Son of Joseph

So really the genealogy is an expression and proof of the completion of Christ's identity, his purpose and the fulfillment of the scriptures.

There are various verses in the bible which refer to God/Jesus as the Alpha and Omega the beginning and the end.

There is a hymn which puts it well the
verses go:

You are God of the heavens
And God of the earth
You are God of our Savior's virgin birth
You were God on the cross
And God over hell
You were God before man
And God when he fell.


God created mankind, we were designed to have a relationship with Him. In that sense we are all sons and daughters of God, or at least that was the intention.

But due to the fall people were no longer sons and daughters of God automatically. Think of it as disowning
our inheritance and birth right and choosing to serve another instead.

It took God to become man to live as one of us and take the punishment which should have been ours, to buy back that birth right - the right to be sons and daughters of God again.

The bible has a lot to say about inheritance, birthrights, lineage etc.
There is an interesting little tale in Genesis about Esau and Jacob. Easu the oldest sold his birth right for a pot of stew. He give it away without a second thought. The same happened in the garden of Eden. Jacob the youngest ended up with the birth right and blessing which should have gone to the elder son.

The question is will you recognise your
own right to be a child of God. Will you accept the free inheritance which has been purchased for us via Christ, Will you turn your back on it like Esau or will you seek Christ and repent and walk in it like Jacob.

Will you become a sheep or remain a goat, will you grow and bear fruit or remain a thistle. Esau or Jacob? Walk away from your inheritance or claim it.

Other biblical phrases used are Walk the broad path as the majority do which leads to destruction, or find the narrow leading to eternal life.


That’s an even more important and intriguing question. x

I wouldn't get too "stuck" on Jesus genealogy, read on maybe take a few notes on Matthew and then go to the gospel according to John - what you need is an overall view of the message/story - some of the fine details have been "argued" about for centuries.

Don't be worrying over a few pixels here and there try and see the picture as a whole otherwise you can get bogged down.

Jesus lineage is important to establish that he was the son of David and son of Abraham..Matthew is showing Josephs line because when Mary was pregnant and betrothed to Joseph, he had to take her to Behtlehem in Judea where he was from, to be born. Place of birth is significant as that establishes birthright. Jesus was therefore brought up Jewish, because Bethlehem is in Judea..it shows Josephs lineage is Jewish..i,e, going back to Judah, who was son of Jacob (called Israel) this is significant for prophecy too because Kings come from the line of Judah. See chapter 2:6

In gospel according to Luke Marys lineage is shown, which also establishes that Jesus is of the line of Israel, but goes back further to show he is the son of God.

Being adopted into family is also important for Christians to know as we are adopted by God to be his children, when we are born again. This is why the geneolgy is shown in gospel according to Matthew, which was written for a jewish audience...plus they had to know what was Jesus claim to be Messiah. It was through Joseph more than Mary...Jesus dna may come from Mary, but Joseph being Marys husband and raising Jesus in Judea according to all the jewish customs...to show Jesus was one of them, see the next chapter where the wise men say there is a new King of the Jews. This surprised Herod, who is claimed to be king of the Jews but he actually has no birthright to the throne...Herod was not even jewish. Further investigation shows that Herods ancestry was from .esau, not jacob.

I’d say one thing to that both Joseph and Mary had the same dna in their gens, the lineages are from two sons of David. Of coarse Joseph wasn’t the next in line linage but Joseph lineages represents the king lineages from David thus hand in marriage of Mary was a handing the crown to the true king from an older lineages of king David. But Both Geno’s go back to Adam.

Genesis is for those who believe God…..

Jesus in the flesh is descended from Abraham (honored Father of the peoples) and from Abraham back to Adam (mankind) and Adam to the Father.

This is a bit long, but an interesting from James Tabor - Dr. James Tabor is Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he is professor of Christian origins and ancient Judaism:

So one obvious question is how was Jesus a “son of David”? What do we know of his lineage that might support this claim that he was a part of the royal family of David?

Luke and Matthew give Jesus no human father yet they give different genealogical accounts of his ancestry. Genealogies, or what many Bible readers remember as the lists of “begats,” do not usually make gripping reading, but Jesus’ genealogies are full of surprises.

Matthew begins his book with this genealogy: “Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob, and Jacob begat Joseph,” and so forth. Since Matthew is the first book of the New Testament, more than a few eager Bible readers have had good intentions dampened by this technical beginning. But let’s look again. Matthew lists forty names, all the way from Abraham, who lived a thousand years before David, through David, and down to Joseph, husband of Mary. But there are two surprises.

Any standard Jewish genealogy at the time was based solely on the male lineage, which was of primary importance. One’s father was the significant factor in the cultural world in which Jesus was born. Yet in Matthew we find four women mentioned, connected to four of the forty male names listed. This is completely irregular and unexpected. Luke records:

Judah fathered Perez and Zerah from Tamar (v.3)

Salmon fathered Boaz from Rahab (v. 5)

Boaz fathered Obed from Ruth (v. 5)

David fathered Solomon from Uriah’s wife (v. 5)

These are all women’s names, or in the case of Uriah’s wife, an unnamed woman.....

At the end of the list, the very last name in the very last line, the other shoe drops. Matthew surely intends to startle, catching the reader unawares. He writes:

Jacob fathered Joseph, the husband of Mary;

from her was fathered Jesus called Christ.

What one would expect in any standard male genealogy would be:

Jacob fathered Joseph;

Joseph fathered Jesus, called the Christ.

Matthew uses the verb “fathered” or “begot” (Greek gennao) thirty-nine times in the active voice with a masculine subject. But when he comes to Joseph he makes an important shift. He uses the same verb in the passive voice with a feminine object: from her was fathered Jesus. So a fifth woman unexpectedly slips into the list: Mary herself….


But there is yet another remarkable feature of this lineage of Joseph that is vital to the story and should not be missed. Joseph’s branch of David’s family, even though it had supplied all the ancient kings of Judah, had been put under a ban or curse by the prophet Jeremiah. In those last dark days just before the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC, Jeremiah had made a shocking declaration about Jechoniah, the final reigning king of David’s line: “Write this man down as stripped . . . for none of his seed shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David and ruling in Judah again” (Jeremiah 22:30).[iv] Joseph was a direct descendant of this ill-reputed Jechoniah (Matt 1:11-12).[v]

In effect, it was as if Jeremiah was declaring the covenant that God made with David null and void. At least it might appear that way. Psalm 89, written in the aftermath of these developments, laments: “You have renounced the covenant with your servant; you have defiled his crown in the dust” (Psalm 89:39). Or so it seemed. After all Jechoniah was the last Jewish king of the royal family of David to occupy the throne in the land of Israel. Joseph was of this same line, but as the legal father of Jesus, rather than the biological father, Joseph’s ancestry did not disqualify Jesus’ potential claim to the throne if Jesus could claim descent from David through another branch of the Davidic lineage. But how many “branches” of the Davidic family were there?

Luke’s genealogy provides us with the missing key to understand how Jesus could claim Davidic descent with no biological connection to his adoptive father Joseph. Luke records his genealogy of Jesus in his third chapter. Jesus was 30 years old and had just been baptized by John. Whereas Matthew begins with Abraham and follows the line down to Joseph, Jesus’ adoptive father, Luke begins with Jesus and works backward—all the way back to Adam! Rather than forty names, as in Matthew, we have seventy-six. There are three striking features in this genealogy.

First, it begins with a surprising qualification. Literally translated it says: “And Jesus was about thirty years [old] when he began, being a son as was supposed of Joseph, of Heli (Luke 3:23).” The Greek is quite terse, but what jumps off the page is the phrase “as was supposed.”[vi] Luke is telling his readers two things: that Joseph was only the “supposed” or “legal” father of Jesus and that Jesus had a grandfather named Heli. According to Matthew Joseph’s father was named Jacob. So who was Heli? The most obvious solution is that he was Mary’s father.[vii] One seldom hears anything about the grandparents of Jesus, but Jesus had two grandfathers, one from Joseph and the other from Mary. Two grandfathers mean two separate family trees. What we have in Luke 3:23-38 is the other side of Jesus’ family, traced through his actual bloodline from his mother Mary. The reason Mary is not named is that Luke abides by convention and includes only males in his list. Since Luke acknowledges no biological father for Jesus he begins with Joseph as a “stand-in” but qualifies things with the phrase “as was supposed.” A freely paraphrased translation would go like this: “And Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work, supposedly being a son of Joseph but actually being of the line of Heli.” If Mary’s parents were indeed named Joachim and Anna, as early Christian tradition holds, it is possible that Heli is short for the name Eliakim, which in turn is a form of the traditional name Joachim.

It is unlikely that Luke simply concocted such a detailed record. Jewish families were quite zealous about genealogical records—all the more so if one was descended from the line of David. Josephus, the Jewish historian of that period, traces his own priestly genealogy with obvious pride and mentions archival records that he had consulted.[viii] Julius Africanus, an early 3nd century Jewish-Christian writer who lived in Palestine reports that leading Jewish families kept private genealogical records, since Herod and his successors had sought to destroy those that were public. Africanus specifically notes the practice of keeping clandestine family genealogies as characteristic of Jesus’ descendants.[ix] Since the Davidic lineage of Jesus was so important to the early Christians it is likely that Luke had one of these records available to him.

Cont next post:

Luke’s genealogy also reveals another important bit of information. Mary, like her husband Joseph, was of the lineage of King David—but with a vital difference. Her connection to David was not through the cursed lineage running back through Jechoniah to David’s son Solomon. Rather she could trace herself back through another of David’s sons, namely Nathan, the brother of Solomon (Luke 3:31). Nathan, like Solomon, was a son of David’s favored wife Bathsheba, but Nathan never occupied the throne and his genealogy accordingly became obscure. He is listed in the biblical record but no descendants are mentioned, in contrast to his brother Solomon (2 Chronicles 3:5). So, according to Luke, Jesus could claim a direct ancestry back to King David through his mother Mary as well. He did not have the “adoptive” claim through his legal father Joseph alone, but also that of David’s actual bloodline.

The name Nazareth, the town where Mary lived, comes from the Hebrew word netzer meaning “branch” or “shoot.”[x] One could loosely translate Nazareth as “Branch Town.” But why would a town have such a strange name? As we have seen, in the time of Jesus it was a tiny village. Its claim to fame was not size or economic prominence but something potentially even more significant. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, written before Jesus’ lifetime, we regularly find the future Messiah or King of Israel described as the “branch of David.”[xi] The term is taken from Isaiah 11 where the Messiah of David’s lineage is called a “Branch.” The term stuck. The later followers of Jesus were called Nazarenes or “Branchites.”[xii] The little village of Nazareth very likely got its name, or perhaps its nickname, because it was known as the place that members of the royal family had settled and were concentrated. It is no surprise that both Mary and Joseph lived there, as each represented different “branches” of the “Branch of David.” The gospels mention other “relatives” of the family that lived there (Mark 6:4). It is entirely possible that most of the inhabitants of “Branch Town” were members of the same extended “Branch” family. The family’s affinity for this area of Galilee continued for centuries. North of Sepphoris, about twelve miles from Nazareth, was a town called Kokhaba or “Star Town.” The term “Star,” like “Branch” is a coded term for the Messiah that is also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.[xiii] Both Nazareth and Kokhaba were noted well into the 2nd century AD as towns in which families related to Jesus, and thus part of the “royal family,” were concentrated.[xiv]

Finally, the names in Luke that run from King David down to Heli, Mary’s father, offer us some very interesting clues that further explain why this particular Davidic line was uniquely important. There are listed no fewer than six instances of the name we know as Matthew: Matthat, Mattathias (twice), Maath, Matthat, and Mattatha. What is striking is that the name Matthew was one invariably associated with a priestly not a kingly or royal lineage. One of Jesus’ twelve apostles was named Matthew, but he was also called Levi.[xv] Two of the six “Matthews” in Jesus’ lineage were sons of fathers named “Levi.” Josephus, the 1st century Jewish historian, records that his own father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and brother were all named Matthias, and they were all priests of the tribe of Levi from the distinguished priestly family of the Hashmoneans or Maccabees. Ancient Israel was divided into twelve tribes, descendents of the twelve sons of Jacob the grandson of Abraham. The priests of Israel had to be descendents of Aaron, brother of Moses, who was from the tribe of Levi. The kings had to be of the royal lineage of King David, who was of the tribe of Judah. These positions, King and Priest, gave the tribes of Judah and Levi special prominence. But why would there be so many priestly names in a Davidic dynasty?

Remember, when Mary became pregnant and left Nazareth to stay with Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptizer, Luke notes that they were relatives, though he does not say how (Luke 1:36). But he also records that Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah were of the priestly lineage (Luke 1:5). This is further confirmation of the link between Mary’s Davidic family and the priestly tribe of Levi.

It is inconceivable that such a heavy prevalence of Levite or priestly names would be part of Mary’s genealogy unless there was a significant influence from the tribe of Levi merging into this particular royal line of the tribe of Judah. What appears likely is that Mary was of mixed lineage. Luke only names the male line from David down to Mary. But the large number of priestly names indicates that there were likely important Levite women marrying into this Davidic line along the way. It is a pattern that goes all the way back to Aaron, brother of Moses, the very first Israelite priest. Aaron of the tribe of Levi married a princess of the tribe of Judah named Elisheva or Elizabeth (Exodus 6:23).

Very interesting!

Hi Meditator, in a very real sense, the four Gospels themselves are about that too, and more. They help us come to know Jesus, who and what He is (was/will be), why He came here, etc., and that from four generally different points of view, Jesus as King (Matthew), Jesus as a Servant (Mark), Jesus as a man (Luke), and Jesus as God (John). The Gospels identify Him/prove Him to be the long-promised and prophesied Jewish Messiah from the household of David who would save His people from their sins.

~Deut
p.s. - here's a look ahead for you into the Gospel of John (which, again, takes a look at Jesus as God .. or as the One who was always God but became a man as well at His Incarnation). Jesus is the One being referred to as the "Word" (λόγος [Logos]) in the following verses from John 1, just FYI.

.

Thank you. Why is Jesus called Logos?

Each of the 4 gospels represent Jesus in a different light......Matthew represents Jesus as King and rightful heir to the Throne of David.............While Joseph was not his biological father he raised Jesus nonetheless.......And JESUS is the 2nd Adam......the 1st Adam brough sin into the human race....for humanity to be redeemable there had to be atleast 1 worthy....JESUS AS A MAN (called Son of Man and Son of God) bridged the gap between men and God....he was sinless though tempted in all points as we are tempted....his righteousness is applied and imputed by faith unto all that believe and pur life is hid within Christ in God.......

Hi again Meditator, there is a VERY important reason why Jesus cannot be related biologically/genetically to Joseph like He is to Mary.

This will take a bit of explanation, so let's start here. I have no doubt that you've heard the phrase, "nobody's perfect", and that you'd agree with that assessment, as it is 1) perhaps the most common saying that we have among us, as well 2) an apt description of our race. The Bible puts it this way: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" .. Romans 3:23.

The question is "why", why are we ~all~ sinners/why hasn't there ever been anyone among us (save Jesus) who is perfectly innocent and perfectly righteous (since the days when our first parents were still innocent and living in the Garden of Eden)? How did we get this way do you think?

Thanks!

~Deut

The gospel of Matthew was for the Jews, and how this good news related to them. The geneology reflects this.
Luke, othe other hand, was to the Gentiles and the geneology presented by him was for their understanding.

It was important in light of prophecy regarding the Messiah.

There are books, web sites and commentaries (preferable) that explain the differences.

Sadly, I need to run again, but this article should get you started: https://www.gotquestions.org/Jesus-Word-God.html

I hope to return tonight and add a bit to what our friends at "Got Questions" have said, but if not, I will return soon (though it is possible that "soon" could mean not until 12/26 at this point, just FYI .. it all depends on how much I can get done tonight).

~Deut

Hello Meditator,

I struggled with this question for years. If the Holy Spirit is the child's sire. How does Joseph fit in the genealogies?

Answer ADOPTION

David to Mary & Joseph to King Jesus

Joseph was descended from David via Solomon. While Mary was a descendant of David via Solomon’s older brother Nathan.

Mary had to find a husband from the tribe of Judah like herself to protect her father’s estate. (See Numbers 36)

She also needed a direct descendant of Solomon to perfect her son’s claim to the throne of David, since Nathan’s descendants weren’t of the Royal line.

Joseph fit the bill on both accounts but like every other descendant of Solomon.. He carried a blood curse disqualifying any biological son of his from ever being King of Israel. (Jeremiah 22:28-30)

Since Joseph was not the Lord’s biological father, he could adopt Him, qualifying Him to be King without passing Him the curse.

Thus, because of the virgin birth, Jesus became the only one in Israel qualified to sit on David’s throne, and remains so to this day.

There are two recorded lineages of Jesus. One from Mary & another from Joseph. Thus, Jesus became Joseph’s actual son via ADOPTION. Old testament adoption gives the child complete equality & all the benefits of a natural born child.

A simpler way to explain it:

Jesus differing genealogies are a result of Matthew's account being Mary's line, and Luke's being Joseph's line

Matthew is about Messiah as King. Luke is about Messiah as the son of man.

Because Israel's true Messiah-King would be a Hebrew (through Abraham) and a royal descendant of the tribe of Judah through David. He would have the legal right to the throne of David.
Because 7 is the number of divine perfection in the Bible, and 14 is twice that number. Christ's genealogy is perfect.
Joseph was the LEGAL father of Jesus, and thus his ancestry from David through Solomon as given in Matthew was important. Mary was the biological mother of Christ, and her ancestry is given in Luke from David through Nathan. In Luke Joseph is shown in this genealogy instead of Mary, with his father-in-law Heli as showing descent from David. Genealogy was reckoned from father to son, and so it was presented this way.