Abraham: One God Three Wives Five Religions

More than a thousand years after Moses, the second Messenger of God to rise from Abraham and Sarah’s line was Jesus. During His ministry, Jesus drew a line from the past to the present, making it clear that the God with which He communed was the same God Who had appeared to Abraham and spoken to Moses. “Have ye not read in the book of Moses,” Jesus asked, “in the account of the bush, how God said to him ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’” Furthermore, Jesus reminded His listeners that the past and the present were connected to the future because God had made promises “to Abraham and his descendants forever.”²

Jesus reaffirmed the importance of the Ten Commandments that Moses had brought and then, in His capacity as a Manifestation of God, gave several new laws, including a very stringent edict about divorce and a heartwarming decree concerning love: “A new command I give unto you. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”³

It was difficult for many of those who heard Jesus’ message to believe that He was truly a Messiah because the manner in which He fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament did not jibe with people’s completely literal expectations. They were looking forward to someone who would be born in a city they’d never heard of, a warrior-king who would sit on an imposing throne and conquer East and West with a flick of his iron sword. Furthermore, the new prophet would be an animal-tamer of astounding ability because he would convince wolves to lie down peacefully among lambs.

To the consternation of most of those who met Him, Jesus’ life did not match their expectations. He was born in a city everyone had heard of. He was too humble to claim a throne and be crowned as a king and too peaceful to own a sword or command an army. Speaking in Paris in 1911, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá described the spiritual paradoxes posed by the advent of Jesus in these terms:

Although He came from Nazareth, which was a known place, He also came from Heaven. His body was born of Mary, but His Spirit came from Heaven. The sword He carried was the sword of His tongue, with which He divided the good from the evil, the true from the false, the faithful from the unfaithful, and the light from the darkness. His Word was indeed a sharp sword! The Throne upon which He sat is the Eternal Throne from which Christ reigns forever, a heavenly throne, not an earthly one, for the things of earth pass away but heavenly things pass not away. He reinterpreted and completed the Law of Moses and fulfilled the Law of the Prophets. His word conquered the East and the West. His Kingdom is everlasting … The animals who were to live with one another signified the different sects and races, who, once having been at war, were now to dwell in love and charity, drinking together the water of life from Christ the Eternal Spring.⁴

Another puzzling facet of Jesus’ life is the matter of His genetic lineage. In retelling the story of Jesus, two of the Gospels of the New Testament—Matthew and Luke—provide detailed genealogies, but their long lists raise as many questions as they answer.

Matthew is thought to have been one of the Twelve Apostles, though it is difficult to be certain that the apostle named Matthew is identical with the Gospel writer. In any case, the Gospel of Matthew traces Jesus’ ancestors back through forty generations to Abraham. Luke, by contrast, was a Greek physician who never met Jesus. His writings reflect a love of historical details, and his genealogy is much more extensive than that of Matthew. Luke traces four thousand years of ancestry by following the trail beyond Abraham and going all the way back to “Adam, which was the son of God.”⁵

Among the multitude of fascinating puzzles presented by the two genealogies are a couple of especially riveting items: First, neither genealogy traces Jesus’ biological inheritance. Both Matthew and Luke are quite clear in stating that they are tracing the lineage of Joseph, who was Jesus’ adopted father but not His biological father.

Second, the two genealogies don’t fully agree. Matthew and Luke each trace Joseph back to Abraham through King David, who lived c. 1000 BC, but they take different routes to get there. Matthew begins by naming the father of Joseph as Jacob, while Luke names the man who was probably Jacob’s brother or half-brother—Eli (or Heli)—as Joseph’s father.

There have been numerous explanations of why the genealogies differ. Many of them are focused on proving that one of the genealogies is Mary’s, which would make King David a genetic ancestor of Jesus. King David is cherished in both Judaism and Christianity because several Old Testament prophets foresaw that David’s house would be eternally important, that a ruler from David’s family would restore Israel and usher in an era of peace, and that God would “establish the throne of [David’s] kingdom forever.”⁶ Those who believe that Jesus was the Messenger intended to fill these promises genetically rather than spiritually are eager to connect Him to David.

But, tempting as it may be to assign Jesus to the line of David (within the tribe of Judah), many scholarly sources, including the Catholic Encyclopedia, conclude that there is no valid way of claiming that either of the genealogies in the New Testament belongs to Mary. The Encyclopedia suggests, instead, that Jesus be connected to David through adoption: “If by virtue of Joseph’s marriage with Mary, Jesus could be called the son of Joseph, he can for the same reason be called ‘son of David.’”⁷

Digging even deeper into the question of descent, one discovers in the New Testament that Mary is a cousin of Elizabeth, who is a Levite through Aaron, who was the brother of Moses and, like Him, a son of Amram. This makes Elizabeth—and by extension, Mary—a descendant of Abraham through Sarah but not through David. This lineage is explained more clearly in the Qur’án when Muḥammad describes Mary’s mother as being “a woman of ‘Imran,” which means she was definitely a descendant of Moses’ father, Amram. The Bahá’í writings concur by explicitly placing Joseph rather than Mary in the line of David.⁸

When Jesus Himself was asked about His ancestors, He dismissed the question of lineage entirely, replying, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Or, as the Bahá’í writings describe it, “In reality His Holiness Christ was glorified with an eternal sovereignty and everlasting dominion, spiritual and not temporal. His throne and kingdom were established in human hearts where He reigns with power and authority without end.”⁹

Throughout His short ministry, sitting upon a spiritual throne in a nonphysical kingdom, Jesus invited everyone, Jew or gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, woman or man, poor or rich, to follow Him. And through this persistent focus on faith rather than family background, a wonderful thing happened. Jesus inaugurated a new era of accepting a religion by choice rather than by DNA. This fresh and exciting understanding of the role of religion allowed monotheism to escape its tribal confinement in the Middle East and spread to diverse cultures and other continents, eventually becoming the most widespread religion on earth. Thus God’s promise to make Abraham’s seed a blessing to the whole world was fulfilled through Jesus the Christ in a mystical manner that no one had anticipated and that no one could really understand until centuries later.