ynquirer

Hi PhilosopherJay,

Regardless of other contributors' criticism, which you ought to address in any event, I find your hypothesis interesting because it highlights some common features in Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies. Length, one-term connectors, and - in my opinion - specially the common pair Shealtiel-Zerubbabel, which are supposed by both to be father and son - in accordance with Haggai 1 and 2, Ezra 3 and 5, and Nehemiah 12. Yet 1 Chronicles 3: 17-19 quite clearly states that they actually were grandfather and grandson, respectively. If so, Matthew’s calling Shealtiel “(the father) of Zerubbabel” is like his calling Jesus Christ “the son of David, the son of Abraham.” And conversely for Luke. And if so, furthermore, one must perhaps add Pedaiah in between Shealtiel and Zerubbabel to have a full fourteen generations from the exile to Jesus in Matthew. This agreement in calling father and son who actually were grandfather and grandson, in seeming ignorance of 1 Chronicles 3, cannot, in my opinion, be a mere coincidence.

Yet to say that one writer knew of the work of the other - probably Luke of Matthew - is not tantamount to saying that they were the same person. You have - less than satisfactorily, in my opinion - explained a few of Matthew’s last names, but there is no match for such names as Azor, Achim, Eliud, and Matthan. So, I repeat my question: why do you say that this part of the genealogy was “compromised”?

A failure to address this issue, in my opinion, renders the theory that theological divergences account for the differences in the genealogies, the more parsimonious.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Y,

Thanks for your comments.

I will try to answer your question of how the Matthew text might have been "compromised".

Let's start with a problem. You are composing a genealogy of Jesus and you are using Hebrew Scriptures and perhaps the text of Josephus to do it. You want to show that Jesus descended from a kingly line. Now it is easy from texts like 1 Chr. to deliver a kingship down to the exile, but what do you do after the exile. There are no longer any kings. You've established a nice theory that there were 14 names from Abraham to the building of the temple and 14 names from Solomon to Jecondias and the exile. You need to come up with 14 more names. Well, you have two choices really, make up names or use a high priest list. Making up names is silly. The Jews will just laugh at you, and ask, "Who the hell are these guys." The high priest list is the only way.

The problem is complicated by the number of High Priests. When we look in Wikipedia we find a list of 35 high priests from the exile to the time of Herod's death. and some 56 high priests from the time of the exile to the time of the destruction of the temple. Most of these high priests are from a variety of families. So a straight line genealogy is impossible. The best solution is to pick 14 names and put them down to complete your genealogy. Please note that there is no reason to believe that the writer had a complete list of high priests compiled from a lot of different sources. We may suppose he had access to less than 35 and less than 56, so his choices might be more limited.

Now, when we look on the Matthew list, we only find 2 names that match any known high priests. It seems at first glance that the writer of the list went the silly way and made up names.

However , when we look at the 54 non-sourced names on the Luke list, we find something strange, we find 12 names that are on the Wikipedia post-exilc high priest's list, plus two names of post exile governors -- Salathiel and Zerubabel. Here are the 12 matching priest names:

Jona - Jonathan 36-37 C.E.
Joseph - Joseph caiaphas 18-36 C.E.
Simeon - Simeon Tassi 142-144 B.C.E.
Matthat - Mattathias ben Theophilus 65-66 C.E.
Jorim - Joiakim 490 - 470 B.C.E.
Eleazar - Eleasar 260 -245 B.C.E.
Joshua - Joshua ben Fabus 30-23 B.C.E.
Joanna - Johanan 410-371 B.C.E.
Joseph - Joseph ben Camydus 44-46 C.E.
Mattathias - Mattathias ben Theophilus circa 4 B.C.E.
Mathath - Matthias ben Ananus 43 C.E.
Joseph - Joseph Cami ben Simon 62-63 C.E.

Now some could say that some names don't match exactly, Jorim and Joiakim for example, but they are sufficiently close that anybody with an Hebrew scipture with the name Joiakim in it, could have figured out that the name Jorim meant the same guy.

Now notice that we have three Josephs and three Matthat variations on the list. The list follows Luke's order. Let's place the list in order of real chronology:

Jorim - Joiakim 490 - 470 B.C.E.
Joanna - Johanan 410-371 B.C.E.
Eleazar - Eleasar 260 -245 B.C.E.
Simeon - Simeon Tassi 142-144 B.C.E.
Joshua - Joshua ben Fabus 30-23 B.C.E.
Mattathias - Mattathias ben Theophilus circa 4 B.C.E.
Joseph - Joseph caiaphas 18-36 C.E.
Jona - Jonathan 36-37 C.E.
Mathath - Mathias ben Ananus 43 C.E.
Joseph - Joseph ben Camydus 44-46 C.E.
Joseph - Joseph Cami ben Simon 62-63 C.E.
Matthat - Mattathias ben Theophilus 65-66 C.E.

Now compare it to the order that we find in Luke's post-exilic list

Reza
Joanna
Juda
Joseph
Semei
Mathathias
Mathath
Nagge
Hesli
Nahum
Amos
Mathathias
Joseph
Janne
Melchi
Levi
Mathat
Heli
Joseph
Jesus

In the real list when we look at the real Hebrew high priests we get three Josephs and three Matthew variations. In Luke's post-exilic list of 22 names we find three Josephs and three Matthew variations.

If Joseph or Mathew were common names, we might be able to consider it a coincidence, but the 6 names appear on the list starting circa 4 B.C. Neither the name Joseph or Matthew appears on a high priest list before this time.

Okay, Luke copies his name from a priest list, but the strange thing is that Matthew doesn't. But that still leaves us with the problem of why non-source names appears on both lists. Here is my solution.

Our writer wrote the original post-exilic Matthew list from a High-Priest's list and included the 12 Priestly names we now find in Luke on it, including three Joseph's and three Matthews. He released the Matthew list, quite satisfied with his cleverness in creating a High-Priestly and Kingly genealogy for his beloved Jesus. Some Jew noticed that the names Joseph and Matthew appeared on the list and told him, "Yes, we did have three high priests with the name Joseph and three high priests with the name Matthew, but they all lived after Jesus was born. This list is obviously a fake.

The writer went back to the drawing board and came up with a second genealogy, using a lot of fake names like Addi and Melchi, and Levi. He moved the original names to the new list and scattered them around. He didn't want the new list to resemble the old one, so he changed Solomon to Nathan and put in a lot of nonsense names. He went back to the first list and added mainly nonsense names to the first list.

While, I feel bad that this hypothesis is so complicated and convoluted, it seems to me to fit the facts and explain things reasonably well.

If someone offers a better explanation of why Luke and Matthew suddenly switch from source to non-source names and why the names Joseph and Matthew (or variations thereof) appear three times both in Luke's post-exilic list genealogy of Jesus list and appears on historical high priest's list, I will abandon it.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Von Smith

I see no problem with thinking that he *would* have declared this. After all, it *is* 14 generations from the deportation to Christ as the list stands (well, actually 13, but Matthew isn't counting from 0). That Matthew double-counted Jechonias as the end-point of one 14 and the beginning of another, either out of carelessness or for the sake of rhetorical neatness, is at least as plausible as anything you've proposed in this thread. It is more parsimonious, as well.

Since we're attributing carelessness to Matthew, anyway, why not just suppose he was careless in double-counting Jechonias, instead of inventing invisible names for him to forget?

aa5874

If you are speculating, I find it difficult to assume the high priest list is the only way to go. If the OT is studied carefully, you may find other genealogies with serious problems. The credibilty of the OT and NT is very weak therefore no genealogy can be said to be more authentic than the next.

There is no need, in my opinion, to hold onto speculative analysis. The only facts we know is that the Christian Bible is a compilation of fiction and only that is true.

spamandham

Doesn't David rightfully belong in both the list from Abraham to David and in the list from David to captivity? It seems to me this is what the writer of Matthew meant. The total number of names is 41, but there are still 3 periods with 14 generations, because David counts in two lists. :huh:

PhilosopherJay

Hi Von Smith,

17: So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.

If we take the statement literally we're getting 14 names from Abraham to David, 15 names from David to Jechonias and the exile and 14 names from Jechonias to the Christ. We can fix this by saying the author doublecounted Jechonias upto and after the exile, but did not doublecount David. This however means that the author mispoke and should have said "From Solomon to the deportation (Jechonias)," or "From David up to [meaning before] the deportation (Josiah)."

There is no actual good solution. The words imply a doublecount of both David and Jechonias, which gives us 14, 15,14. If we dismiss both doublecounts, we get 14,14 and 13. if we dismiss the first doublecount (of David)and keep the second (of Jechonias) we do get 14,14 and 14. We may try the opposite solution and doublecount David (David to Josiah) but not doublecount Jechonias, which also gives us 14,14 and 14.
Now if he did want us to doublecount Jechonias and not doublecount David, or doublecount David and not Jeconias, the author gave us no indication.He treats both exactly the same in the actual genealogy and in his statement about it.

Every solution seems bad to me. That the author did not intend doublecounts and there were originally 14 names after the exile on the list has the slight advantage of making the author seem less stupid than the other three solutions. In this case he neither 1) forgot how to count to 14, nor 2) forgot to indicate when he was doublecounting a name and when he wasn't. However, since we have no way of telling the intelligence level of the author, I admit that this is not a very good reason to choose it.

I'll see if I can think of a better one.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

jakejonesiv

I think it is as simple as the author of GMatthew was stupid.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Jake,

Well, stupidity is relative. He was able to count to 14 correctly in 2 out of 3 attempts. This could have made him the smartest man in his village or even in his province.

Let's try looking at this from a slightly different prospective. We've been thinking about Matthew's 14-14-14 pattern, but a pattern also appears in Luke's genealogy.

We get 21 names from Adam to Abraham, 14 names from Abraham to David, then 20 names to the exile, and 22 post-exilic names. However, the Alexandrian texts contain an extra name "Admin" into the Abraham to David geneaology. If we take this as originally in Luke's version, we get 14 names from Abraham to Jesse and 21 names from David to the exile. We get 21 names down to Joseph in the Exile. Thus we have a pattern of 21-14-21-21.

Now the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew says this:
"The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." The thing to notice here is that David was a King and Abraham was the Jewish patriarch. If a person wanted to establish the kingship of Jesus, he would just need to establish a connection with King David. On the other hand, if he wanted to establish a connection with the founding of the Jewish religion, he would want to trace the connection back to Abraham.

Now if we use 1 Chronicles, we can establish the Kingship of David forward to the time of the exile, but let us assume we do not have that particular document. Let us say we just have Josephus' antiquities. Perhaps not even all the books of the Antiquities, but just the first five. We read this in book 5:9.4:

Booz married Ruth, and they had a son within a year's time. Naomi was herself a nurse to this child; and by the advice of the women, called him Obed, as being to be brought up in order to be subservient to her in her old age, for Obed in the Hebrew dialect signifies a servant. The son of Obed was Jesse, and David was his son, who was king, and left his dominions to his sons for one and twenty generations. I was therefore obliged to relate this history of Ruth, because I had a mind to demonstrate the power of God, who, without difficulty, can raise those that are of ordinary parentage to dignity and splendor, to which he advanced David, though he were born of such mean parents.

Now note that this says that David left his possessions to one and twenty generations. Luke gives us 20 names of David's descendents down to the exile. However, if we count David himself as part of the "one and twenty" generations, then Luke has followed the information in Josephus.

Let us say that Luke doesn't have any more information than what he finds in Ruth or ! chronicles 2.and the five books of Moses. He has the means of getting from Abraham to David in his genealogy, but no further. He makes up 20 names down to the exile. He makes up another 21 to get from the exile down to Joseph. There are also 21 names to get from God to Abraham. He thus creates a pattern of 21-14-21-21. We're getting a total of eleven sevens or 77 generations from God to Jesus.

Let us say that some God Jews bring it to the attention of Luke that 1 Chronicles and other materials firmly show 17 generations from David to the exile. This busts his pattern. Luke could add four names to his David to the exile list, but he's already been burnt once. How does he know that more text contradicting his post-exilic names would show up? The best thing to do under the circumstances is to leave out 3 authentic names in the David King's List and cut his fake exilic names down to 14. He can now tell us about his wonderful 14-14-14 pattern.

This hypothesis suggests that the genealogy of Luke came first and was corrected in Matthew to better match the Hebrew Scriptures.

Warmly,
Philosopher Jay

aa5874

He may have been under a lot of pressure to complete his work, and possibly the lighting was not the best or maybe he was legally blind.

Sometimes, I think GMatthew had little knowledge of Greek, but maybe you are right, because he is the one who claimed Jesus rode two asses at the same time. That's real stupid!

Matthew 21:6-7,'And the disciples went, and did as Jesus commanded them. And they brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon.'

PhilosopherJay

In considering the One Author - Two Genealogies Hypothesis, I saw a problem. Matthew has to follow Luke because nobody would change a set of scriptural certified names into a set of nonsense names. On the other hand, Luke has to follow Matthew because tracing Jesus' genealogy back to Adam and God is a more sophisticated and later project than tracing it back to Abraham. We have to account for this apparent contradiction.

We also have to account for Luke's 21-14-21-21 pattern that appears in opposition to Matthew's 14-14-14 pattern. [We may assume 14-15-14 is a trivial mistake]. Finally, we have to account for the fact that both geneologies contain names from Hebrew scripture [apparently 1 Chronicles] and non-scriptual names. We may call the names that we can easily trace to scripture "S" names and non-scriptual names "NS" names as they appear to be non-sense as well as non-scriptural.

I think we may start with an author who reads Josephus. Apparently, only in Josephus and Matthew is the name Racab spelled Rachab. [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...tthew/Example1 ]
We may assume that the Matthew author is getting the name's spelling from Josephus, rather than assuming the spelling comes from some unknown third source.

The inspiration for doing a genealogy of Jesus appears to have come from Josephus 5:9.4:

Booz married Ruth, and they had a son within a year's time. Naomi was herself a nurse to this child; and by the advice of the women, called him Obed, as being to be brought up in order to be subservient to her in her old age, for Obed in the Hebrew dialect signifies a servant. The son of Obed was Jesse, and David was his son, who was king, and left his dominions to his sons for one and twenty generations. I was therefore obliged to relate this history of Ruth, because I had a mind to demonstrate the power of God, who, without difficulty, can raise those that are of ordinary parentage to dignity and splendor, to which he advanced David, though he were born of such mean parents.

The author literally follows in Josephus' footsteps by demonstrating "the power of God" to "raise those that are of ordinary parentage to dignity and splendor". This, plus other facts makes it a reasonable. For example this tells us that David left his dominions to his sons for "one and twenty generations" and including David, we find 21 generations to the exile in the Luke genealogy. We also find it mentioned that Ruth was Booz' wife, which is only mentioned in the book of Ruth, here in Josephus, and in the Matthew genealogy.

Assuming he gets the inspiration from this passage, how does our author go about creating a genealogy for Jesus. Well, he knows at least four names from this passage Booz, Obed, Jesse and David and he knows Abraham, Issac and Jacob. That gives him 7 from Abraham to David. He has to come up with 20 more after David to get to the exile. Since he probably knows David to the exile was about 500 years and from the exile to Jesus was 500 years, he knows he has to come up with 21 names for that period two. Since God works in mysterious but often symetrical ways, it is a good bet that he had 21 generations from Abraham to David too.

Now at the moment we should keep in mind that he is reading Josephus and we have no guarantee that he has a copy of the septuagint around. Here is the task for the author

Add about 14 NS names to get to 21 from Abraham to David. (He might have known that Jacob's son was Judah and Judah's son was Perez, so he didn't necessarily have to make up 14, it could have been only a few to get to 21.)
Add 20 NS names to get from David to the Exile
Add 20 NS names to get from the Exile to Jesus or Jesus' father Joseph.

When he is finished he has a perfect genealogy from Jesus back to Abraham
It follows a perfect 21-21-21 pattern. The authors considers that this must be the work of God, because God always works with the number 7 (7 days or 7 good harvests -- see story of Joseph in Egypt) He publishes this and shows it to his Marcionite opponent proving that Jesus was not only a Jew, but descended from Abraham and he shows it to his Rabbinical Jewish opponent to prove that Jesus wasn't a nobody -- a rebellious bastard slave -- but a descendent from King David. The Marcionite laughs, and calls it a forgery, but the Rabbinical Jew, just says, "Oy Vey," and shows him a copy of 1 Chronicles and proves that not 21, but 14 generations passed from Abraham to David and not 21 but 17 generations passed from David to the exile.

Recovering his composure, the author thinks, "This is okay. I can work with this. Maybe God didn't work the scheme with 3-7's (21), maybe he worked it with 2 7's (14). No problem, I can deal with this." He rewrites his genealogy from scratch. There are 14 generations from Abraham to David and 14 generations from David to the exile. There are also 14 generations from the exile to Jesus. While he can use the names from Hebrew scripture to get the first two divisions, he still has to get from the exile to Joseph using NS names.

Our author now publishes his revised genealogy of 14-14-14 and thinks it is so perfect that he puts it at the beginning of his published edition of Matthew.

He still has his 21-21-21 geneaology, but it is now only an embarassment for him. Then, let us assume something amazing happens. He's counting the generations from Adam to Abraham and he gets 21 names. He now has found some vindication for his original scheme of 21-21-21, only it should have been 21-21-21-21. He immediately decides to publish it, but then remembers his second 14-14-14 genealogy and hesitates.

How is he going to explain the differences in the genealogies? The first 21 S names are in Hebrew Scripture and it doesn't really contradict anything in the 14-14-14 geneology because it is prior to it. It is only the second 21 with approximately 10-14 NS names that are going to get everybody in an uproar. It is at this point that the author thinks about the fact that David has multiple sons, one named Nathan and one named Solomon. While he had used in his 14-14-14 genealogy, he hadn't used Nathan. Nathan does not have any real traceable bloodline anyway. That's the solution. Take the 14 names on the second (Matthew) list and put them in place of the 21 names. Put in the name of Nathan after David. The author can now explain that after Daniel the lists separate because it is following two different bloodlines.

He also finds the names of two post-exilic Hebrew leaders and decides to put them on both lists to add to the idea of continuity between the lists.

He now has his 21-14-21-21 list If he puts it at the beginning of a gospel as he did with Matthew, it would draw too much attention to itself and people would immediately dismiss both the Matthew and Luke gospels. How absurd that they begin with competing genealogies. He quietly slips it into the end of book 3 of Luke's Gospel.

This hypothesis seeks to explain how and why the two genealogies of Jesus came into existence.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay