The Genealogies of Jesus

There are some prima facie difficulties in the genealogies of Jesus presented in Matthew and Luke.  The two main difficulties start after David.  First:  Luke traces the genealogy through David’s son, Nathan, while Matthew traces it through Solomon.  Second: Luke and Matthew list different people for Joseph’s father, Heli and Jacob respectively.  How can we resolve these difficulties?

We’ll start with the second problem.  My preferred solution is that Luke is not tracing Joseph’s genealogy but Mary’s.  This is supported by a few data points:  Luke seems especially invested in a Marian perspective, unlike the other three gospels, so it’s natural to think that he provides Mary’s genealogy.  Luke’s parenthetical remark in 3:23: “He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli” has some chance of meaning “being the son (as it was supposed, of Joseph, but really) of Heli.”  This has the effect of eliminating Joseph from Jesus’ genealogy.  But this way of reading the verse isn’t favored by textual critics.  Some additional evidence:  There is a late tradition that identifies Mary’s father as “Joahchim,” for which “Heli” can be an abbreviated form.  Further, some theological evidence:  Providing Mary’s genealogy would link Jesus biologically to David, rather than merely adoptively as in Matthew’s gospel.  

That Luke provides Mary’s line is my preferred solution.  Still, it isn’t a mainstream view, so we should explore other options.  One suggestion is that Joseph was adopted by Heli, allowing a divergence between a legal and natural line. Another, suggested by the quite early writer Julius Africanus, is that Joseph is the result of Levirate marriage.  This view holds that Heli and Jacob share a mother, but have different fathers - one from the line of Nathan, the other from the line of Solomon.  It further proposes that Heli died, leaving a widow.  Jacob marries Heli’s widow in a levirate marriage.  So Joseph is a child of Heli legally, but is biologically the son of Jacob.  This is a very intricate view, but Julius Africanus seems to rest it on documents and testimonies that he had available to him.  So tradition is on its side.

Others propose that Matthew is presenting the more straightforward royal line, so that it becomes clear how Jesus fits into the line.  David’s son Nathan is quite obscure.  Solomon not so much.  So Luke presents the actual descent and Matthew shows how Jesus fits into the more preeminent line. I don’t really like this view.

I don’t hold strongly to any of these solutions.  So long as we manage to show a strong enough probability that these options could be correct, it’s possible to hold to both Luke and Matthew’s genealogies without denying an error in either one of them.  The problem of the complexity of these solutions is eased, at least in my case, from my experience with building out my own personal family tree.  Such weird complexities are not at all rare!  Such intricacies are true to life’s intricacies.  

Another personal note - and this is true of all doubts more generally - I feel the pressure of these doubts to a much greater degree at night when I’m tired.  They feel irresolvable at these times.  But whenever I wake up in the morning and resurvey the evidence, these pressing doubts tend to disappear.  Just a weird fact about our psychology, I guess.

One further note and I’ll finish here.  I tend to feel a pretty vast skepticism over these genealogies from a more general historical point: How did the Jews preserve these records, and would they have been easily accessible to the Gospel writers?  Hundreds of years.  Loads of wars and conquest.  Two quick points:  The Jews were notorious record keepers and there was actually a dedicated building for genealogical records next to the temple, identified as the Archives in the ESV Study Bible.  Also, God could easily guard history and records so as to preserve a true account of Jesus’s genealogy for Matthew and Luke. If he can create the universe, surely he could guard the records, right?

Accessibilism: A Hybrid View

William Lane Craig is an Accessibilist. He thinks that one can be saved apart from hearing the gospel. But if he's an Accessibilist, then what's the point of his Molinist move that holds that those that reject natural revelation and never hear the gospel would have rejected the gospel had they heard it? To safeguard against the objection that there may be individuals who, while rejecting natural revelation, would have accepted the gospel had they heard it, so that it’d be unfair if they were damned without hearing it. This objection goes through even given Accessibilism, so still requires a response.  

So WLC doesn’t hold that any that would respond to the gospel would indeed hear it - for those that accept natural revelation would also accept the gospel - but rather holds that those who do not hear the gospel and do not believe general revelation would not have believed the gospel if they had heard it.

Still, there's an issue with Accessibilism. We'll call it the Missions Objection.  What’s the point of doing missions if people can be saved apart from hearing the gospel? It isn't just about our motive for missions but about the urgency and immense importance placed on missions in the Bible. We need to uphold both a grounded motivation and the Biblical data undergirding missions.

So I propose a hybrid view: There are individuals who will respond positively to natural revelation and thus be saved apart from hearing the gospel, so bare Accessibilism is true. But there are also individuals who will not respond to natural revelation but will respond to the gospel upon hearing it. So they will not be saved by surveying natural revelation alone, but must hear the gospel in order to believe. And we can add the middle knowledge bit here: those people that will only respond to the gospel *will* get a hearing of it.

Thus we can preserve bare Accessibilism and the motive and biblical data for missions.  Still, I decline to endorse this view.  It's just an option on the table.

An Argument for Hypothetical Universalism

Thus a thousand talents hidden away in the treasury of a prince are said to be a sufficient payment price to redeem ten citizens taken captive by an enemy; but if there is not added an intention and act of offering and giving these talents for those captives, or for some of them, then a mere, and not an ordained, sufficiency of the thing is supposed as to those persons for whom it is not given. But if you add the act and intention offering them for the liberation of certain persons, then the ordained sufficiency is asserted as to them alone.

I think that no divine of the Reformed Church of sound judgment, will deny a general intention or appointment concerning the salvation of all people individually by the death of Christ, on this condition: If they should believe. For this intention or appointment of God is general, and is plainly revealed in the Holy Scriptures, although the absolute and infrustratable intention of God, concerning the gift of faith, is special, and is limited to the elect alone. 

- John Davenant

1. If it's true that if a reprobate comes to belief, then they'll be saved, then the atonement must have been made for them. 
2. It is true that if a reprobate comes to belief, then they’ll be saved. 
3. So the atonement must have been made for the reprobate.1

Why believe premise (1.)?  Because if we deny it, we’d have to hold that a reprobate person can be saved by coming to belief but without having their sins atoned for.  That seems wrong.

Why believe premise (2.)?  Because we’d have to deny that the reprobate person could be saved, despite coming to belief.  That also seems wrong. If a person truly and honestly believes in Jesus, then they will be saved.  To say otherwise undermines the sincerity of the gospel’s offer (“whoever believes will be saved”) and numerous New Testament passages.

There’s a few maneuvers open to the standard Calvinist:  (a) They could argue that if the reprobate believed, then they’d be elect. (b) They could argue that the conditional in the first premise includes an impossible antecedent, and thus poses no threat to limited atonement (c) They could deny one of the premises.  Given that both premises seem safe, as we’ve seen, I don’t think (c) is a viable path. 

(a) seems initially promising, but contains a confusion. It holds that the argument is using “reprobate” in an equivocal sense.  If by “reprobate” we mean individuals in our world who are non-elect, but who, being elected in other worlds, would therefore believe and thus be saved - then yes, the first and second premises are true.  But the conclusion would only get us to: “the atonement must be made for the reprobate if they had been elected,” which just seems like standard Calvinism.  But if instead we’re using the term “reprobate” in a more flaccid sense to refer to a variable class of individuals who are always non-elect, then the original conclusion goes through and is not in line with standard Calvinism.  It’s this latter meaning of reprobate that I intend.  We’re effectively divorcing election from belief, and it still seems the case that if a non-elect person came to genuine belief that they would be saved.2

(b) is a difficult maneuver as well.  It holds that, given the impossibility of the reprobate coming to belief apart from election, that we can safely dismiss the truth of the conditional.  Given the way that the logic of material conditionals work - sure, it comes out true that if the reprobate were to believe, they’d be saved - because the antecedent is necessarily false.  But that’s just a trivial truth of logic and doesn’t have the theological import I’m wanting it to have.   We don’t need to give an account of the truth of the conditional, this response goes, because all conditionals with an impossible antecedent are like this.  So, in fact “no,” the atonement doesn’t need to be universalized to account for the truth of this conditional, as we can already account for its truth given its impossible antecedent 

There’s two ways to respond to this maneuver.  First, we could hold that the antecedent in the conditional is not metaphysically impossible or necessarily false.  Perhaps it’s false in our world, and perhaps false in all nearby worlds - but it seems hard to imagine that it must be false in every world.  Perhaps in some worlds the doctrine of prevenient grace is true.  This sort of response, to maintain its Calvinist character, must hold that the reprobate cannot believe in our world apart from election.  But perhaps this fact of our world is more like a law of nature - necessary *here*, but not necessary in every world.3

The second maneuver is to argue that even if the antecedent is necessarily false, it’s still clearly not irrelevant to the consequent.  There is a connection between the two.  This isn’t like the conditional “Squares have 5 sides, therefore unicorns exist.”  There’s a strength in the conditional that’s lacking in these vacuous sorts with impossible antecedents.  And given the strong connection between the antecedent and consequent in our conditional, we still need to account for it, even if it is a metaphysically impossible antecedent. 

I think we need an account of the conditional: If the reprobate believed, then they'd be saved.

To say that they cannot and never will believe doesn't explain it, for there are true conditionals in our world that cannot and never will have their antecedents met, yet are still true in a substantive sense:  e.g., if you could lift an elephant then you could lift a giraffe.4  To say that the reprobate would be members of the elect if they believed doesn’t work either; because even granting that God doesn’t elect the reprobate class of people, it still seems true that if they truly believed - all on their own, apart from election - that they’d be saved.  And election isn’t responsive to belief, so they do not become members of the elect by believing.  So it doesn’t seem like election can explain the truth of the conditional.  

How about this? If the reprobate believed, then Christ would have died for them, but since they won’t, he didn’t.  That seems to provide a sort of stop-gap that does explain the conditional.  But it also seems to give away the case.  Isn’t this just the hypothetical universalist option? Christ died for some on the condition of their belief. And while they don’t meet that condition in this world, so Jesus didn’t die for them - he would have, had they believed on their own.  The atonement is *responsive* to belief, even belief absent-election.

Here's an alternative strategy that requires less machinery.  Rather than focusing on the reprobate person/s, instead we focus on the belief itself.  So we focus on belief that is not the result of election, and find that it would still result in salvation.  

So I think that the conditional is true even on the requirement that the belief not result from election.  This, of course, cannot be accounted for by saying that the would-be belief would be the result of election if the belief were to occur, because I’m explicitly targeting belief that is *not* the result of election, whether it would occur or not.  Or, I'm defining "belief" such that it does not and cannot result from election - and I think the conditional is still true even in that case. 

And so the conditional “if a person believes with a belief that is not the result of election, then they’ll be saved” is true at our actual world, though the possibility of them believing in the actual world isn’t there. 

I think the question becomes: Why accept the conditional?  Why think that this type of belief would save?  Because it just seems that if such belief occurs in a person, that they’ll be saved - whether that belief is the result of election or not.  So while their belief doesn’t occur here in the actual world, the conditional’s truth *does* occur here in the actual world.

The next move is to argue that the truth of the conditional in our world requires that Jesus have died for the non-elect in some sense.