It’s All in the Family

Am I the only one who skips the genealogy bits of the Bible? What is this stuff in here for, and what theological value is there in it? There were even discrepancies between the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, so which could be trusted? We know the Jewish people took this very seriously, but if we can’t trust even the basics, what hope do we have that the rest of the Bible can be trusted when it comes to the more out-there details like miracles and resurrections?

The theory that makes the most sense to me is that Matthew aimed for a more spiritual path, tracing the lineage from Abraham to show Jewishness and through David to show royalty. He clearly wanted to structure it into three tidy steps of 14 generations, very satisfying, very Jewish. Luke, meanwhile, had more people in his list to cover the same period, which raises an eyebrow or two. We also know that Biblical writers often used “father of…” loosely to show ancestry rather than a direct parent-child relationship, for example, in John 8:39, the Pharisees said that “Abraham is our father,” even though centuries had passed.

One possible explanation is that Matthew and Luke each preserved a different family line connected to Jesus. Matthew may have traced Joseph’s legal or royal line, while Luke may have traced Mary’s biological line, or Joseph’s line through levirate marriage. Put another way, Matthew seemed to emphasize the royal Davidic line through Solomon, while Luke emphasized a different Davidic branch through Nathan. A third explanation, found in older Christian tradition, was that Joseph could have been both the legal son of Heli and the biological son of Jacob because of levirate marriage. Whichever theory is right, they all agree on the main point: Jesus was descended from David and was the promised Messiah.

These are theories, and we have no hard proof of the actual lines. There are many smarter people than I who have been wrestling with this for centuries. But I do think it’s worth pausing here, because if we can’t trust these writers to get something as verifiable as a family tree right, and honestly, tracking down Jesus’ grandparents shouldn’t have been that hard, what hope do we have for the bigger claims?

Here’s what helps me make peace with it. Dual lineages wouldn’t have seemed strange to the original audiences at all. In Deuteronomy, God commanded a man to marry his brother’s widow, and the Pharisees even tried to use this to trip Jesus up in Matthew 22. Adoption, tribal affiliation, and legal inheritance could create family trees that would have a modern Western genealogist pulling their hair out. Matthew’s primary audience was Jewish, so tracing Jesus back through David was his way of establishing credentials, showing that Jesus was the Son of David that people had been waiting for (Matt 9:27; Matt 15:22; Mark 10:47; Luke 18:38). When people called Jesus “Son of David,” they knew He wasn’t literally one generation removed from the king, just as the Pharisees knew they weren’t the direct children of Abraham (John 8:37).

Luke, on the other hand, was writing for a Gentile audience and addressed his gospel to Theophilus. Rather than stopping at Abraham, Luke traced the line all the way back to Adam, making Jesus the son of all humanity, not just the Jewish people. My goal here isn’t to solve the genealogy puzzle. It’s simply to show that two different lists don’t automatically imply a contradiction or a cover-up. We’ll be wrestling with questions like this throughout this book, and even when there’s no clean answer, we’ll look at the possibilities honestly.

One final thought on why I think these genealogies deserve our trust: they were written at a time when anyone could have fact-checked them. People were being persecuted for following Jesus, and letters full of obvious errors would have been the perfect excuse to walk away from this risky new movement. Critics would have pounced on shaky foundations. The gospels circulated widely, passed between churches and communities, and were compared with one another. If the genealogies hadn’t held up, it’s hard to imagine this movement surviving long enough to become anything more than a footnote in history.