# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S36
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

36 Proceedings of the nineteenth convention

Moreover, it is also linguistically quite incorrect to conclude, from the word συγγενίς, which Luther quite rightly renders by "Gefreundte" [kinswoman], that Mary was a tribeswoman of the Levitical Elizabeth and therefore herself also Levitical. The word means quite simply related. Συγγενίς, to be sure, occurs in the New Testament only once, at this place, but συγγενής, the masculine, more often, and never in the restricted meaning that one might think only of a tribesman in the sense that those designated as relatives would have to be members of the same one of the twelve tribes of Israel. This is shown quite clearly by Rom. 9:3, where Paul says: "For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh (συγγενεῖς κατὰ σάρκα)." He means by this not only such as, like himself, were of the tribe of Benjamin but, as he says directly after: "Who are Israelites." So Mary can very well be called the συγγενίς of Elizabeth if someone from the nearer or more distant relatives of Mary had married into the relatives of Elizabeth, which in any case had happened. For it was nowhere forbidden to the Jews to marry into another tribe; otherwise Joseph too, as a pious man of the tribe of Judah, would have been unable to desire a virgin of the tribe of Levi, if Mary had belonged to it.

No, if Mary were not of the tribe of David, then Jesus too is not David's shoot, "that should sprout from his stem." But if he is not that, then he lacks a quite essential mark which, according to the prophecy of the Old Testament, the Messiah must have. If Jesus did not come from the seed of David according to the flesh, how can one then blame the Jews if they wait for another and do not believe that Jesus is the one who was to come?

But precisely this, that we can prove of our Jesus of Nazareth, and can also make irrefutably true by means of the genealogies, that he comes from David and from the tribe of Judah according to the flesh, precisely this makes these two chapters of Holy Scripture, at which the enemies of Christ and of Scripture stumble and in which they find contradictions without any need, an inestimable treasure of the Christian Church. As rightly as Luther remarks on occasion that even if neither Matthew nor Luke had written a genealogy of Christ, we should still be sufficiently certain from the Old and New Testaments that Mary was of the tribe of David and Jesus therefore David's son, we nevertheless have every reason to be heartily thankful to God for these two genealogies which the Holy Spirit has preserved for us, and also to the evangelist Luke. He tells us at the beginning of his Gospel that he inquired into everything which he put together in good order, from the beginning, from eyewitnesses and ear-witnesses of the events. Thus he will not have failed to call upon the disciple John, who after Jesus' cruci-