I saw a very interesting show on TV the other night.  In it I heard that Mary's genealogy is found in the Gospel of Luke.  Is this true?

Yours sincerely,

Ann O’Nimus

You are referring to Luke 3:23-38.  Look closely.  Mary is not mentioned in the text.  It is a genealogy of Joseph.

There is another genealogy of Joseph in the first chapter of Matthew.  They are two different genealogies. Yipes!  Can this mean the Gospels are contradictory?  Calm down, Ann. 

Eusebius of Caesarea resolves the whole problem in his Ecclesiastical History, book 7:4-14.  He explains that when a family was about to die out for lack of male descendants, a close relative would be adopted into the family to keep the line going.   I remember a Palestinian friend told me that this is sometimes done among Christian Arabs in Palestine. 

So, Jesus has two genealogies.  One is his legal genealogy (Luke) and the other the genetic genealogy of Joseph (in the Gospel of Matthew.)

Well, the scriptures say that Jesus was not descended from Joseph physically.  How can he be descended from David?   Simple.  Africanus, an historian from the first hundred years of Christianity went and asked Jesus’ relatives (none of whom mentioned the tombs in Talpiot).  They explained the genealogies and that Mary, as was the custom and still is among some Palestinians, was a close relative of Joseph.  Hence, they were both descended from David.

All this is interesting in the light of the Sola Scriptura or Bible alone principle that is a central tenet of Protestantism.   If one cannot refer to the sacred tradition of the Church, then the Bible is clearly contradictory, but if we have both tradition and Scripture testifying one to the truth of the other, added to the great wealth of early Christian literature that goes back to the very first days, well then as the author to the letter to the Hebrews puts it, we have “a great cloud of witnesses.”

Don’t worry, Ann.  Our ancestors in the faith did not give their lives for a fantasy.  There never was and never will be another like Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, Son of Mary, that is until He comes again in glory.

Yours most sincerely,

Rev. Know-It-All