Jason Staples' Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites was one of my favorite reads of last year; a really path-breaking work in Pauline scholarship, that clears up a great many confusing issues surrounding St. Paul’s ongoing relation to “the Jews” and “Judaism” and stimulates numerous further questions. So I was pleased, last week, to hear the Mere Fidelity guys do a show with Staples on the book. During the discussion of the ten northern tribes being assimilated among the Gentiles, a sidelong comment from one of the hosts—can’t recall which—sparked two hypotheses for me:

1. It is extremely plausible that at, say, the time St. Paul wrote Romans in AD 60ish, many or even nearly all living Gentiles in the Mediterranean-Near Eastern world known to him had Israelite ancestry.
2. Furthermore, it seems quite plausible—and the more I think about it I grow more confident—that almost every human being living today is a descendant of the patriarch Israel.

Let’s work out these two claims, which will require, well, summarizing two books and doing a bit of math.

The first book to summarize is Paul and the Resurrection of Israel. Staples' basic contention is that when the Apostle speaks of Gentiles coming to know Christ and receive adoption to sonship through faith, he understands this as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel’s restoration in a remarkably straightforward, even literal, way. In 722 BC, the ten northern tribes that comprised the kingdom Israel (vis-a-vis the southern kingdom of Judah) were conquered by the Assyrian empire and, as the Assyrians often did to conquered peoples, relocated to various far-flung corners of the empire. There they settled down, intermarried with the other subject peoples, fully abandoned the cult of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (whom they had, as the prophets remind us, not previously served with any special distinction), and assimilated to the ways of the nations. In exile, Israel died. Meanwhile, Judah persisted for another 140 years or so, but they too were ultimately conquered by—and partially exiled to—Babylon. The wheel of Mesopotamian civilization turned; Babylon, which had overtaken Assyria, was itself overtaken by the upstart Persia; and under Cyrus the Great, some of the Judahite exiles were permitted to return. This development the prophets had first predicted, and then described, as life from the dead (most famously by Ezekiel). But a small band of Judahites slowly rebuilding Jerusalem did not look much like the expected glorious fulfillment of the promises to Abraham. Most critically: where were the other ten tribes? How could “Israel” be reconstituted to reign over the nations without the return of, well, the kingdom of Israel? (See the less famous second half of Ezekiel 37.) The agony of this question generated a set of theological debates within (what came to be called) Judaism, with various groups staking out differing positions on what exactly would constitute the renewal of national righteousness sufficient to summon the Messiah, inaugurate the new age, and restore the kingdom to Israel—right up to, and through, the day when Saul of Tarsus, an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee of the strictest national-righteousness party, met the risen Jesus of Nazareth on the Damascus Road and knew him to be the promised Messiah.

“Go, for I am sending you far away to the Gentiles.” With these words the Lord inaugurated Paul’s new perspective on the problem of lost Israel. Israel’s ten tribes had been scattered among the nations, all jumbled up and undifferentiated like a valley full of dry bones. But if the Messiah had been raised from the dead, Israel could be too. And when the Holy Spirit fell upon uncircumcised Gentiles who had put their trust in the name of Israel’s Messiah Jesus—what could this be but the fulfillment of these promises? A new life of obedience to God, circumcision of the heart, cleansing from idolatry, hearts of stone replaced by hearts of flesh, and all the rest. In gathering in Gentiles from all nations to Christ, God was gathering in all Israel from the nations to Christ. To those who were formerly called “Not My People,” God now said, “You are my people”—a prophecy uttered by Hosea, as Staples points out, precisely to the northern kingdom Israel. To wit, Israel’s disobedience, though punished by exile, could not overcome God’s promises to the descendants of Jacob. That is Staples' core argument; and I must say I find it in outline an utterly convincing reading of the relevant Pauline texts, as well as disclosing—though he plays this card fairly close to the chest—the possibility of a genuinely integrative post-supersessionist New Testament theology. (Regarding which I hope to write at greater length someday.)

The second book to summarize is of a rather different category: S. Joshua Swamidass’s The Genealogical Adam and Eve: The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry. [Full disclosure: Swamidass is a long-term scholar and speaker partner of my workplace, the Veritas Forum, and my father was a lead endorser for the book.] Swamidass is a population geneticist and biologist who tackles the perennial question of the historical Adam and Eve through an unconventional lens. Set aside the red herrings, he says, introduced by the science of population genetics — “Y-chromosomal Adam” and “Mitochondrial Eve," hypothesized human universal genetic ancestors found non-simultaneously in extremely distant prehistory. What kind of relationship does the Bible say that we have with our first parents? Just that: a genealogical relationship, that is, they are ancestors of us all. If, the Bible asserts, we could all comprehensively trace our family trees back several thousand years, every one of us would find ourselves descended on some line from that man and woman who were cast out of the Garden of Eden. St. Paul takes this for granted in Romans 5. Most modern, “scientific” people do not. Even those Christians who do affirm it struggle (one way or another) to understand how it is compatible with the insights of population genetics and evolutionary biology. But that compatibility is just what Swamidass shows. Genetic universal common ancestors can only be found extremely far in the distant past, but genealogical universal common ancestry takes a remarkably short time to occur: only several hundred to a few thousand years, depending on population sizes.

This is a nonintuitive claim. What precisely does “genealogical universal common ancestry” mean? If “Adam” is a man living in the year 10,000 BC, for him to be a “genealogical universal common ancestor” means that at some later point in human history—say the year AD 1—every human being living in that year has “Adam” as an ancestor. (It does not mean that every human being who ever lived between 10,000 BC and AD 1 had “Adam” as an ancestor.) An Adam and Eve, Swamidass argues, who lived just several thousand years before Christ (i.e., roughly when the Bible suggests they did), created de novo with perfectly ordinary Homo sapiens biology but endowed with a new kind of divine life, could well—even if there was already a substantial Homo sapiens population on earth at the time—be the ancestor of every living human in AD 1. In fact, the screw can be turned further. Beyond a certain point in the past, whose likely range can also be calculated, everyone who has any living descendants at all is a universal common ancestor. In other words, the number of living descendants one has at any subsequent point in time, as history goes on, diverges toward—and then actually reaches—0% or 100% of global population. Genealogically, one’s line either completely dies out (which in most cases would happen quickly, within a handful of generations) or achieves global success. Genghis Khan is famously thought (based on perhaps shoddy and motivated genetic research) to be the ancestor of some extremely large-sounding proportion of living human beings, but his genealogical achievements are actually unremarkable given a large enough world-historical perspective. His “success” story (if impregnating an extremely large number of more or less coerced women counts as success) becomes less out-of-distribution with every subsequent generation.

This is where the math comes in. Assume a generation is 25 years (historically, a long generation). In the last 200 years, I presumably each have something like eight generations of ancestors. Theoretically, ancestors double each generation: every child has a mother and a father. Since 1826, I thus have 2^8 = 256 ancestors in the 8th generation, which of course doesn’t seem like very many against ~20 billion who have lived in that time period. But go back another eight generations. In the 16th generation, I don’t just have twice as many (512) ancestors in that generation, but 256 times as many (65,536)! By the time one reaches 1000 years (40 generations), I would have 1,099,511,627,776 theoretical ancestors in that generation. Now, this kind of truly exponential growth is obviously impossible. 2^40 is more humans than have existed in the entire history of the species! The actual function is more like a logistic curve than an exponential. In a highly endogamous, long-term isolated community, the actual number of recent-past ancestors would be smaller, as there are cousin or even sibling couplings, so that the child might have, say, 12 actual 4th-generation ancestors rather than 16 theoretical ones. (Mutatis mutandis for even further back in larger populations.) Clearly a credible mathematical model of ancestry diffusion would be significantly more complicated. But this at least opens up our intuitions for the claim that if a person in the not-too-distant past has any descendants in the present day at all, he or she most likely is the ancestor of every person living in the present day.

And unlike a true logistic function, which only approaches its upper limit more and more closely forever, Swamidass shows that ancestry diffusion can eventually reach 100%. The major plausibility challenges here are usually taken to be widespread endogamy and long-term community isolation in the pre-modern world—especially geographical barriers between the Old and the New World peoples. Unlike genetic ancestry diffusion, which requires a major infusion of new DNA (usually only explicable through conquest) to make a meaningful change in the record, for genealogical ancestry it only takes a few—even one!—successful entrances into a different community for this to work. For the first matter, widespread records of exogamy taboos are in fact backhanded evidence for widespread exogamy (e.g., Ezra and Nehemiah). For the second, it could be as simple as, say, one Norse sailor who fell in love with an indigenous Newfoundlander woman in the tenth century (or other avenues for conception, less pleasant to the historical imagination); if that child lives and has children, and so on and so on for a few more generations, suddenly one have a perfectly plausible pathway for an entire apparently geographically isolated group of peoples to acquire some European ancestry, though hardly any European genetics. The Polynesians settled the entire South Pacific archipelago in a few hundred years in large canoes, using astral navigation; one of their boats never got blown off course and ended up in South America or even the Galapagos Islands? Only a few outside individuals in the entire history of any community have to be genealogically successful, in this sense, to unlock the argument. And the historical records, such as they are, of highly-endogamous isolated communities might not preserve the memory of exogamous marriages.

Those with Nature access can read the 2004 paper which established the field, and on which Swamidass bases his arguments. (One of the co-authors of that paper wrote an unpublished but publicly accessible paper on the subject, as well.) According to the highly restrictive model they developed for genealogical ancestry diffusion (essentially no diffusion along trade routes, minimal exogamy, etc.), they conclude that the “most recent common ancestor” is likely to have lived between 2,000 and 5,000 years ago. Not much further back than that is the “universal ancestor point,” at which every person with any living descendants in the present day is an ancestor of every person in the present day. Of course, if one relaxes any of the conditions (by, say, assuming providential guidance of certain genealogical lines), the times shrink dramatically.

Here I properly return to my two hypotheses, bringing Staples and Swamidass into dialogue. (1) Is it plausible that in AD 60 the majority, or even the vast majority, of Gentiles in the world known to St. Paul actually had Israelite ancestry? We might ballpark that population at 100 million. Note that here we are not speaking about just a single common ancestor 700 years prior—that would be considerably less likely—but a much larger number, thousands or tens of thousands, of Israelites who were dispersed among the Near Eastern nations. And the Mediterranean-Near Eastern world in the Persian period and onward is likely to be an unusually high-ancestry-diffusion zone, as we learn from reading authors like Herodotus, who is always telling stories about such-and-such Greek tyrant going into Persian exile and being given eight wives and a Central Asian estate by the Great King, or one Aegean island people kidnapping a hundred women from another Aegean island people to replenish their fertile population. Thus I find it entirely plausible that in the approximately seven centuries (i.e., 28 generations) between the fall of Samaria to the Assyrians and the birth of Christ, the ancestry of the ten northern tribes diffused something close to, if not in fact, universally, in the Mediterranean-Near Eastern world.

Now for the more outrageously speculative thesis. (2) Is it plausible that in today, AD 2026, the vast majority—even the totality ?—of living human beings would find the patriarch Israel somewhere deep in their family trees? Is Jacob a contemporary universal ancestor? Well, as usual, I’d prefer “confident” to “certain.” But consider the time scales involved. Say he lived in approximately 1900 BC. Even on the restrictive model of the original Nature paper, this is fairly early in the hypothesized window of 2,000–5,000 years ago (i.e., AD 1 – 3000 BC) for the most recent common ancestor. And, note, one doesn’t have to have lived before the “universal ancestor point” to be a common ancestor: only before the point at which a common ancestor becomes possible. He’s in the window.

Precisely because of the differences between genetic and genealogical ancestry, none of this can be demonstrated one way or another by contemporary science. Nor am I even close to working out what might be the theological implications—and of course, St. Paul’s point in Romans is that “not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.” But knowing the existence of universal ancestors, and given the sweeping scale of the promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I like the chances. It has something to it of “Your Majesty, the Jews!”