Matthew uses Jacob, who was Joseph’s father, to trace Christ’s lineage to Solomon.

Hope this clears up the confusion.

Matthew starts with Abraham and ends with Jesus. He identifies two delimiters in the intervening generations: David and the deportation to Babylon. Notice he does not identify the breaking points as David and Jehoichin. There are 14 generations that start with Abraham and end with David. There are 14 generations that start after David and end with the deportation. And there are 14 generations that start after the deportation and end with Jesus. Jehoichin is a member of the second and third 14s because his life started before the deportation, but ended after.

I responded with the 3 groups of 14 shown above, but this was my reason for making the splits in the groups as shown:

“But shouldn’t Matthew have included Jehoichin/Jeconiah as the last king?”

“No. Jehoichin/Jeconiah is the cursed King. The LORD cursed him by sending him into captivity. He belongs with the Captives, not the Kings.”

“Also, like David, Jehoichin/Jeconiah is a transitional figure. He takes us from the Kings to the Captives. Likewise David takes us from the Fathers to the Kings. Matthew puts the transitional figures with the earlier sequences.”

Thankfully, I am not claiming inerrancy about my own claims, since this is clearly a total hash.

I still adhere to the idea that the second group of 14 ends with Jehoiakim rather than Jeconiah, while the third group begins with Jehoichin/Jeconiah. I also still don’t think this represents an error because I think that that breaking point was mangled in the copying process, not in the original autograph.

But the reasons I gave for splitting the genealogy at Jehoiakim and Jehoichin are clearly contradictory and involve special pleading.

Yes, Jehoichin was cursed, but so was Jehoiakim, why not include both with the captives then?

The transitional figures, David and Jehoichin, were not _both_ included with the earlier sequences. Jehoichin was included with the later sequence (as I argued he should be but one sentence earlier).

Ach! What a mess I’ve made!

I will make one more effort for now, before admitting that I’m stumped.

We might still argue, based on their transitional status, that Davd belongs with the Fathers and Jehoichin with the Captives. The rationale, then, is that the ‘Royal’ section of the genealogy contains only individuals who were born as princes and died as kings. Neither David nor Jehoichin satisfy that criterion.

I’m now going to concede a big point to Amtiskaw based on further research of both ends of Luke’s genealogy from David to Jesus:

You are probably right about Luke giving Mary’s genealogy, not Joseph’s.

First of all, I did what I should have done when you first posted the point, I went back and checked I Chronicles 3:5. It says there that David and Bathsheba had 4 sons and it gives four names. Two of the names given are Solomon and Nathan. The only way I could continue with my hypothesis that Nathan was Solomon’s birth name, and not the name of a brother, would be to suppose that one of the 4 sons referred to had no name. But the passage doesn’t read that way. Though it may be true that David and Bathsheba had a son who had no name (the child of their adultery that died at 7 days) it still seems like a big stretch.

At the other end of Luke’s genealogy. The term “son” (or “descendant”) actually only occurs at the head of the list. The delimiting term for the members of the list first occurs before Heli’s name, not Joseph’s. Joseph is essentially relegated to a parenthetical remark. The list contains only males and so begins with Mary’s father, Jesus’ grandfather.

That is, it may be possible to read:

“He was the son (as was thought) of Joseph son of Heli, son of Matthat, son of…”

As something like:

“He was the descendant (though seemingly of Joseph) of Heli, of Mathat, of…”

It seems like much less of a stretch to accept this than to read David’s unnamed son into I Chronicles 3.

None of this, of course, invalidates my arguments defending Matthew’s elisions for the sake of memorability.

The Fathers:

01. Abraham
02. Isaac
03. Jacob
04. Judah
05. Perez
06. Hezron
07. Ram
08. Amminadab
09. Nahshon
10. Salmon
11. Boaz
12. Obed
13. Jesse
14. David

The Kings:

01. Solomon
02. Rehoboam
03. Abijah
04. Asa
05. Jehoshaphat
06. Joram
07. Uzziah
08. Jotham
09. Ahaz
10. Hezekiah
11. Manasseh
12. Amon
13. Josiah
14. Jeconiah*

The Captives and their Descendents:

01. Jeconiah
02. Shealtiel
03. Zerubbabel
04. Abihud
05. Eliakim
06. Azor
07. Zadok
08. Achim
09. Eliud
10. Eleazar
11. Matthan
12. Jacob
13. Joseph
14. Jesus

But Jeconiah is mentioned twice right? That must be an error.

Well, yes, but it’s probably a copyist’s error.

The king who served for a few months before the beginning of the Babylonian captivity was Jehoichin or Jeconiah.

The last King to serve a full term (and the king that was the son of Josiah) was Jehoiakim. That probably got mangled to Jeconiah also, and the apparently duplicated generation was eliminated. That’s why I put an asterisk by the ‘first Jeconiah’ above. That’s not Jeconiah at all but Jehoiakim.

But shouldn’t Matthew have included Jehoichin/Jeconiah as the last king?

No. Jehoichin/Jeconiah is the cursed King. The LORD cursed him by sending him into captivity. He belongs with the Captives, not the Kings.

Also, like David, Jehoichin/Jeconiah is a transitional figure. He takes us from the Kings to the Captives. Likewise David takes us from the Fathers to the Kings. Matthew puts the transitional figures with the earlier sequences.

Of course, the genealogy really is 14-14-13…

(Or one can say it’s 14-15-14, but there’s no consistent way to call it 14-14-14.)

One correction. You actually made 3 points over your 2 most recent posts. In my last post I was addressing the second and third points that you made, though I said I was addressing the first and second. I had actually not read the first of your most recent posts. Sorry about that.

With that said, the point you made in your first post also deserves a response. Here was what I was originally saying, Matthew gave his 14-14-14 genealogy for a reason. I speculated that the reason might be to give a general picture of Jesus descent from Abraham and David that could be remembered by people who would only get to see his book sporadically during there lives. 14-14-14 was a good mnemonic for that. Had he given the genealogy as is and called it a 14-20-21 genealogy, that would have tended to undercut this purpose.

But isn’t this a lie?

I don’t think so. Suppose that I give you directions to Paris, you follow them and end up in Texas. I don’t think that the fact that you aren’t in France makes me a liar. I always intended to give you directions to Paris, Texas, not Paris, France.

Similarly, Matthew is not trying to give an exact and detailed description of Jesus’ ancestry. He’s trying to trace his lineage to the throne of David in a memorable way. So we can’t really complain about error or deceit when we don’t get from Matthew what he was never trying to give.

On your first point.

There is some evidence that the Jews had the practice of kings taking coronation names. Just like Joseph Ratzinger took a Papal name: Benedict XVI. The Egyptians and Hittites definitely had the practice. Roland De Vaux has argued that the kings of Judah also had the practice (though the Kings of Israel might not have). See “Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions” which is available on Google books and is still in print. There is a section in it on coronation names.

I had thought to identify Nathan-through-Joshua on the Luke side with Solomon-through-Jeconiah on the Matthew side by arguing that Luke gave the birth name while Matthew gave the coronation name. But there is a problem with that.

There is a point of commonality in the middle of both genealogies. Both Matthew and Luke mention a father-son pairing of Shealtiel and Zerubbabel. I think these are the same folks. If so, and assuming that Luke’s Joshua is the same as Matthew’s Jeconiah, there are too many generations between Joshua and Shealtiel on Luke’s side.

But there are elisions in Matthew’s genealogies of the kings. There are at least 19 generations of Kings of Judah from Solomon to Jeconiah, so that Matthew’s Jeconiah would actually be identified with Luke’s Melchi, leaving one generation Neri, between Luke’s Shealtiel and Mathew’s Shealtiel. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that Matthew omitted that generation.

Zerubbabbel would not be skipped because he was the governor of Judah who led the Judah _back_ from the Babylonian captivity.

That leaves eight names in Matthew’s genealogy with no match in Luke’s genealogy (I’m treating Matthan and Matthat as a match). I think that you can deal with these by imagining either double-names in those eight cases or overlapping genealogical elisions.

On your second point.

I will have to admit. The idea that Luke was somehow completing Matthew’s genealogy was probably a dumb one. So I recant that point. Luke _was_ probably trying to be as complete as it was possible to be.

My initial reticence with the completeness of Luke’s genealogy was that the interval from David (circa 1000 B.C.) to Jesus (circa A.D. 1) was too great to be spanned by 41 generations. But, doing the math, that actually allows an average of 24 years per generation. Since some men might not have gotten married until they were older, that’s not too much to swallow.

In saying this, I do not intend to affirm that Luke’s genealogy is or was intended by Luke as a perfect genealogical record.

By the way, if you you make a list of the two you find there’s basically no overlap between them from David to Jesus, as I recall. You need some way of explaining this.

“You might even have a case where Matthew lists the highlights of the genealogy, and Luke deliberately skips a lot of those highlights and completes the picture with some of the less prominent entries.”

I think if he wanted to complete the genealogy he would give the complete genealogy! :)

Leaving gaps in a list might be acceptable, but I just don’t see in what way 1:17 is actually true.