If you are like me, you probably do not get overly excited about biblical genealogies. If there is any part of the Bible I am likely to skim over, it is a list of names!
But if you’ve stuck with the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, you may have been struck by a curious fact. Not only do the genealogies differ in the number of Jesus’ ancestors (Luke’s list is quite a lot longer), they also disagree on the names of those ancestors, particularly the names of Jesus’ more immediate ancestry.
In this short piece, I want to consider why this might be. Were the evangelists just hopelessly confused, or is there something more interesting at play? We will begin by tackling the number of Jesus’ ancestors, before turning to the ancestors themselves.
