Childhood Gospels – 12/23/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

“Book of the origin of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham”: before talking about Joseph and Mary, the star of Bethlehem, the magi and the wicked king Herod, this is how the evangelist Matthew begins the narrative that is in origin of Christmas: with the genealogy of Jesus.

Among the four canonical (“official”) Gospels of the Christian Bible, the birth and early years of Jesus’ life are only covered by one more evangelist, Luke. He prefers to leave the genealogy of the Nazarene until later, in chapter 3, when Christ begins his preaching.

Interestingly, while Matthew does what we are used to expecting from a genealogy —starts with the oldest ancestors and approaches the present—, Luke, somewhat baroque, follows the opposite path, starting with Jesus and going back towards the past.

But the differences are much deeper and more interesting than that. The fact is that the genealogies, for the most part, do not match. Names and generation numbers contradict each other. And this is the perfect clue to understand that we are not faced with historical records — at least not in the way we understand them today. Each in their own way, the evangelists want to explain “who Jesus is” in the deepest sense, and not present Christ’s ID to the reader.

Both, it is true, excel in symmetry. Matthew structures his genealogy in three large blocks of 14 generations (42 in total, or, to be exact, 41; it seems that the first evangelist omits a name from the last block); Lucas, in 77 generations. In both cases, they are multiples of 7, one of the “perfect numbers” of Antiquity.

The difference in the number of generations is partially explained by the fact that, while Matthew uses Abraham, ancestor of the people of Israel, as the initiator of Jesus’ lineage, Luke traces the origin of Christ back to Adam, the first human being, and to himself. God (saying that Adam, like Jesus, was “son of God”).

Traditionally, the divergence of perspectives is explained by the emphasis given to the Jewish tradition in the Gospel of Matthew: in it, Jesus would be the new Moses, a fully and proudly Israelite Messiah. Luke, on the other hand, writing for Christians of pagan (non-Jewish) background, emphasizes his central character’s links with all humanity since the creation of the world.

It makes sense, but Matthew is not completely unaware of Jesus’ universalism either, since his genealogy is the only one to mention, as Christ’s ancestors, three women —Tamar, Rahab and Ruth— who were not Jews/Israelites, but were united with ancestors of King David.

Speaking of him, it is from this monarch that Matthew and Luke gain irreconcilable differences. While for the first evangelist Jesus descends from David, his successor Solomon and all the kings who came after them, Luke places another son of David, Nathan —never crowned—in the lineage of the Nazarene. In the Lucan narrative, at least at this point, the inheritance of the throne of Israel seems to matter less.

(A quick parenthesis: there is no point trying to resolve this incompatibility by suggesting that one of the genealogies is the one that leads to Mary. Both sequences of ancestors reach Joseph, seen as the adoptive/legal father of Jesus, and not the carpenter’s wife.)

As a Christian, I prefer to see differences as sources of theological enrichment, not perplexity. Jesus is both deeply Jewish and universal. For Luke, he was born in the manger; for Matthew, he had to flee from Herod. Both stories emphasize, each in its own way, the child’s identification with the least among us: the power of God that reveals itself in weakness and refuses all domination and all violence. Merry Christmas everyone!

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