Originally Posted by
YorkNecromancer
Zombies, Klendathu and The Absurdly Violent Intergalactic Space Fungus.
I remember the first time I tried to properly read the Bible. I lay down in bed, cracked open Genesis, and just ploughed in there. The stories seemed fun enough, and a lot of the ideas are certainly interesting. ([url=http://biblehub.com/genesis/3-22.htm]Genesis 3:22[/url] has always been a favourite little curiosity of mine...)
But the genealogies…
I can never manage the genealogies. Where Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram…
Pages and pages of them! When I was young, I could never work out why they’d stop the stories and parables in favour of a really long list of names. And not names of interesting characters. Names of people we’re never really interested in, whose stories we never hear, and who aren’t ever really mentioned again. It’s like those double page spreads in special issues of the ‘Avengers’ comics where you’ve got two pages filled with all the heroes, and you know Iron Man, Thor and Black Widow, but you’ve got no idea who the other nine hundred tits in tights are in the background, and you never get to find out, because they never show up again.
‘Who are these people?’ I wondered. ‘What is the point of mentioned them if they don’t do anything else?’
I didn’t realise that there were only three names on the list that mattered: Abraham, David, and, of course, Yeshua.
Years of Nativity plays have taught us that Jesus was the son of a carpenter. We’ve all been there, sat in a hall as scared children in fibre-glass beards stand next to cardboard cows with rubber gloves for udders, praying that the sick-looking girl vomits on the smug-looking boy playing the third King from the left. As a result, we all know that Jesus was born so absurdly humble, his family couldn’t find any room at an inn, and had to stay in a barn with the animals. It’s a charming story; a narrative designed to show us that God doesn’t really like the rich.
The problem, of course, is that people have always hated the poor. And an impoverished son of God… Well, it’s a solid moral lesson, but it doesn’t bring legitimacy.
Hence the geneaologies. See, Jesus has to have credibility. He has to be royalty. The same way Aragorn can’t just be some guy who’s strong and brave and fundamentally decent, Jesus can’t just be himself, oh no. He has to be a king, too, even if he never mentions it. So the Bible interrupts a set of entertaining tales with a series of people’s names in order to prove that Yeshua, son of Joseph, who would later be named Jesus, The Anointed One, was in fact, descended from a line of kings.
Which means, despite the Nativity, he wasn’t just some working class dole-scum, out to steal the jobs from hard-working locals. No, he was a king, descended from kings.
[url=http://www.herinst.org/BusinessManagedDemocracy/culture/wealth/fear.html]We’ve always hated the poor.[/url]