The Genealogy of Jesus
Genealogies are not usually among the favorite passages of readers
of the Bible. Sometimes my students complain when I have them
read the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. If they think
this is bad, I tell them they should take a class on the Hebrew Bible
and read the genealogy of 1 Chronicles. It covers nine full chapters,
name after name. By comparison, the genealogies of Jesus in Mat¬
thew and Luke are short and sweet. The problem is that the genealo¬
gies are different.
Once again, Matthew and Luke are our only Gospels that give
Jesus’ family line. Both of them trace his lineage through Joseph to
the Jewish ancestors. This in itself creates a puzzling situation. As we
have seen, both Matthew and Luke want to insist that Jesus’ mother
was a virgin: she conceived not by having sex with Joseph but by the
Holy Spirit. Joseph is not Jesus’ father. But that creates an obvious
problem. If Jesus is not a blood-relation to Joseph, why is it that Mat¬
thew and Luke trace Jesus’ bloodline precisely through Joseph? This
is a question that neither author answers: both accounts give a gene-
alogy that can’t be the genealogy of Jesus, since his only bloodline
goes through Mary, yet neither author provides her genealogy.
Apart from this general problem, there are several obvious differ¬
ences between the genealogies of Matthew 1 and Luke 3. Some of
them are not discrepancies per se; they are just differences. For ex¬
ample, Matthew gives the genealogy at the very outset of his Gospel,
in the opening verses; Luke gives his after the baptism of Jesus in
chapter 3 (an odd place for a genealogy, since genealogies have to
do with your birth, not your baptism as a thirty-year-old. But Luke
may have had his reasons for locating it where he does). Matthew’s
genealogy traces Joseph’s lineage back through King David, the
ancestor of the Messiah, all the way to Abraham, the father of the
Jews. Luke’s genealogy goes back well beyond that, tracing the line
to Adam, father of the human race.
I have an aunt who is a genealogist, who is proud to have traced
our family back to a passenger on the Mayflower. But here is a ge¬
nealogy that goes back to Adam. As in Adam and Eve—the first
humans. It’s an amazing genealogy.
One might wonder why the two authors have different end points
for their genealogies. Usually it is thought that Matthew, a Gospel
concerned to show the Jewishness of Jesus, wants to emphasize Jesus’
relation to the greatest king of the Jews, David, and to the father
of the Jews, Abraham. Luke, on the other hand, is concerned to
show that Jesus is the savior of all people, Jew and gentile, as seen
in Luke’s second volume, the book of Acts, where the gentiles are
brought into the church. And so Luke shows that Jesus is related to
all of us through Adam.
One other difference between the two genealogies is that Matthew
starts at the beginning, with Abraham, and moves down generation
by generation to Joseph; Luke goes the other direction, starting with
Joseph and moving generation by generation back to Adam.
These then are simply some of the differences between the two
accounts. The real problem they pose, however, is that the two gene¬
alogies are actually different. The easiest way to see the difference is
to ask the simple question, Who, in each genealogy, is Joseph’s father,
patrilineal grandfather, and great-grandfather? In Matthew the
family line goes from Joseph to Jacob to Matthan to Eleazar to Eliud
and on into the past. In Luke it goes from Joseph to Heli to Mathat
to Levi to Melchi. The lines become similar once we get all the way
back to King David (although there are other problems, as we’ll see),
but from David to Joseph, the lines are at odds.
How does one solve this problem? One typical suggestion is to say
that Matthew’s genealogy is of Joseph, since Matthew focuses on
Joseph more in the birth narrative, and that Luke’s is of Mary, since
she is the focus of his birth narrative. It is an attractive solution, but
it has a fatal flaw. Luke explicitly indicates that the family line is
that of Joseph, not Mary (Luke 1:23; also Matthew 1:16). 7
There are other problems. In some ways Matthew’s genealogy is
the more remarkable because he stresses the numerological signifi¬
cance of Jesus’ ancestry. From Abraham to David, Israel’s greatest
king, there were fourteen generations; from David to the destruc¬
tion of Judah by the Babylonians, Israel’s greatest disaster, there
were fourteen generations; and from the Babylonian disaster to the
birth of Jesus, fourteen generations (1:17). Fourteen, fourteen, and
fourteen—it is almost as if God had planned it this way. In fact, for
Matthew, he had. After every fourteen generations there occurs an
enormously significant event. This must mean that Jesus—the four¬
teenth generation—is someone of very great importance to God.
The problem is that the fourteen-fourteen-fourteen schema doesn’t
actually work. If you read through the names carefully, you’ll see
that in the third set of fourteen there are in fact only thirteen gen¬
erations. Moreover, it is relatively easy to check Matthew’s genealogy
against his source, the Hebrew Bible itself, which provides him with
the names for his genealogy. It turns out that Matthew left out some
names in the fourteen generations from David to the Babylonian di¬
saster. In 1:8 he indicates that Joram is the father of Uzziah. But we
know from 1 Chronicles 3:10—12 that Joram was not Uzziah’s father,
but his great-great-grandfather. 8 In other words, Matthew has dropped
three generations from the genealogy. Why? The answer should be ob¬
vious. If he included all the generations, he would not be able to claim
that something significant happened at every fourteenth generation.
But why does he stress the number fourteen in particular? Why
not seventeen, or eleven? Scholars have given several explanations
over the years. Some have pointed out that in the Bible seven is the
perfect number. If so, then what is fourteen? Twice seven. This could
be a “doubly perfect” genealogy. Another, possibly more convincing,
theory is that the genealogy is designed to stress Jesus’ status as the
Messiah. The Messiah is to be the “son of David,” a descendant of
Israel’s greatest king. It is important to know that in ancient lan¬
guages, the letters of the alphabet functioned also as numerals, so
that the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, was also the nu¬
meral 1, the second, beth, was 2, the third, gimel, was 3, and so on.
Also, in ancient Hebrew no vowels were used. So the name David
was spelled D-V-D. In Hebrew, the letter D (daleth) is the number
4 and the V (waw) is 6. If you add up the letters of David’s name,
it equals 14. That may be why Matthew wanted there to be three
groups of precisely fourteen generations in the genealogy of the son
of David, the Messiah, Jesus.
Unfortunately, to make the numbers work he had to leave out
some names. I might also point out that if Matthew was right in his
fourteen-fourteen-fourteen schema, there would be forty-two names
between Abraham and Jesus. Luke’s genealogy, however, gives fifty-
seven names. These are different genealogies.
And the reason for the discrepancies? Each author had a purpose
for including a genealogy—or, more likely, several purposes: to show
Jesus’ connection to the father of the Jews, Abraham (especially Mat-
thew), and the great king of the Jews, David (Matthew), and to the
human race as a whole (Luke). Probably the two authors inherited,
or possibly they made up, different genealogies. Of course neither
could know that his account would be placed in a “New Testament”
and be carefully compared with the other by historical critics living
two thousand years later. And they certainly didn’t consult with each
other to get their facts straight. Each gave his account as well as he
could, but their accounts ended up different.
