The Genealogy of Jesus in the Bible

It is interesting that you mention Celsus. Early Christian writers identify the Panthera he mentions as the family name of Joseph (Bar Panther).

The Talmud identifies Jesus as the son of this Panthera/Pandera. This probably the same story that Celsus refers to. But the same passage in the Talmud tells us that Stada is really the nickname for Jesus' mother, Miriam, and that her husband was called Pappos ben Judah.

Both Celsus and the Toldoth Yeshua identify Mary's husband as a carpenter (as the Gospels do), and the Toldoth names him as Yochanan from the house of David. We therefore have three names for Mary's husband - Joseph (Gospel), Pappos (Talmud) and Yochanan (Toldoth).

The sources regarding Mary's lover give his name as Panthera/Pandera (Celsus/Talmud/Toldoth), which name is also called Joseph (Toldoth/Epiphanius/John Damascene).

These extra-Biblical sources do substantiate the theory that Mary had a lover called Joseph (Bar Panther), who was not her husband. The Gospels then also give her husband the name Joseph.

There is no substantial argument against the two genealogies presented in the Gospels as both being accurate - one for Joseph the lover, the other for Joseph the husband.

Edited by Lachi - 22 April 2014 at 1:53pm

Lachi wrote: Thank you for your response islamispeace. To answer your points I would only be repeating myself, to which you would repeat your same objections. We will get no where. It is indeed a difficult thing to see what is written, and not to think what is assumed. That there were two men called Joseph (one married to Mary, the other Mary's lover) is a theory that allows both genealogies to stand as valid. It does not agree with the conclusion in your blog, but it also doesn't involve any mental gymnastics.

Laughing out very loudly.

Lachi wrote: Why does my theory not work? The only explanation you give for why it doesn't is that you say so. That is not a reason, only an excuse for not having an answer.

Your theory is no different from the many that have been posited by Christian apologists to reconcile two contradictory genealogies.

You claimed that Luke was suggesting that Mary was associated with a second Joseph, who may have been her lover.  To support this speculation, you falsely claimed that Luke mentioned certain women from the Tanakh who were known for having had illicit sexual relations.  But, as you have acknowledged, it was Matthew was mentioned, not Luke.  Yet you also stated that Matthew mentioned the first Joseph, who was engaged to Mary.  The pieces simply don't fit.

Lachi wrote: That the genealogies are for two men called Joseph would explain why the gospel writers used different sources and provided different lines of decent. It also doesn't involve altering what the gospel writers actually put (as other theories do). Matthew has Joseph son of Jacob as the husband of Mary who was the mother of Jesus. Luke has Joseph the son of Heli as the man said to be the father of Jesus. Almost all traditions hold that Jesus was not the son of Joseph the husband of Mary (as Matthew implies). So therefore Luke is providing the genealogy of the other Joseph, the man claimed to be the 'real' father of Jesus.

 

This is simply not true.  Luke, like Matthew, mentions only one Joseph.  In both gospels, Joseph is the man who was engaged to Mary (Luke 1:27, Matthew 1:18).  There is no evidence of a second Joseph.  How could Mary have been engaged to two Josephs? 

The fact that Matthew has a different genealogy from that of Luke cannot be explained in any way other than that they were simply based on different sources.  It may also be that both are simply made up genealogies.  They both cannot be right since they both mention the same Joseph. 

Lachi wrote: It is indeed speculation. But speculation based upon what is actually written. Not speculation based on assumptions . You assume the two lines must be for a single person called Joseph, which then means the genealogies contradict each other, which aids in criticizing the reliability of the gospel accounts. However the two genealogies are for two different men called Joseph; that is why the genealogies are different and why they are identified as having different relationships to Jesus (Matthew - the husband of Jesus' mother; Luke - the reputed father of Jesus).

You are not speculating "based upon what is actually written".  There is no evidence of a second Joseph in the written account.  If Luke was indeed referring to another Joseph, don't you think he would have mentioned it?  And don't you think that there would be something in the text to suggest this?  If this Joseph was Mary' "lover", then why does Luke say elsewhere that she was engaged to him?

Lachi wrote: Because we can not ask the gospel authors themselves about these genealogies, then everything we say about them is just speculation. It is noticeable that the genealogy in Luke contains five women (Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary). It fails to mention many other women whose names are known from the Bible to be within this genealogical line (Eve, Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, Naamah, Maacah, etc), so why mention just these five? These five have something in common = Tamar played the prostitute and Judah found her attractive and they slept together, Rahab worked as a prostitute and slept with men not her husband, Ruth made herself attractive to a man not her legal husband/betrothed in order to marry him, and Bathsheba was the wife of Uriah when David desired her and slept with her. Mary is seen to fit into this group - she was attractive to a man not her husband and was (unlike Sarah with the Pharaoh and Abimelech) willing to have sex with them. Jewish tradition from the earliest time makes Jesus the son of Mary by a man who was not her husband/betrothed, although the tradition is that he slept with her through deception, which exonerates Mary from any complicity. Mary, if convicted of adultery, might well have been condemned to be stoned, but that does not mean the sentence would have been carried out. Jesus himself saved a woman so condemned without too much opposition from the Jewish crowd.

First of all, it is Matthew's genealogy that mentions the women, not Luke's.  Your theory simply does not work. 

Like I said, in order to reconcile what are obviously contradictory genealogies, you can nothing more than speculate.  On the other hand, when you accept that they are different because the authors were relying on different sources and had not in any way colluded with each other, the discrepancies become easy to explain.  Apologists go to great lengths to reconcile Matthew and Luke, yet in almost 2,000 years, there has not been a satisfactory explanation.  Perhaps the reason is that there is no explanation.  They are simply contradictory genealogies and nothing more.