Genealogy of Jesus Christ

Although the genealogies of Jesus Christ listed in Matthew 1:1-16 and Luke 3:23-38 do not appear to match, what is true is that the two genealogies are listed for different reasons. According to Matthew 1:1 the genealogy that followed is the actual record of the lineage of Jesus Christ through Joseph, but Luke 3:23 introduced the genealogy of Jesus that was what was commonly believed. The point is that public knowledge about the ancestry of Jesus Christ was very wrong, and Matthew makes the case clear that his record is true and correct because it is not just what people believe but instead it is the actual true record of Jesus Christ. The point to be made is that Jesus Christ had God the Father as a father anyway, so Joseph was more like a step father.

The strong divergence between the two genealogies really breaks down in differences in detail between Luke 3:24-31 and Matthew 1:8-16. The problem would have been that for Joseph to have such a high covenantal genealogy, that Matthew describes, the family may have wanted to hide the genealogy during the Babylonian exile because otherwise people could have identified exactly who the step father of Jesus Christ may be. In other words the genealogy listed in Luke could have been the genealogy used as like a cover to hide the family that would produce the Messiah.

Matthew 1:20 shows an angel appearing to Joseph in a dream to comfort him that his child would not be a bastard. Matthew 2:13-18 continues with the story of a dream that involved an angel appearing to Joseph and warning him to flee to Egypt, and thus the childhood of Jesus Christ was spent in Egypt. Luke 1 gives account of the birth of Jesus Christ such that Marry was informed by an angel that she had the child, and Luke 2 also presents the early youth of Jesus as associated with the temple in Jerusalem. Luke 2 uses what appears to be direct confrontation with angels as they even inform the shepherds of the birth of Jesus Christ. Overall, both Matthew and Luke can be harmonized in detail despite differences.

Both Marry and Joseph could have been informed of the birth of Jesus Christ separately, and neither one may have spoken about it much because they most likely had been engaged in an arranged marriage such that neither felt comfortable with talking to the other. Joseph would have fled to Egypt, so that the people that would know him would not get suspicious. Joseph thus could have had Jesus circumcised after birth at the temple in Jerusalem without any question because Joseph would have just been passing through, and Jesus also could have taught at the temple as a youth because Joseph could have brought his family in from Egypt for the festivals. Joseph, Marry, and Jesus could have all blended in to the seasonal visitors at Jerusalem, but they would have been identified if they permanently lived in Judah during the early childhood of Christ as a result of social networks that would develop from living in a place for a long time.