MRS. A. S. LEWIS, ON THE GENEALOGIES OF OUR LORD. 21 



Nazareth would have been then the King of the Jews, and the title on 

 the Cross spoke the truth. God had raised Him up to the house of 

 David. 



Mr. Martin Rouse said : It is a pleasure indeed to listen to the 

 result of new research made by one of those two ladies who brought 

 to light the most ancient Syriac version of the Diatessaron and who, 

 to establish and enlarge their discoveries, made three more 

 pilgrimages to the remote library of Sinai where they had found 

 it. 



The most remarkable and delightful thing in Mrs. Lewis' paper 

 is that she has found in the Jerusalem Talmud the statement that 

 Mary, the mother of our Lord, was the daughter of Heli. This 

 confirms my own previous conviction that, as Matthew's genealogy 

 is the official one — of Joseph, who took the place of a father to 

 J esus, so is Luke's the natural one — of Mary, the only earthly parent 

 of the Saviour. For her omission from it and the mention of her 

 husband alone we find two analogies — the first in I. Chron. ii, 35 f., 

 the second in Ezra ii, 61-63. In the first case Sheshan, having no 

 sons, gives a daughter in marriage to his Egyptian servant Jarha ; 

 and the son of this marriage is next mentioned and all his descendants, 

 the pedigree being thus throughout Sheshan's, not Jarha's. In the 

 second case a priest named Hakkoz marries a daughter of Barzillai, 

 the succourer of King David, and takes her family name, so that 

 when his descendants on returning from the Babylonian captivity 

 claim to be priests their male or priestly ancestry beyond Hakkoz 

 can no longer be traced. In neither case is the daughter's name 

 mentioned ; but the genealogy goes on from father-in-law to son-in- 

 law and thence to grandson or later descendant, just as in Luke iii, 23, 

 the genealogy passes from the father-in-law Heli to the son-in-law 

 Joseph and thence to the grandson Jesus. 



It is deeply important to prove that Mary was herself descended 

 from David. I once met and tried to re-establish in the faith a 

 thoughtful young man who had been unsettled by a remark of the 

 late Chief Rabbi Adler that the evidence for the Messiahship of 

 Jesus failed in the most important item, since both the pedigrees 

 given of Him in the Gospels traced His ancestry up through Joseph, 

 while there was otherwise no evidence that His mother was a 

 descendant of David. 



Yet there is other evidence, though it is immensely strengthened 



