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From: bill@astro.as.utexas.edu (William H. Jefferys)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: inconsistencies in the Bible (digest of postings)
Message-ID: <Dec.20.23.39.29.1989.18916@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 89 04:39:31 GMT
Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu
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Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu


In article <athos.Dec.15.01.39.35.1989.17438>, phys-bb@garnet.berkeley.edu (John Warren) writes:

#Here is another 'contradictory' pair.  Let no one say these are 
#contradictory passages without considering these thoughts.
#Matthew and Luke give two different genealogies for Jesus.  The
#discrepancy sticks out like a sore thumb; thus the Bible compilers
#must have known about it, and they don't seem to have been too 
#troubled by it.  The standard answer to this 'inconsistency' is
#to say that one list is Jesus' ancestry through Joseph and the other
#through Mary.  But both go through a man named Joseph.  So what
#do we think.
#
#Well, there were more than one Joseph around in Jesus's day.  In
#fact, ancient traditions have Joseph, Mary's husband, dying early 
#in Jesus's life, so that Jesus came under the care of Joseph of
#Arimathea, who was Mary's uncle.  This is why Luke says that 'it
#was supposed' that Jesus was the son of Joseph; it's talking of
#Joe of A.  Matthew can only say that Joseph was the husband of
#Mary, since Jesus had no physical father.  So Luke actually does
#go through Mary's bloodline.

I've never been very impressed with the `genealogy through Mary' 
theory, and I don't think that this twist of bringing in Joseph of 
Arimathea fixes it. The `genealogy through Mary' theory is utterly 
without scriptural support. It was unknown to the ancient Church 
(Eusebius does not mention it, for example), and in fact it is 
quite recent, having been first suggested at the end of the 15th 
century by Annius of Viterbo. I recently found the following 
supporting comments in Farrar's Greek edition of Luke (Cambridge, 
1921: p. 413). Farrar strongly rejects the theory, pointing out 
that there is no evidence that the Jews recognized genealogies of 
women as constituting a legal right for their sons. He also says 
that to accept the `genealogy of Mary' theory does great violence 
to Luke's language, for then we would have to make out Luke's 
words to mean `Being, as was reputed, the son of Joseph [but 
really the son of Mary, who was the daughter] of Eli, &c.' Luke, 
whose Greek is quite good, would hardly write so sloppily. 

There may be a convincing way of resolving this discrepancy 
between Matthew and Luke, but IMHO the `genealogy through Mary' 
theory isn't it.

Bill Jefferys