# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1902. 37

[fixion] had taken his mother Mary into his house, and from her he will have received the communication of what stands in his first and second chapters; from her he will probably also have learned the names of her fathers according to the flesh, as far back as until Holy Scripture of the Old Testament again established the connection.

We read in Eusebius (I, 7) that Herod, so that no lineage in Israel should be held older than his own, had the genealogical registers of the Jews burned wherever he could lay hands on them. We know further that with the fall of the Jewish kingdom after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, and further through the dispersion of the Jews into all lands, through the manifold persecutions that have come upon the Jews, their genealogical registers have been irretrievably lost. It stands today thus: that no single Jew, whoever he may be, can say with any certainty: I am of the tribe of Judah, I of the tribe of Zebulun, etc. This is for our Jewish mission [Judenmission] a great lever and an important argument. If a man who passes himself off as an orthodox Jew comes to the Jewish missionary and says: Your Jesus I do not accept as Messiah, but I am still waiting for another, then the missionary can say to him: So you are still waiting for a Messiah? Suppose he comes today; when he now comes, tell me, will he then be able to prove from which of the twelve tribes he is? that he is of the tribe of Judah? Then the Jew must confess: No, he will not be able to, because our genealogical registers are lost. Then the missionary can say to him again: Then your expected Messiah cannot furnish the proof at all that he is the one who was to come; from that alone you can already conclude that the Messiah must already have come; we, however, can prove of our Jesus, the son of Mary, that he is a son of David, of Judah, of Abraham; here are the genealogies. Where are yours? Those of our Jesus have been preserved down to this day in spite of the Babylonian captivity, in spite of Herod, and in spite of so many enemies that the Old and New Testaments have had up to today.

Yes, these chapters of names, over which one stumbles in family devotions, when they happen to be next in turn, perhaps because of the many foreign-sounding names, and even gladly skips them, these, precisely in that in which they differ from one another, are an offense only to unbelievers, but to believers, who through comparison with Holy Scripture have learned to unite what seems to contradict, they are full of doctrine and comfort. If Matthew goes back only to Abraham, because he writes for Jewish Christians and Jews, to whom he wishes to prove that Jesus is the son of David and of Abraham, then Luke goes back to Adam and shows that Jesus according to the flesh belongs not to the Jews alone but to the whole human race, so that not only Israel but the whole world is to rejoice over his true humanity.