We find this, for example, in the account of Jesus’s genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel, which starts with the father of the Jews, Abraham, and traces Jesus’s line from father to son all the way down to “Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, from whom was born Jesus, who is called the Christ” (Matt. 1:16). As it stands, the genealogy already treats Jesus as an exceptional case in that he is not said to be the “son” of Joseph. For some scribes, however, that was not enough, and so they changed the text to read “Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, to whom being betrothed the
...more
An interesting schism between those who wish to emphasize semitic prophecy and those who emphasize the perpetual virginity of Mary.
