Genealogy of Jesus

The New Testament provides two accounts of the genealogy of Jesus, one in the Gospel of Matthew and another in the Gospel of Luke. Matthew’s starts with Abraham, while Luke begins with Adam. The lists are identical between Abraham and David, but differ radically from that point. Traditional Christian scholars (starting with the historian Eusebius) have put forward various theories that seek to explain why the lineages are so different, such as that Matthew’s account follows the lineage of Joseph, while Luke’s follows the lineage of Mary. Modern biblical scholars such as Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan see both genealogies as inventions, conforming to Jewish literary convention.

Matthew 1:1–17 begins the Gospel, “A record of the origin of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham: Abraham begot Isaac…” and continues on until “…and Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.”

Matthew emphasizes, right from the beginning, Jesus’ title Christ—the Greek rendering of the Hebrew title Messiah—meaning anointed, in the sense of an anointed king. Jesus is presented as the long-awaited Messiah, who was expected to be a descendant of King David. Matthew begins by calling Jesus the son of David, indicating his royal origin, and also son of Abraham, indicating that he was a Jew; both are stock phrases, in which son means descendant, calling to mind the promises God made to David and to Abraham.

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Author: Wikipedia

Keywords: Genealogy of Jesus, Root of Jesse, Genealogy, Jesus family tree

Bible reference(s): Mat 1, Luke 3:23-38

Source: This article uses material from the Wikipedia article “Genealogy of Jesus,” which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

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