Was Jesus a Jew? How about Peter or Andrew or John?Jesus descended from David through the line of Nathan [Luke 3:23-31]. Jesus was a Jew.
They were all from the Northern Kingdom. By your definition, they would have been of the lost tribes.
No....by my definition they were of Judea. The two Kingdoms of Israel and Judah had been gone for quite a while by the time Our Saviour and his Disciples were born. Israel was exiled to Assyria in 721 B.C. so you can see that it was about as long before the first century as the crusades in the thirteenth century were before us. Judah was exiled to Babylon in 595 B.C. 126 years later. It would be very difficult to be a citizen of a country that has not existed for 700 years or so. Judah did come back from captivity 70 years later (Ezra and Nehemiah document this) but they were known by the first century as Judea.....and they had a phony King.
The fact is that by the time Christ was born, the tribes had intermarried so much that it was almost impossible to determine which tribe you were.
Where is your proof of this? Are you just supposing or can you document it?
I don't think the two houses could have intermarried.
According to the count of fighting men, there were four or five million in the House of Israel. There is no indication that there were that many plus the House of Judah in Judea during Christ.
There would not have been much attrition of the Israel ranks of men, women and children over the centuries because they were on the northern boundaries of Assyria with small groups of other peoples to act as buffer.
However, old Assyrians records in the British museum indicate Israel did not go to Judea when they won their freedom from Assyria. There are indications they went to Europe through Turkey, according to records of sightings of people wearing traditional Israelite priest robes and headdress from Assyrian outposts (pictures were scratched on the tablets).
Just the combined population of Judea alone should discard the meeting of the two houses, I would think. Not to mention that Hosea 1:10-11 predicts the the two houses will reunite at some future time and get right with God.
There has been no evidence that that happened.
