A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Matthew’s and Luke’s ancestor lists are in their present form pointless. They claim to show that Jesus could be described as the Son of David; in fact Luke goes further, taking Jesus back to Adam, the first man. Yet they do this by tracing David’s line down to Jesus’s father, Joseph. Both then defeat their purpose by implying that Joseph was not actually the father of Jesus. Matthew does it by abruptly ending the genealogical mantra ‘father of’ after the generation of ‘Jacob the father of Joseph’, continuing ‘Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born’. Luke is more directly indecorous by calling Jesus ‘the son (as was supposed) of Joseph’.10 These rather lame phrases cannot be other than emendations of the rival texts, designed to accommodate the rapidly growing conviction of Christians that Jesus’s mother, Mary, was a virgin in human terms and became with child by the Holy Spirit.