Jesus was referring to the opening
verse of Psalm 110: “The Lord says to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I
make your enemies your footstool.” He was pointing out that according to this
text, when David addresses the king-Messiah who is invited to sit on the right
hand of God, David calls him “Lord.” Then, Jesus commented, “David himself
calls him Lord, so how is he his son?” In other words, if the Messiah was in
fact from the house of David, David would have addressed him as “my son.” With
the support of this verse, Jesus was making an extraordinary claim: the Messiah
described there, whose arrival the people was awaiting, was not a descendant of
David!
Scholars have suggested that Jesus used
this verse from the book of Psalms to show that although he did not descend
genealogically from the house of David, he was the Messiah nevertheless. (See
Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, 141) If that was the
case, this tradition concerning Jesus’s sermon assumed that he did not belong
to the house of David, which contradicts the contention of the gospels of Matthew
and Luke that Jesus was in fact descended from this line (see Matt .1:1; Luke
2:4). The very existence of this contradiction makes all the more likely the
authenticity of the tradition that Jesus was not of the Davidic line and that
he offered an extraordinary interpretation to support his claim to messiahship.
It is hard to believe that New Testament authors would later fabricate a
tradition opposed to the one in the gospels of Luke and Matthew.
And, in fact, in Jesus’s own words, as
related in the Gospels, he himself never claimed to be a descendant of the
house of David. Some of the people around him did say that hew as in the Davidic
line—the beggar in Jericho called him “son of David,” the people at the Mount
of Olives pronounced “Blessed be the kingdom of our father David that is
coming!” (Mark 10:46-48 and 11:10, and parallels)—but Jesus himself never
confirmed it.
Yet there’s more here. Jesus’s sermon
denying that the Messiah would be descended from the house of David also represented
an ideological rejection of Davidic messianism, which expected the arrival of a
fighting Messiah who would liberate the Jews from Roman rule. To Jesus, the
Messiah was not case in the mold of the warlike David, but was the son of God.
As such, the Messiah was higher than David, which is why David had addressed
him as “my Lord.” The divine voice Jesus heard when he was baptized in the
River Jordan had addressed him as “my son,” and that is how he saw himself.
Jesus would confirm this a few days later when he stood before the High Priest
at his trial and asserted that he was “the Son of the Blessed one” (Mark 14:61-62).
(Israel Knohl, The Messiah Confrontation: Pharisees Versus Sadducees and the
Death of Jesus [trans. David Maisel; Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
Society, 2022], 148-49)