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?