fantastic. The ability to customize the music and all of it, the way they arranged the playlists so that you can just go straight through Bible or get a topical playlist is absolutely brilliant. And for the amount of work that went into that thing, they did a great job of making it affordable and accessible to normal people. I put a link down in the show notes. If you click on that, you get 33% off an annual membership, so 20 bucks instead of 30, or 33% off a lifetime membership, so a hundred bucks instead of a hundred and fifty. All right, enough said. Excited to connect with you tomorrow. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll catch you soon.