Solomon Melchizedek.
It is possible that the genealogies of Jesus started from no other basis than Hebrews vii. 14: “It is clear beforehand that our Lord hath arisen out of Judah.”[1] Yet nothing could be more subversive of the Epistle than a claim of any hereditary authority or advantage for Jesus.
The author of the Epistle, if he ever heard the phrase “Son of David,” avoided it, for David is here in the background, and in a quotation from one of his Psalms his name is passed over, with the vague words, “one hath testified somewhere, saying,” etc. It is an essential part of the writer’s argument that Christ is “without genealogy” of that kind. To some it was no doubt grateful to be told that Jesus was not of the priestly tribe, not of that “apostolic succession,” so to say; but it was more important to convince the conservative that their sacred history sanctioned faith in a high priest approved as such not by carnal descent, but by his sinlessness and by his resurrection. But it was not agreeable to any Jewish party to suppose that the new dominion was to be altogether in the heavens, or detached from the Solomonic Golden Age for whose return they were hoping. The writer therefore connects Jesus with a “first-born” forerunner, namely, with Melchizedek, concerning whom he “has many things to say, and hard of interpretation.” So Christian commentators have to this day found what he does say, and Melchizedek is not surrounded by any dogmatic fence that can turn a new hypothesis into a trespass.
The Epistle applies to Jesus lines from Psalm cx.:
Thou art a priest for ever,
After the order of Melchizedek.
But in this anonymous Psalm there is reason to believe that Melchizedek is not a proper name at all. It is admittedly a combination of malki’-tzedek, “king of justice,” and in the Jewish Family Bible (Deusch) the above lines are translated, “Thou art my priest for ever, my king in righteousness, by my word.” The Septuagint, regularly followed by the Epistle to the Hebrews, has Melchizedek in this Psalm cx., which was also messianized by the LXX. in its very first line, “The Lord said unto my Lord,” Κυρίος being the word for Lord in both cases, whereas in the original the words are different (“Jahveh declared to my Adonai”). And it is notable that Matthew xxii. whose Hebraic character is so marked, and Mark xii., both make Jesus follow the Septuagint in quoting these words.
In both of these Gospels the incident is evidently, in Mark clumsily, interpolated, and it would appear to have belonged to some legend of the Infancy, such as that of the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, where it occurs naturally:
“And when he was twelve years old they took him to Jerusalem to the feast. But when the feast was over they indeed returned, but the Lord Jesus remained in the temple among the doctors and elders and learned men of Jerusalem, and he asked them sundry questions about the sciences and they answered him in turn. Now he said to them, Whose son is Messiah? They answered him, The son of David. Wherefore, then, said he, Doth he in spirit call him Lord, when he saith the Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, that I may bring down thy enemies to the footprints of thy feet?”
It is probable that this anecdote had floated down from an early period when the notion of a royal descent of Jesus had not arisen.