Ancestors 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. Some modern biblical scholars such as Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan see both genealogies as inventions, to bring the Messianic claims into conformity with Jewish criteria.

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.

Matthew's introductory title (βίβλος γενέσεως, book of generations) has been interpreted in various ways, but most likely is simply a title for the genealogy that follows, echoing the Septuagint use of the same phrase for genealogies.

Matthew's genealogy is considerably more complex than Luke's. It is overtly schematic, organized into three tesseradecads (sets of fourteen), each of a distinct character:

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