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From: cjdb@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Charles Blair)
Newsgroups: net.religion.christian
Subject: The Trinity and the Son of David
Message-ID: <975@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 13-Aug-85 17:12:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: sphinx.975
Posted: Tue Aug 13 17:12:12 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Aug-85 14:42:38 EDT
References: <411@philabs.UUCP>
Organization: U. Chicago - Computation Center
Lines: 40

>  For instance, the Old Testament prophet Isaiah says:

>  For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government
>  shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful,
>  Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of
>  Peace.  Is. 9:6 (KJV).

>  If this child were not actually God, it would be Blasphemy to call Him 
>  these names. There are numerous other places where similar things are 
>  said about The Anointed One, though not quite so blatantly. (Ps. 2:7; 
>  ICh17:11-14; IISa7:12-16; Micah 5:2; Ps 110:1)

All these passages refer to the king of Judah. All the kings of Judah
were descendants of king David. All kings were "messiahs." "Messiah"
is, by devious routes, a transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning "the
anointed one." ("Christos"--Christ--is a translation, rather than a 
transliteration, of this word into Greek.) Anointing was part of the
ceremony of installing a king. To call a king a "messiah" was like
calling Queen Elizabeth II "the crowned one."

Now I am not going into the history of the development of "messianism"
here. Suffice it to say that nowhere does the the Hebrew Bible refer to
a hitherto unknown type of being by the term "messiah." All the
passages that were cited, except Micah, express the belief, not
uncommon in the ancient Near East (and pushed to extremes in Egypt)
that the king was divine. Another examples of this belief may be found
in Ps. 89.26-27 (verse numbering according to the English versions).
The Samuel passage, with the parallel in Chronicles, expresses the
promise that the Davidic line would be eternal. 

The reason why it was important for Matthew and Luke to establish Jesus'
Davidic heritage should now be easy to understand. If Jesus was to be
accepted as the messiah, he had to be of royal lineage. He had to be the
rightful heir to the Davidic throne. This would then establish his
claim to messiahship, which is another way of saying kingship (see the
discussion above). Now if the king was the son of God (Ps. 2.7, and
elsewhere in the passages cited at the beginning of this discussion),
and if Jesus was king, then Jesus, too, would be the son of God. This
is in fact what is claimed. Historically, I view it as the final
statement of the ancient Near Eastern belief in the divinity of kings.