Two Different Lines of Descent

There is no better place for Christians to begin in the always strange but wondrous journey from adolescence into adulthood than with the stories of the birth of Jesus.

And the first thing we must address there is the shocking revelation, almost universally unnoticed, that Matthew clearly tells us Jesus was descended from David’s son Solomon while in Luke David’s son Nathan was his ancestor. We don’t even notice this because the two Gospel genealogies are so different that they are seen in their entireties as merely one of the numerous conflicts causing the accounts to be non-historical. Moreover, as we shall later see, from a historical standpoint each account contains within itself obvious errors based upon Old Testament genealogical information. We don’t really bother to read them anymore.

We shall indeed see that while the Evangelists themselves did at least minor doctoring with them to make historical fact serve spiritual revelation, the genealogies are otherwise essentially accurate reflections of the earthly ancestry of Jesus, “who was descended from David according to the flesh” as Paul says in the third Pauline verse of our Bible. In other words, what seem to us to be errors in the genealogical accounts from a historical standpoint are modifications intentionally made by the Evangelists to reflect deeper spiritual realities.

And when we have unraveled this seeming but non-existing conflict we shall also have resolved all the other seeming conflicts and differences between the two Gospel birth accounts, even from a historical point of view (if we can use the word “historical” to also cover what we call “prehistorical”).