Birth and Infancy of Jesus

122:4.1Joseph did not be­come rec­on­ciled to the idea that Mary was to be­come the mother of an ex­traor­di­nary child un­til af­ter he had ex­pe­ri­enced a very im­pres­sive dream. In this dream a bril­liant ce­les­tial mes­sen­ger ap­peared to him and, among other things, said: “Joseph, I ap­pear by com­mand of Him who now reigns on high, and I am di­rected to in­struct you con­cern­ing the son whom Mary shall bear, and who shall be­come a great light in the world. In him will be life, and his life shall be­come the light of man­kind. He shall first come to his own peo­ple, but they will hardly re­ceive him; but to as many as shall re­ceive him to them will he re­veal that they are the chil­dren of God.” Af­ter this ex­pe­ri­ence Joseph never again wholly doubted Mary’s story of Ga­briel’s visit and of the prom­ise that the un­born child was to be­come a di­vine mes­sen­ger to the world.

122:4.2In all these vis­i­ta­tions noth­ing was said about the house of David. Noth­ing was ever in­ti­mated about Je­sus’ be­com­ing a “de­liv­erer of the Jews,” not even that he was to be the long-ex­pected Mes­siah. Je­sus was not such a Mes­siah as the Jews had an­tic­i­pated, but he was the world’s de­liv­erer. His mis­sion was to all races and peo­ples, not to any one group.

122:4.3Joseph was not of the line of King David. Mary had more of the Da­vidic an­ces­try than Joseph. True, Joseph did go to the City of David, Beth­le­hem, to be reg­is­tered for the Ro­man cen­sus, but that was be­cause, six gen­er­a­tions pre­vi­ously, Joseph’s pa­ter­nal an­ces­tor of that gen­er­a­tion, be­ing an or­phan, was adopted by one Zadoc, who was a di­rect de­scen­dant of David; hence was Joseph also ac­counted as of the “house of David.”

122:4.4Most of the so-called Mes­sianic prophe­cies of the Old Tes­ta­ment were made to ap­ply to Je­sus long af­ter his life had been lived on earth. For cen­turies the He­brew proph­ets had pro­claimed the com­ing of a de­liv­erer, and these promises had been con­strued by suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions as re­fer­ring to a new Jew­ish ruler who would sit upon the throne of David and, by the re­puted mirac­u­lous meth­ods of Moses, pro­ceed to es­tab­lish the Jews in Pales­tine as a pow­er­ful na­tion, free from all for­eign dom­i­na­tion. Again, many fig­u­ra­tive pas­sages found through­out the He­brew scrip­tures were sub­se­quently mis­ap­plied to the life mis­sion of Je­sus. Many Old Tes­ta­ment say­ings were so dis­torted as to ap­pear to fit some episode of the Mas­ter’s earth life. Je­sus him­self one­time pub­licly de­nied any con­nec­tion with the royal house of David. Even the pas­sage, “a maiden shall bear a son,” was made to read, “a vir­gin shall bear a son.” This was also true of the many ge­nealo­gies of both Joseph and Mary which were con­structed sub­se­quent to Mi­chael’s ca­reer on earth. Many of these lin­eages con­tain much of the Mas­ter’s an­ces­try, but on the whole they are not gen­uine and may not be de­pended upon as fac­tual. The early fol­low­ers of Je­sus all too of­ten suc­cumbed to the temp­ta­tion to make all the olden pro­phetic ut­ter­ances ap­pear to find ful­fill­ment in the life of their Lord and Mas­ter.