Ninjahound - I hope you won’t bite me. I’m just interested in the issues.

1. Genealogies:  I think there is a mixture of theological significance and patterning, and establishment of credentials through lineage in the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, so I think both issues have to be taken into account. For instance, the lineages are not totally inclusive, and in Matthew’s it is clear that he is arranging the names in three groups of fourteen. Personally I hadn’t come across the Jeconiah issue in Matthew’s genealogy before. I don’t think the rules of inheritance were quite as rigid as you are asserting - although I’m not an expert. It seems as if there was natural inheritance and legal inheritance - where the inheritance did not take place through natural descent. In Matthew, Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel; in Luke, Shealtiel is the son of Neri. It’s possible that Shealtiel was the natural son of Neri, but the legal son of Jeconiah (or the other way round). Jesus was, by the virgin birth (which you’ll gather I take literally), the legal son of Joseph, but not the natural son, though I doubt if this was the explanation given on whatever was the equivalent of the register of births and deaths.

2. You introduced at an earlier point in your argument that the natural line of David proceeded through Solomon, because he was God’s chosen successor. As far as I can see, he was only David’s chosen successor, because he was the son of his marriage with Bathsheba.  I’m not sure he was God’s exclusive choice (may be wrong - I haven’t looked this up).

There is an issue here, because if, like me, you take the virgin birth of Jesus literally, then there was a break in the natural line going back to David. Jesus wasn’t the offspring of Joseph’s seed, and so by the seed principle, the offspring ultimately of David. However, ‘seed’ is a messianic term applied to both Abraham’s and David’s offspring, eg Genesis 12:7, 2 Samuel 7:12. Abraham’s ‘seed’ was not simply, according to a NT understanding, his physical offspring, but all those who believed in him. This is inferred because although Christ is the fulfilment of the ‘seed’ in both cases (eg Galatians 3:16), all those who believe in him participate in the promises made to the seed through faith. (Granted that in 2 Samuel 7:12 there is a sense in which Jesus did not literally come from David’s ‘own body’ in a rigidly literalistic understanding).

3. You haven’t actually shown that Immanuel and Jesus couldn’t have been the same person, based on the context of Isaiah 7, because the context extends to Isaiah 9, which describes a son who is very closely identified with Jesus.

4. You are probably right in associating the ‘shepherd’ of Ezekiel 34 with ‘the prince’ mentioned elsewhere, since ‘shepherd’ was a term for rulers of all kinds, including kings. But interpreting Ezekiel strictly literally is going to create problems of many sorts. I assume you believe that the ‘eschatological temple’ described by Ezekiel will one day be built. (Or maybe not, gievn your views on the bible expressed elsewhere). Have you any idea just how huge its dimensions are - if taken literally? But here, we run into some principles of interpretation of the OT which are sketched out in the NT. Whichever way the Jews interpret Ezekiel (and for all I know, they may not hold to a literal interpretation either), there are many aspects of OT prophecy which have been understood as having a non-literal fulfilment in Jesus - since he is the fulfilment of the story, around whom everything else becomes relative. So it’s unlikely that OT prophecy concerning many of the ‘land’ prophecies relating narrowly to geographical Israel have a literal fulfilment, since they are fulfilled in who Jesus was and what he did - through his worldwide people, in effect.

This picks up on the wider thrust of prophetic fulfilment concerning Israel - that her significance was always going to be in relation to fulfilling God’s purposes for the whole world, not just for herself. ‘Land’ prophecies (as a single example) have to serve the wider purpose, rather than create a separate category all of their own. Prophets prophesied using the images and language of their cultural time and understanding. Some aspects of prophetic language and imagery are going to be culturally relative. So the question is: what is culturally relative, and therefore symbolic, and what is ‘literal’ in prophecy? Answer for the Christian: look at what was fulfilled in Jesus - the vanishing point of all prophecy. (But there do remain areas of disagreement in this debate). Prophecy is rarely straighforward literal prediction.

5. Incidentally, I also don’t think it is true to say that the Christian faith only spread because of the spread of the bible. It spread because of the power of the gospel, concerning Jesus, outside the bible, as a reality in people’s lives. The bible simply confirms the gospel.

I did once get bitten by a German shepherd dog at a house where I was delivering leaflets for our church. It left some quite deep puncture marks in my leg. I’m not nervous about dogs, since we have one of our own (a Shetland sheep dog), but your message moniker does give me flashbacks to that episode - or the phantom dog in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Also I don’t like loud noises or bangs, or people shouting at me. So please be careful how you put things in any response to this.