Testing 1, 2, 3, testing 1, 2, 3, this is Radio Free Mormon.

On the air, broadcasting behind Enemy Lines.

Tonight's episode, Jesus, who's your daddy?

Now that question might lead one to think that this podcast is going to deal with the issue

of whether Jesus' father was God or Joseph or perhaps some other individual.

But actually, we're going to be talking about the question of whether Jesus was the son

of David.

Now we know that Jesus is commonly understood to be the son of David.

We will talk about why it was that the common belief was that the Messiah would have to

be a descendant of David, that that was one of the criteria that the Messiah would

have to fulfill in order to be the true Messiah, whether it was that Jesus was actually a descendant

of David, and perhaps a little bit about how it was that that belief came to be formulated

in the first century CE.

But before I get to that, I want to talk a little bit about the birth of Jesus, because

there were a number of things that the Messiah was supposed to do.

In order to qualify as the Messiah, and those things were laid out in prophecies as

they were generally understood in Jesus' day, prophecies now contained in what we call

the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures.

One of those prophecies had to do with the Messiah being born in Bethlehem.

Now spoiler alert, Jesus was almost certainly not, repeat not, born in Bethlehem.

And yet the gospel writers felt it important to put him there in order to make him fit the

bill for the predicted Messiah.

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