For BlueOctogons: Which one of Jesus' genealogy is correct?

Question

I love it when anti-Christians go straight for the jugular! (Plus she called me "Punkin"!)

Would you believe that both genealogies are correct? (Wow! That will REALLY stir up the hornet's nest, won't it?)

See, guys, when you pretend to know what you're talking about and then forget to do your research, sly guys like me can slip in and make you look ignorant. Here's your homework: study Jewish traditions. It might help you. (Or you could just read Eusebius, who answered this question about 1600 years ago.)

Moses gave a law that when a man dies without children, his brother takes the wife and has children in his brother's name. This creates a paradox. There is a LEGAL lineage, from father to son, and a BIOLOGICAL lineage from father to brother to son, and Jews were required to keep both.

Matthew gives the LEGAL lineage, necessary for inheritence and proof of messiahship.

Luke gives the BIOLOGICAL lineage (and Eusebius actually names the brothers!)

Zero cool: Roman period sources offer enough data to confirm some of Luke's data and all of Matthews. The existence of the genealogy library used by Luke is also well documented, and there's little reason to believe any of it was fabricated.

(Incidentally, the destruction of the genealogy library in 35 AD serves to confirm that Lukes gospel was written within 5 years of Jesus' death.)

Palomnik Dobbs: Josephus should serve as enough evidence for you. He offered numerous examples of controversies among the Jews at the time including levirate marriage. But since you pretend motivations before you consider textual evideciary quality, I don't think you're ready for him.

Elizabeth: I don't understand why Christians even offer the argument of both Joseph's and Mary's lineage. Both gospels clearly give Joseph's lineage without mentioning Mary. I try not to alter the text when explaining it.

dbytz: Didn't the sadduccees ask this of Jesus?

(And didn't the Jews go through a terrible period of war in the 2nd century BC?)

Answer 1

I little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. The Christian response to this is that the Matthew lineage is that of Joseph, whereas the Luke lineage belongs to Mary. We will now deal with each one to examine their problems.

Concerning Joseph’s Lineage in Matthew.

Point #2: A stepfather is not your father. We are looking, in a sense, to find the path whereby David’s Y-chromosomes (passed father-to-son) reached Jesus. It doesn’t jump from one’s stepfather. Christians will argue that Joseph adopted Jesus, and by doing so gave over the inheritance of the royal line. Yet, just as with the Kohanim (Priests), an adopted son cannot become a Kohane. So, too, a son adopted by a member of the royal line cannot become heir to the throne.

Point #3: Missing Names & Generations. When you compare the Davidic line shown in Matthew against how it is shown in 1st Chronicles, we see that 4 names are eliminated as indicated on the chart. The language in Matthew, for instance, states that Uzziah (same as Azariah) was the son of Jehoram, instead of the son of Amaziah. Christian apologists try to explain this by stating that when it says “this one begat that one”, it implies his ancestor, and not necessarily his father. The problem they create for themselves, is that Matthew states:

So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David

until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations.

Matthew 1:17

We can accept that names could be skipped when showing an ancestral line. However, it is not fair to take a lineage that stretched from David to the exile, which included 18 generations, and claim it only contained 14.

Point #4: Joseph himself was not a legitimate heir to the throne. Even if you could get your lineage through adoption, one could only pass on what you rightly own, and Joseph was of an invalid line. In Matthew 1:11 it shows that Joseph was descended from a former king named Jechoniah, or Coniah for short. He was a very wicked king, and was cursed by Hashem. In Jeremiah 22, we see that Jechoniah’s descendants are absolutely cut-off as heirs to the throne. Therefore anyone descended from Joseph was also cut-off as a candidate to be king.

Is this man Coniah a despised broken vessel? An object that no one cares for? Why are they cast out, he and his seed, and banished to a land which they know not? O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord, Write this man down as childless, a man who shall not prosper in his days; for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah.

Jeremiah 22:28-30

Christians will answer that even the Talmud tells us that Jechoniah repented, and that his grandson Zerubbabel became a leader among the Jews. This they claim is proof that the curse was temporary, and was later rescinded. The fact is that Zerubbabel only became a governor. Neither he nor anyone else from this line ever sat on the throne again. The curse remained.

As a descendant of Jechoniah, Joseph’s lineage was not valid. The reality is that very few Christians attach Jesus to David through Joseph anyway, relying more on the line of Mary. Which leads us to wonder, why was the lineage of Joseph even mentioned to begin with?

Concerning Mary’s Lineage in Luke.

Point #5: Mary’s name is not mentioned anywhere in connection to Luke’s lineage. How would we know this is Mary’s line? Some will contend that Heli is really Mary’s father, and when it says that Heli is the father of Joseph, it really means father-in-law. Yet, the New Testament says nothing about who Heli was anywhere, and he is only mentioned here. Others contend that Joseph was also the name of Mary’s father, and that the Joseph mentioned here was really Mary’s father, not husband. The bottom line is that one cannot substantiate this as Mary’s lineage by anything written in the New Testament, but must rely on a Christian oral tradition. This is ironic, since Christians are so adamant in condemning the legitimacy of Jewish oral traditions, insisting on a strict reliance on scripture alone.

Point #6: The royal line is only passed through the father, never the mother. Even if the lineage mentioned in Luke is Mary’s lineage - that presents a problem in of itself. True, one’s Jewishness is passed through the mother, yet one’s tribal inheritance passes through the father. Christians argue that the Book of Numbers shows a case where a father had no sons, and his estate of land went to his daughters, who it is presumed could pass it on to their children. The Jewish position, however, is that this may apply to property, but not to one’s rights to the throne. Yet, even if we were to assume that the lineage could pass through the mother, and we assume that Luke’s lineage did in fact belong to Mary, was Mary’s lineage a legitimate one?

Point #7: David-to-Solomon. According to Judaism, the Davidic line had to pass through David’s son Solomon, and no other son.

As I swore to you by the Lord G-d of Israel , saying, assuredly Solomon your son shall reign after me (David), and he shall sit upon my throne in my place…

I Kings 1:30

Behold, a son shall be born to you, who shall be a man of rest; and I will give him rest from all his enemies around; for his name shall be Solomon, and I will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days. He shall build a house for my name; and he shall be my son, and I will be his father; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom over Israel forever.

1 Chronicles 22:9-10

Luke’s lineage shows that Mary is not from Solomon’s line, but rather from another of David’s sons, Nathan (Luke 3:31 ), who was not the royal heir. Since Mary is not from Solomon’s line, she and her descendants do not have a legitimate connection to the royal line of David either.

Point #8: Unlikely Marriage. If in fact the lineage shown in Matthew was Joseph’s (27 generations from David to Joseph), and the lineage in Luke was in fact Mary’s (43 generations from David to Mary), then Mary married someone 16 generations older than herself. Quite unlikely.

Having seen that neither Matthew’s lineage of Joseph, nor Luke’s (supposed) lineage of Mary is legitimate, how can one consider Jesus as a legitimate descendant of David? One cannot. Without this, an honest person cannot accept Jesus as the Messiah, since this is the most important criterion, and Jesus does not have it.

Answer 2

I comprehend the place you're coming from whether, you're making use of mortal genealogical situations to a Supernatural Being, and the properties of the supernatural. organic Holy Spirit does not very own a corporal physique, it incredibly is omniscient, all-powerful and omnipresent. in this context Jesus descended from the Holy Spirit or incredibly God the father; (God the father (author) God the Son (Savior) God the Holy Spirit) this might properly be a count number of and reliant on, the Holy Trinity a secret the human strategies has no longer the skill to comprehend. Mary bore the toddler Jesus throughout the time of the potential of what's called the immaculate concept, lower back a supernatural secret no longer certain with the help of genealogical or mortal territories. Joseph become no longer Jesus's organic and organic father; Joseph become the husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary. i do no longer discover your question a waste of time, the quest for theTruth, nor the solutions. in my opinion it incredibly is time properly spent, and maximum actually a fashion of acquiring understanding and/or expending understanding. God bless.

Answer 3

What difference does it make, since Joseph was not Jesus' biological father?

The prophesy specifically states that the messiah would be David's "seed." Since Joseph is not biologically related to Jesus, Joseph's genealogy is moot.

Saying that the genealogy in Luke is of Mary makes no sense. The genealogy given specifically starts with Joseph not Mary. It starts with Joseph, which was the son of Heli. Where do you get that this was a genealogy of Mary?

Answer 4

It sure is lucky that you have that Jewish tradition to act as an explanatory mechanism for the divergent genealogies created by redactors with different theological axes to grind and different communities to convince.

Question for you: what textual evidence can you give me that the Levirate was actually practiced in Palestine at the time? Cause the problem starts with Joseph's father -- Matthew says it's Jacob, and Luke says it's Heli.

Answer 5

I haven't done a lot of study on this, but I believe that Matthew records Jesus' lineage through Joseph, whose father was Jacob. Luke records his lineage through Mary, whose father was Heli. Either way, the point was to prove that Jesus was a direct descendant of King David which was to fulfill one of the Messianic prophecies. Legally, Jesus was the son of Joseph, which would have been the most important to the Jews, to whom Matthew was writing his gospel. But people began to dispute the claim that Jesus was a descendant of David because he was not really the son of Joseph. So Luke recorded the genealogy of Mary to prove that she too was a descendant of David to satisfy the gentiles(non-Jews) to whom he was writing.

Answer 6

Strange that this counters the common Christan answer that one is Joseph's blood line and the other is Mary's.

You, of course, will post links to confirm that this was standard Jewish practice in the first century? If this was common practice, we should have several records that document similar instances - definitely more convincing than someone writing 400 years after the fact.

Answer 7

There are literally millions of Christians out there who are not learned Bible students. Just like evolutionist and atheist- millions of them can not balance their check book or tell you which came first, the man or the dinosaur. There are millions of sport fans who do not know the rules of the game. It is very common for people to be believers or even unbelievers with out much knowledge of why.

Answer 8

Obviously I've missed something.
Anyway, Jesus Christ was of both the Tribe of Judah and the Tribe of Levit;
This fulfills both the King line and the Priest line.
I'm quessing this is the argument????

Answer 9

I'm curious to know how you verified this as true. I mean, sure, it sounds plausible, but did you or anyone else actually do crosschecking and provide evidence that your "lineage explanation" is accurate? I'd honestly like to know.

Answer 10

That is all well and good but what about Panthera? Doesn't that change the genealogy completely? Turns out there may be Roman heritage there.....