real life wrote:skeptical wrote:
The Jewish follower that gave these to me, also pointed out that Jews did not trace heritage by women, only men.
Luke, who gives the lineage thru Mary, was not a Jew. His gospel was written to a primarily Gentile audience as well.
This was mildly hilarious.
In the first place, no one knows who Luke was, so your claim that he was not a Jew appears to be based upon nothing more than a desire to sound authoritative. Even the long-accepted belief that he was a companion of Paul is not universally agreed upon by scholars, many of whom point out that there is textual evidence that he knew Flavius Josephus, which means that he was living 30 years or more after the death of Paul, and 60 years or more after the time when the crucifixion of the putative Jesus was alleged to have taken place, which makes it highly unlikely that he was a companion of Paul. In that case, he may or may not have been a Jew, and he may or may not have been a gentile. You're whistling past the graveyard with the your seemingly authoritative claim that Luke was not a Jew. Even if he were a Greek--which the is the implication if he were a companion of Paul, and the the most likely case if he were a gentile and a Christian in the first century--it would be highly improbable that he would give a matrilineal descent based upon being a Greek, and in fact, almost any other category of gentile then common in southwest Asia.
"Gentiles" means absolutely everyone who is not a Jew--are you suggesting that Jews have one way of looking at genealogies, and absolutely everyone else has a different way of looking at genealogies than the Jews, but which is otherwise identical among gentiles? Given that absolutely no reference is made to a matrilineal descent, and given that there are some coincidental similarities with the other genealogy, are you suggesting that Luke's genealogy is sometimes patrilineal and sometimes matrilineal--and that you or anyone else can tell when that is true? Do you suggest that all gentiles would know when the references were to male-descent and when they were references to female descent, simply because they are gentiles? Do you suggest that there is sometime textually internal logic which should make it obvious that some one part or another of Luke's genealogy is matrilineal?
You know, the kind of "logic" you attempt to peddle may work well with the bible-thumper crowd, but you really should know better than to think that educated people who are not wedded to your preferred imaginary friend superstition are going to swallow absurdities like that.
