Not only the genealogy of the male members, but also that of the female members of a family, were preserved, as we may learn from Scripture accounts and certainly from secular history. A supposed defect in the genealogy of the mother of JohnHyrcanus, a high-priest, B. C. 108, was the cause of bloodshed in Jerusalem[155] because of the insult offered to the high-priest by the bare announcement of such a defect, although it was shown that the genealogical records certified her descent from a Jewish tribe.
2. The Virgin Mary’s genealogy was as important as that of Joseph, her reputed husband, although her husband’s genealogy might have been perfect, as in the instance given in the last paragraph. In the case of Hyrcanus, his father’s origin, according to the Jewish law, was without defect; it was the mother’s pedigree which was assailed.
Especially was it important to the priest’s office that the mother of the candidate for this office should be of unquestioned Jewish descent.
3. It is for this reason that while the writer of the first Gospel (Matthew) opens his history of the Messiah with the answer to the important question, Whose son is he? the writer of the third Gospel (Luke) gives the lineage of his mother. So that, whether Christ’s pedigree be traced through the line of Joseph or of Mary,it is undeniable that he was descended from David and from Abraham.[156]
NAZARETH AND BETHLEHEM.
4. These two places, which are brought into prominence at this part of the history, were 68 milesapart, Bethlehem being not quite five miles, a little west of south, from Jerusalem, and Nazareth 63 miles north of Jerusalem, if the distances be measured in a straight line.
5. Nazareth is a village of about 5,000 inhabitants, situated in a plain surrounded almost entirely by hills. The place is not mentioned in the Old Testament, nor in Josephus, but twenty-nine times in the New Testament. The city itself rises in part upon the sides of a hill on its northwest side, but the little plain at the south end of the city is 1,144 feet above the sea level,and the top of the hill northwest of the city 1,602 feet, or 458 feet higher.[157] The country slopes from Nazareth southward to the northern limit of the plain of Esdraelon, two miles distant, where the level is about 300 feet above the sea. The Mediterranean is twenty-one miles west from Nazareth, and the southernmost shore of the Sea of Galilee is seventeen miles due east of the city. The soil has always been fertile and the climate pleasant. It has one fine spring which supplies the entire city, as it must have done in the time of Christ.
6. Bethlehem contains nearly the same population as Nazareth, but its surroundings are the reverse of those at Nazareth, Bethlehem being upon an elevation. A church, erected by Constantine, A. D. 330, still remains, which furnishes us with the style of architecture of the earliest Christian period.
This was the city of David and of his father Jesse, and hence always held dear by his descendants, and to this town Joseph and Mary went from Nazareth to be enrolled in accordance with the decree issued by Cæsar Augustus, as stated in Luke 2:1. The decree was only for the enrolment. The actual collecting of the taxes did not take place for some years afterward, as is recorded in Josephus, when the rebellion took place,which is alluded to in Acts 5:37, against the actual levying of the taxes.[158]