sus being by adoption
the son of Joseph, and that such fulfilment was regarded as important by
the evangelist, not only for strengthening his own faith, but for urging
his Lord's claims on his fellow-countrymen, whom he had chiefly in view
in writing. Such external 'fulfilment' goes but for little with us, who
rest Jesus' claims to be our King on more inward and spiritual grounds,
but it stands on the same level as other similar fulfilments of prophecy
which meet us in the Gospels; such as the royal entry into Jerusalem,
'riding upon an ass,' in which the outward, literal correspondence is
but a finger-post, pointing to far deeper and truer realisation of the
prophetic ideal in Jesus.

What, then, did the evangelist desire to make prominent by the
genealogy? The first verse answers the question. We need not discuss
whether the title, 'The book of the generations of Jesus Christ,'
applies to the table of descent only, or to the whole chapter. The
former seems the more probable conclusion, but the point to note is that
two facts are made prominent in the title; viz. that Jesus was a true
Jew, 'forasmuch as He also is a son of Abraham,' and was the true king
of Israel, being the 'Son of David,' of whom prophets had spoken such
great things. If we would take in the full significance of Matthew's
starting-point, we must set by the side of it those of the other three
evangelists. Mark plunges at once, without preface or allusion to
earlier days, into the stir and stress of Christ's work, slightly
touching on the preliminaries of John's mission, the baptism and
temptation, and hurrying on to the call of the fishermen, and the busy
scenes on the Sabbath in Capernaum. Luke has his genealogy as well as
Matthew, but, in accordance with his universalistic, humanist tone, he
traces the descent from far behind Abraham, even to 'Adam, which was the
son of God,' and he works in the reverse order to Matthew, going upwards
from Joseph instead of downwards to him. John soars high above all
earthly birth, and begins away back in the Eternities before the world
was, for his theme is not so much the son of Joseph who was the son of
David and the son of Abraham, or the son of Adam who was the son of God,
as the Eternal 'Word' who 'was with God,' and entered into history and
time when He 'became flesh.' We must take all these points of view
together if we would understand any of them, for they are not
contradictory, but complementary.

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