More was discussed elsewhere on the issue - as seen here in #
7/./ #
40./#
45 . Many Jews have often noted was that there should never have been an issue with seeing Christ descended from the line of Levi since that is exactly where his mother came from....and Christ was technically adopted into the line of Judah due to his step-father Joseph.
Luke 3:23
Now Jesus himself
was about thirty years old when
he began his ministry.
He was the son,
so it was thought,
of Joseph,
the son of Heli,
Luke 3:22-24
Although Joseph was the one who took in Christ/His mother and was considered to be the father of the Messiah, he technically was not. For as Christ noted often, His true Father was the Lord. That doesn't mean that Christ was of the mindset that Joseph was not a Father-figure to Him since everyone assumed that Christ was the son of a carpenter who came from Judah...but to assume that Christ only saw His identity as being of Judah may be reading more into things than necessary.
Genetically, Christ had the DNA of His mother Mary within Him since he was born of a woman under the Law....and for those who emphasized the PRIESTLY role of the Messiah, seeing Christ descended from the line of Levi would not have been an issue.
And to be clear, More was actually discussed by many Messianic posters (including some in this discussion) elsewhere as seen
here ( #
102 and #
107 ). For myself, personally, I think that there's a lot of beauty in seeing how the lineages of Christ document the King line (Judah) and the Priest line (Levi) of Jesus Christ. For the King line (Judah) comes Joseph via adoption....whereas the Priest line (Levi) would comes through Mary's mother
genetically. ...as it was noted she was a cousin of Elizabeth and Elizabeth was of Aaron.
On Elizabeth:
Luke 1:35
The angel answered, The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month.
As one ministry said best:
We find this in Luke 1:5, as scripture shows that Mary's Cousin Elizabeth is a Levite. Mary and Elizabeth's mothers were sisters. Below we see that Elizabeth was of the genealogy of Aaron. Aaron was a Levite (of Levi) and thus Elisabeth was of the tribe of Levi. Elisabeth's mother and Mary's mother were sisters and both Levites, thus Mary was of the tribe of Levi. Below we see that Zacharias (Elisabeth's husband) was a Levitical priest, and a Levitical Priest could only marry a full blood Levite woman if he was to perform duties in the Temple of God. In verse 8 below we see that Elisabeth's husband was indeed a practicing priest, therefore Elisabeth would have to have been a full blood Levite. And for Elizabeth to be a full blood Levite the her mother had to be a full blood Levite. Elizabeth's mother is the sister of Mary's mother and thus was also a full blood Levite. This documents that Mary was born of a full blood Levite woman......
Luke 1:5-9
5 There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth.6 And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless. 7 And they had no child, because that Elisabeth was barren, and they both were now well stricken in years. 8 And it came to pass, that while he executed the priest's office before God in the order of his course, 9 According to the custom of the priest's office, his lot was to burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord. (KJV)
Perhaps its just me...but I was under the impression that the line of Levi and the line of Judah would've met together with Christ simply by family dynamics. For the cousin of Jesus, John the Baptist, was of the Levitical line since his father was a priest. Many say that John's line was the true line of the Levitical priesthood whereas others were either hijacked/corrupt or false due to a loss of data. But with Christ, his background was from the tribe of Judah---whom Jacob promised in Gensis 49 that kings would come forth from and the Messiah would come. Thus, John the Baptist would have been akin to the priest who ordained the king...with Jesus fitting the role as ruler. This would have run parallel to the way that the priesthood was set up that was corrupt in their sacrifices and worship of the temple....and thus, the priesthood persecuting John and Jesus as "false" were really in error for missing the true KING and PRIEST to come.
If there was a Levitical background in Christ's history through Mary, that's cool to see..and there are other solid organizations that support the theory from logic. One can go here for more info on the matter,
as they show how Mary's mother was the sister of Elizibeth, who was descended from Levi. The Levitical side of Mary's lineage probaby would've taken a backseat to the fact that lineage was often determined by the Father's background.
As it stands, even within Judaism there was the thought that the Messiah would be a Levite...and it is common error to assume that ALL camps in Judaism would assume the Messiah would simply be from Judah. To be more technical, some of the Holy writings from the era of Christ note things not often talked about in Judaism...one of them being that the Damasucs Document actually calls for the
coming of two Messiahs, one from the House of Aaron, and one from the House of Israel. The concept involved what's known as the Teacher of Righteousness....and the high-ranking priests who fled into the wilderness at one point when seeing much corruption within the Jewish nation. This paticular group believed the Messiah would be a Levite priest from the line of Zadok....and according to some of the scrolls, there was a call for the people to look for a warrior Messiah who would be a Levite priest. In the end of all things, the Messiah would lead the Sons of Light in a forty-year long war against the Sons of Darkness that would end with the re-establishment of Davids kingdom ....and i
f one studies the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essenes (another significant camp within Judaism itself), there are some things that'll make a lot more sense.
For more, one can go here to
A New Dead Sea Scroll in Stone? | Daily Bible and Archaeology News or
The Messiah Son of Joseph....or one can investigate
The Dead Sea Scrolls--Community Rule and
Doctrine of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Doctrine of the Messiah
For more clarity on the subject, the Judaism that came about in the days after David was truly diverse in multiple ways...and in many ways, vastly different from what is seen in Judaism today as well as the days of Christ..and a lot of it was directly in line with Samaritan culture (as seen
directly in the camp of the Essenes, as they had a camp within their group believing the Messiah would come as a Levite /from Joseph )
For many, what is considered to be true "Judaism" is Rabbinic Judaism as seen in the time of Christ...and they go from that starting point to say that what was accepted within that era was what was legitimate. Thus, if the other camps in Judaism considered followers of the Way/Yeshua to be a sect within Judaism, that is what made the Nazarene Sect/early Christians acceptable in Judaism. However, what is often not realized is that Rabbinic Judaism (often considered to be THE definition of Judaism) was in many ways a totally new synthesis which borrowed from at least three different streams of Judaism which had emerged during the Second Temple period - Zadokite (covenantal) Judaism, Enochic (apocalyptic) Judaism, and Sapiential (wisdom-based) Judaism. Again, there was Zadokite Judaism, Enochic Judaism and Sapiential Judaism. For anyone wishing to investigate more in regards to the differing variations of Judaism, I'd highly recommend investigating the work of
Dr. Gabriele Boccaccini, professor of New Testament and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Michigan. He is an expert on what happened to the religion of the Jews after the Babylonian exile and in the centuries that led up to the beginning of Christianity...and has written several books, including
Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought, 300 BCE-200 CE (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991),
Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Partings of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), and
Roots of Rabbinic Judaism: An Intellectual History, from Ezekiel to Daniel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001).
The last of the works noted was very fascinating as it concerns detailing the development of Rabbinic Judaism and it's development. For Rabbinic Judaism developed and became the mainstream form of Judaism after Jerusalems Second Temple was destroyed in 70 AD. In
Roots of Rabbinic Judaism ,
Boccaccini traces the Rabbinic movement back to its roots in the Second Temple period (the period that commences right after the Jews return from Babylon)...starting from the premise that Rabbinic Judaism was not always the normative or mainstream expression of Judaism that it claims to be. There's much basis for seeing how Rabbinic Judaism is something that likely descended from a combination of Judaisms that competed with each other in post-exilic Judah when trying to do the best that was possible to give a united front.
For more, one can consider going
here for more review...or here:
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