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A family tree worth boasting about. To establish Jesus as the Messiah, both Matthew and Luke list his genealogy—as far back as Abraham in the former and all the way to Adam in the latter. In both versions, the lineage passes through David, the tenth-century B.C. king of Israel. This 12th-century A.D. window from the Cathedral of Chartres traces the multiple generations from David’s grandfather Jesse, who reclines at the bottom, to Jesus himself. The stained-glass Tree of Jesse illustrates Isaiah 11:1–3: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him”—a prediction that the Messiah will come from the House of David.
But, as Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, points out, the Davidic Messiah was also expected to be a fearsome warrior-king—the antithesis of Jesus. That Jesus was nevertheless identified as the Davidic Messiah indicates that where he was from—David’s hometown of Bethlehem—mattered more than how he behaved.