Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/200 verses of Matthew/Example1

Source text
In the King James Version of the Bible the text reads:
 * The book of the generation
 * of Jesus Christ, the son of
 * David, the son of Abraham.
 * Abraham begat Isaac;
 * and Isaac begat Jacob;
 * and Jacob begat Judas
 * and his brethren;
 * And Judas begat Phares
 * and Zara of Thamar;
 * and Phares begat Esrom;
 * and Esrom begat Aram;
 * And Aram begat Aminadab;
 * and Aminadab begat Naasson;
 * and Naasson begat Salmon;
 * And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab;
 * and Booz begat Obed of Ruth;
 * and Obed begat Jesse;
 * And Jesse begat David the king;
 * and David the king begat Solomon
 * of her that had been the wife of Urias;
 * And Solomon begat Roboam;
 * and Roboam begat Abia;
 * and Abia begat Asa;
 * And Asa begat Josaphat;
 * and Josaphat begat Joram;
 * and Joram begat Ozias;
 * And Ozias begat Joatham;
 * and Joatham begat Achaz;
 * and Achaz begat Ezekias;
 * And Ezekias begat Manasses;
 * and Manasses begat Amon;
 * and Amon begat Josias;
 * And Josias begat Jechonias and
 * his brethren, about the time
 * they were carried away to Babylon:
 * And after they were brought to Babylon,
 * Jechonias begat Salathiel;
 * and Salathiel begat Zorobabel;
 * And Zorobabel begat Abiud;
 * and Abiud begat Eliakim;
 * and Eliakim begat Azor;
 * And Azor begat Sadoc;
 * and Sadoc begat Achim;
 * and Achim begat Eliud;
 * And Eliud begat Eleazar;
 * and Eleazar begat Matthan;
 * and Matthan begat Jacob;
 * And Jacob begat Joseph
 * the husband of Mary, of
 * whom was born Jesus,
 * who is called Christ.
 * So all the generations from
 * Abraham to David are fourteen
 * generations; and from David until the
 * carrying away into Babylon are
 * fourteen generations; and from the
 * carrying away into Babylon unto Christ
 * are fourteen generations.

The World English Bible translates the passage as:
 * The book of the genealogy
 * of Jesus Christ, the son of
 * David, the son of Abraham.
 * Abraham became the father of Isaac.
 * Isaac became the father of Jacob.
 * Jacob became the father of Judah
 * and his brothers.
 * Judah became the father of Perez
 * and Zerah by Tamar.
 * Perez became the father of Hezron.
 * Hezron became the father of Ram.
 * Ram became the father of Amminadab.
 * Amminadab became the father of Nahshon.
 * Nahshon became the father of Salmon.
 * Salmon became the father of Boaz by Rahab.
 * Boaz became the father of Obed by Ruth.
 * Obed became the father of Jesse.
 * Jesse became the father of King David.
 * David became the father of Solomon
 * by her who had been the wife of Uriah.
 * Solomon became the father of Rehoboam.
 * Rehoboam became the father of Abijah.
 * Abijah became the father of Asa.
 * Asa became the father of Jehoshaphat.
 * Jehoshaphat became the father of Joram.
 * Joram became the father of Uzziah.
 * Uzziah became the father of Jotham.
 * Jotham became the father of Ahaz.
 * Ahaz became the father of Hezekiah.
 * Hezekiah became the father of Manasseh.
 * Manasseh became the father of Amon.
 * Amon became the father of Josiah.
 * Josiah became the father of
 * Jechoniah and his brothers, at
 * the time of the exile to Babylon.
 * After the exile to Babylon,
 * Jechoniah became the father of Shealtiel.
 * Shealtiel became the father of Zerubbabel.
 * Zerubbabel became the father of Abiud.
 * Abiud became the father of Eliakim.
 * Eliakim became the father of Azor.
 * Azor became the father of Sadoc.
 * Sadoc became the father of Achim.
 * Achim became the father of Eliud.
 * Eliud became the father of Eleazar.
 * Eleazar became the father of Matthan.
 * Matthan became the father of Jacob.
 * Jacob became the father of
 * Joseph, the husband of Mary,
 * from whom was born Jesus,
 * who is called Christ.
 * So all the generations from
 * Abraham to David are fourteen
 * generations; from David to the
 * exile to Babylon fourteen
 * generations; and from the
 * carrying away to Babylon to the
 * Christ, fourteen generations.

Women
By mentioning four women - Tamar, Ruth, Rahab, and Bathsheba - Matthew's genealogy is unusual compared to those of the time, where women were not generally included at all; for example, the genealogy of Luke does not mention them. Albright and Mann support the popular theory that these four women are mentioned to highlight the important roles women have played in the past, to imply that the other woman mentioned in the genealogy - Mary - is the equal of these. Feminist scholars such as Levine hold the idea that the presence of women in the genealogy serves to undermine the patriarchal message of a long list of males, while Brown feels that the presence of women is to deliberately show that God's action is not always in keeping with the moral politics of the time.

Tamar was an adulteress, while Rahab was a harlot, Ruth was rejected as a wife, and Bathsheba was married when David had relations with her. Greater, more notable and virtuous women are not mentioned, leading Jerome to suggest that Matthew had included these women to illustrate how pressingly moral reform was needed, while Gundry sees them as an attempt to justify Jesus' undignified origin by showing that great leaders of the past had also been born to women of a dubious nature. Rahab was a Canaanite, as most likely was Tamar, Ruth was a Moabite and Bathsheba was married to a Hittite and conceivably was one herself. According to John Chrysostom, the first to remark on their foreigness, their inclusion was a device to imply that Jesus was to be a saviour not only of the Jews, but also of the Gentiles.

Brevity
Amongst others, Brown has remarked that the genealogy seems to be moving much too quickly. Herezon is mentioned in Genesis 46:12 in connection with Joseph going to Egypt, while Amminadab, the man that Matthew states is the grandson of Herezon, is mentioned in Numbers 1:7 in connection with post Exodus events, leaving only three generations covering the entire period of the Israelites in Egypt, that supposedly lasted several centuries. This first part of Matthew 1:8 coincides with the list of the Kings of Judah that is present in a number of other parts of the Bible. However these other lists have Jehoram's son being Ahaziah while Uzziah is a quite different monarch who lives several generations later. This means that Matthew's genealogy skips Ahaziah, Athaliah, Jehoash, and Amaziah.

Those who believe in the inerrency of the Bible contend that the genealogy was never meant to be complete and the author of Matthew deliberately dropped those who were not needed from the list, while everyone else sees a political motive behind excising these individuals from the genealogy. One theory is that they were excised owing to their wickedness, or because they were murdered, but the even more unpleasant Manasseh and Amon are left in the list. Gundry supports the popular theory that these monarchs were left out because they were all descendants of Ahab, through his daughter Athaliah, both targets of a large degree of scorn in Jewish perception. Gundry also believes their removal was because the author was trying contrive a division of the genealogy into three even divisions of fourteen names, hence contriving Jesus to seem to be the natural conclusion to the history.

Albright and Mann have a different theory, proposing that the author, or a later scribe, made a common scribal transcription error, known as homoioteleuton, confusing Achaziah and Uzziah due to the similarity of their names. Under this proposal, the three divisions of fourteen names were not originally present, only discovered after the scribal error, with Matthew 1:17, which discusses this division, being a later addition to the text.

Nobodies
Eleazer, who Matthew names as the great-grandfather of Joseph, is generally placed as having lived some 150 years after the start of Zerubbabel's period. This is a long period of time for just Zerubbabel, Abiud, Eliakim, and Azor to cover, and so many scholars feel an accurate list would be longer than Matthew's, more like Luke's genealogy which has far more names for the period. That this part of the genealogy in Matthew lacks papponymics has lead Albright and Mann to speculate that the original names covering this this period became telescoped together, owing to repetitive re-occurrences of names. Three of the four - Abiud, Eliakim, and Azor - are not known in any records for the period apart from Matthew 1:13, leading many scholars, including Gundry, to believe that the author of Matthew made them up.

To Gundry once the list moves away from the accepted genealogy of Jewish leaders it is fabricated until it reaches the known territory of Joseph's grandfather. The names listed are names that were frequent in the period of history, and so Gundry sees the author as having drawn the names from random parts of 1 Chronicles, disguising them to not make the copying obvious: According to Gundry
 * The author of Matthew liked the meaning "son of Judah that lies behind the name Abihu, a priest, and modified it to become Abiud''.
 * The author then changed the name of Abihu's successor, Eliezer, into Eliakim to link him with the Eliakim of Isaiah 22 and also to link him with Jehoiakim
 * The third name comes from another significant priest - Azariah - which the author shortened to Azor.
 * Achim is an abbreviation by the author of the name of Zadok's son, Achimaas
 * Eliezer, another figure from 1 Chronicles is turned into Eliud.

Variations between the genealogies
The genealogy of Luke and Matthew diverge at David. While Matthew continues through Solomon and the subsequent kings, Luke links to Nathan, David's less well known son. And both lines end at quite different names, with Luke ending at Heli, and Matthew at Jacob. There are several traditional explanations for this. A major one is that Luke's genealogy is of Mary, with Heli being her father, while Matthew's describes the genealogy of Joseph, but this fails to take account of Luke clearly stating that Heli is Joseph's father. Another has Jacob being Joseph's biological birth father but Heli legally becoming his father after a Levirate marriage. These suggestions are not impossible, but there is no evidence for any of them and they are generally only believed by those adamantly committed to Biblical inerrancy.

More scholarly explanation generally gives two possibilities. The first is that Matthew records the passing on of kingship, while Luke records biological parentage, though this fails to explain why kings that were not father to the next have been excluded from Matthew's list. Scholars more willing to criticise factual accuracy are inclined to suggest that at least one, and possibly both, of the genealogies is simply fabricated, thus explaining the divergence.

Zerubbabel and Shealtiel are listed in both the genealogy in Luke and that in Matthew. However, in Luke Shealtiel is not listed as the son of Jechoniah but rather of Neri. A number of explanations have been advanced to explain this, with Gundry proposing that Luke gives the actual genealogy while Matthew presents a "ceremonial" one, i.e. Neri being Shealtiel's natural father, but Jeconiah being the prior leader of the Jewish people. This is further complicated as 1 Chronicles 3:19 states that the father of Zerubbabel was Pedaiah, a brother of Shealtiel; although Zerubbabel, meaning born in Babylon was a common name at the time, and it is entirely plausible that these are two different Zerubbabels.

Terminology
The phrase "book of the genealogy" or biblos geneseos has several possible meanings; most scholars agree that the most logical explanation is that this is simply toledot, although a small minority translate it more widely as "the book of coming" and thus consider it to refer to the entire Gospel. Brown stretches the grammar considerably to make it read "the book of the genesis brought about by Jesus", implying that it discusses the recreation of the world by Jesus.

In modern times the term Christ is considered to apply exclusively to Jesus, but in Matthew's day it had a more general meaning, and Matthew is not specific as to whether he is describing Jesus as the Christ or merely a Christ. The form Matthew uses indicates that the word Christ is being used as a title, rather than an adjective or ordinary noun, which is unusual since this usage was only adopted some time after the death of Christ, implying a much later date for the Gospel. Elsewhere Matthew uses "the Christ".

According to Brown some have theorized that David's name precedes that of Abraham since the author of Matthew is trying to emphasize Jesus' Davidic ancestry. Gundry states that the structure of this passage attempts to portray Jesus as the culmination of the Old Testament genealogies.

Spelling
The author of Matthew has a tendency to use spellings of names that correspond to the spellings in the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic text, suggesting that the Septuagint formed the source for the genealogy. However, Rahab's name is spelt as Rachab, a departure from the Septuagint, though the spelling Rachab also appears in the works of Josephus, leading to speculation that this is a symptom of a change in pronunciation during this period. Additionally, Rahab's position is also pecular, as all other traditions place her as the wife of Joshua not of Salmon, and consequently place her in a different historic time period.

The author of Matthew adds a "φ" to Asa's name. Gundry believes this is an attempt to make a connection with Psalm 78, which contains messianic prophecies, Asaph being the name to which Psalm 78 is attributed. However, most other scholars feel this is more likely a typographic error than a scheme, and most modern translators of the Bible "correct" Matthew in this verse. Whether it were the author of Matthew, or a later copyist, that would have made the error, is uncertain.

Amon has a similar feature. Matthew actually has Amos, rather than Amon, which Grundy has argued might have been an attempt to link to the minor prophet Amos, who made messianic predictions, but once again, other scholars feel this is most likely simply a typo.

Forty two
The dividing of Matthew's genealogy into three groups of fourteen helps for the memorization of the list. The number 14 is itself important; not only is it twice 7, a holy number at the time, 14 is also the gematria of David. The division also makes it seem as though Jesus should be an important event simply by virtue of being at the end of the last set of 14, though this is somewhat artificial, and we could equally divide the names into, for example, 3 sets of 15, the last set being incomplete for a few more generations. Calculations based on this division into 14s led Joachim of Fiore to predict the Second Coming would occur in the thirteenth century, though either his calculations were clearly wrong, or the Second Coming wasn't a terribly significant event.

However, there is a significant complications with this division - there are only 41 names listed (including Jesus), not 42 (14x3), either leaving one of the divisions a member short, or implying that Jesus would have a son who, rather than Jesus, is to be the Messiah. A number of explanations have been advanced to account for this numerical feature. One is that David's name should appear twice just since he is mentioned twice in the genealogy, and so appears both in the 14 prior to the period of Kings, and the 14 covering it. However, this logic also implies that as the exile in Babylon is mentioned twice, so the king involved - Jeconiah - should appear twice, resulting in 43 names in the list.

Other theories that have been advanced include that Mary counts as one of the 14, though discounting all the other women, or that Jeconiah legally counts as two separate people, one as king the other as dethroned civilian. However, the explanation that scholars today find most probable is that the problem lies in confusion of Jeconiah and an individual of a similar name. Almost all other sources report that a king named Jehoiakim lay between Josiah and Jeconiah, and since the second theophory in the name Jeconiah (the ..iah) is transposed to the middle of his name in the Book of Kings, as Jehoiachin, it is plausible that the author of Matthew or a later scribe confused Jehoiakim for Jehoiachin. This would also explain why the text identifies Josiah as Jeconiah's father rather than grandfather, and why Jeconiah, usually regarded as an only-child, is listed as having a number of brothers, a description elsewhere considered more appropriate for Jehoiakim.

Virgin Birth
Matthew 1:16 breaks with the pattern preceding it; it is at pains to distance Joseph from Jesus' actual parentage point out that Joseph did not beget Jesus, but was simply the husband of the woman who did, implying the. In the original Greek, the word translated as whom is unambiguously feminine. The shift to the passive voice also symbolizes the Virgin Birth.

Matthew 1:16 has attracted considerable scholarly attention because unusually the ancient sources show several different versions of it. For example, the Codex Koridethi has:
 * Jacob was the father of Joseph,
 * to whom the betrothed virgin
 * Mary bore Jesus, called the Christ

While the Old Syriac Sinacticus has
 * Jacob was the father of Joseph,
 * to whom the virgin Mary was
 * betrothed, was the father of Jesus

The first version represents the same pattern as that used in most modern translations - unlike the prior genealogy, its convoluted wording, shifting to the passive voice, is at pains to distance Joseph from the parentage of Jesus, to support a Virgin Birth. The other version states clearly that Joseph was actually the father of Jesus, and while it does appear to state Mary is a virgin, the word now translated virgin actually corresponds to the Greek word parthenekos which translates literally more as maid. Some scholars see these latter versions as evidence against the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, while others postulate that the original text only had words of the form "and Joseph was the father of Jesus", following the pattern of the prior verses, which later scribes altered to clarify that this didn't amount to biological parentage.

Raymond Brown has proposed that these variants are not so much concerned with arguing for or against the Virgin Birth, but for the doctrine of perpetual virginity of Mary, which became prominent at the time the variants were created; both appear to be attempts to avoid making Joseph a husband to Mary, and hence to suppress the suggestion of sexual activity between them. Perhaps the most obvious issue of all surrounding this aspect of the genealogy is that if Joseph is no more than a step father to Jesus, the question arises as to why Matthew devoted the prior verses to his genealogy. At the time legal kinship was generally considered more important than biological descent, and thus by demonstrating that Joseph was a member of the House of David, even an adopted son would be legally considered part of the same dynasty.