Summer is giving time for reading, including some things I
don’t normally take time to read. I
recently got interested, for example, in the story of the Somali/Dutch/American
Ayaan Hirsi Ali after listening to/watching her online in several debates (like here) and
presentations (like here) on Islam. She offers
a powerful personal story and a strong critique of Islam, particularly with regard
to its impact on women, as well as a compelling demonstration of conscience. She left Islam
for atheism. One might wish (or might
still hope?) she could have crossed paths with Christians who would have
offered her a more compelling and winsome presentation of Biblical
Christianity. At any rate, I got a cheap
used copy of her first biography Infidel (Free Press, 2007) through Abebooks.com and have been working through it during the evenings this
week (It's like candy after reading Bauckham!).
Aside from her compelling personal story and what she has to
say about Islam and the West, I was particularly struck by the opening pages of Infidel in which Ali begins by noting
how as a five year old child she was taught the genealogy of her father’s subclan
back for three hundred years. She
adds: “Later, as I grow up, my
grandmother will coax and even beat me to learn my father’s ancestry eight
hundred years back, to the great clan of the Darod…..” (p. 3). She also notes how when Somalis meet they
usually rehearse their family lines to see if they can trace a common ancestor
and thus solidify their relation. To a
modern Western (American—at least) this is alien. My ancestral memory ends with my
grandparents.
I read this just after doing a lecture on the birth of Jesus for my "Life and Teaching of Jesus" summer course, and it made me think of the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew 1
and Luke 3. In his 1881 commentary on
Luke, Frederick Godet notes that first century Jews would have regularly
committed to memory and even held written records of their family lines, and he
speculates that Luke might well have had access to records from Mary among the
resources he amassed for compiling his Gospel (cf. Luke 1:1-4; 2:19).
Tradition (represented, for example, in Augustine’s Harmony of the Gospels) upheld the
historical value of the genealogies and harmonized the divergences between
Matthew and Luke’s accounts. Some did this by positing that Matthew presents the line of Jesus
via Joseph as his “legal” father and Luke presents the line of Jesus via Mary, his natural mother. Modern scholars, on the other hand, have typically tended to see the genealogies as holding little
if any historical value and being hopelessly confused and irreconcilable. For many historical-critical scholars, influenced by modern redaction criticism, the genealogies are simply seen as theological fabrications of early Christianity.
Reading Ali’s reflections on the strict learning of her family’s
“bloodlines,” however, makes me wonder if contemporary Somali culture might be
closer the first century Jewish culture in which Jesus lived and about which Matthew
and Luke wrote. It seems perfectly
reasonable, for example, that the family lines of Jesus would have been
remembered and meticulously and faithfully transmitted. The early Christians
who collected and revered the NT writings, including the Gospels and their
authoritative accounts of the life of Jesus, were not fools. They knew that Matthew and Luke’s genealogies
were different (most notably Matthew and Luke diverging at David with Matthew
following the line through Solomon and Luke through Nathan). They did not , however, see this divergence as
irrational or contradictory. It is therefore reasonable both to think that the genealogies of Matthew and Luke were accurate
and that they were compatible.
JTR
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