h whom alone Jesus is said to have
derived his humanity. We have, therefore, no genealogy at all of Jesus
in the Gospels. Various theories have been put forward to reconcile the
irreconcilable; some say that the genealogy in Luke is that of Mary, of
which supposition it is enough to remark that "Mary, the daughter of,"
can scarcely be indicated by "Joseph, the son of." It is also said that
Joseph was legally the son of Jacob, although naturally the son of Heli,
it being supposed that Jacob died childless, and that his brother Heli
according to the Levitical law, married the widow of Jacob; but here
Joseph's grand-fathers and great-grand-fathers should be the same, Heli
and Jacob being supposed to be brothers. Besides, if Joseph were legally
the son of Jacob, only the genealogy of Jacob should be given, since
that only would be Joseph's genealogy. No man can reckon his paternal
ancestry through two differing lines. To make matters in yet more
hopeless confusion, we find Chronicles giving twenty-two generations
where Matthew gives seventeen, and Luke twenty-three; while, from David
to Christ, Matthew reckons twenty-eight and Luke forty-three, a most
marvellous discrepancy.

"If we compare the genealogies of Matthew and Luke together, we become
aware of still more striking discrepancies. Some of these differences
indeed are unimportant, as the opposite direction of the two tables....
More important is the considerable difference in the number of
generations for equal periods, Luke having forty-one between David and
Jesus, whilst Matthew has only twenty-six. The main difficulty, however,
lies in this: that in some parts of the genealogy in Luke totally
different persons are made the ancestors of Jesus from those in Matthew.
It is true, both writers agree in deriving the lineage of Jesus through
Joseph from David and Abraham, and that the names of the individual
members of the series correspond from Abraham to David, as well as two
of the names in the subsequent portion: those of Salathiel and
Zorobabel. But the difficulty becomes desperate when we find that, with
these two exceptions about midway, the whole of the names from David to
the foster father of Jesus are totally different in Matthew and in Luke.
In Matthew the father of Joseph is called Jacob; in Luke, Heli. In
Matthew the son of David through whom Joseph descended from that King is
Solomon; in Luke, Nathan; and so on, the line descends, in Matthew,
through the ra