#80 Are There Gaps in the Genealogies? Solving Jesus’ Family Tree + Dr. Robert Carter”

Matthew and Luke both contain a genealogy of Jesus, but those two gospels are different.

Is this a contradiction? And how do we not see it that way?

Yeah, that's the problem. That's the huge glaring thing that has been sitting in the Bible for 2 ,000 years that people wrestle with today.

Isn't it just as simple of looking at Matthew and then looking at Luke?

No, not even. If Matthew and Luke have different lists of names, how can the same person be in it? And so there's a totally different solution to the problem.

Yeah, that, how would I have known that?

Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

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Hello, hello.

Welcome to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host, Cassian Bellino, and I'm so excited to have one of my favorite guests back. This is gonna be such a good conversation because what we're gonna be talking about is something that if you're really deep in your Bibles, you've taken note of this, and it's the fact that Matthew and Luke have different genealogies.

We've got one going back to Adam and one going back to Abraham, and maybe that's, we've talked about this with other episodes with Dr. Bach, maybe one's just showing the Jewishness, one is showing the humanity, but we're gonna get into it a little bit more because at the end of the day, I wanna understand, is this a contradiction and how do we not see it that way?

Because I don't want it to be that, but in order for us to talk about it, I needed to bring on an expert, which just so happened to be Dr. Robert Carter. Last time you were here, we talked about timelines and we talked about does the global timeline that we were taught in school fit within the Bible that we're reading?

And it was fun talking about the Ice Age and Egyptians and the pyramids, but now you're gonna come back, use your expertise and describe the genealogies, how we should properly read them and why it feels like there's gaps, but there's actually not, it's very intentional.

Welcome back to the show.

Thank you, this is gonna be fun.

This is gonna be so fun.

I mean, for anybody that hasn't listened to that last episode, definitely go back and listen to it. Timelines is a very exciting topic, but you are more than qualified. I mean, you have a PhD in marine biology, but you're also a geneticist.

You're a researcher at Creation Ministries International. So what that means is you study human genetics, you study biblical genealogy, basically how science aligns with scriptural history, but you've also studied the genealogies of Jesus.

You were on Is Genesis History, that show. You've been on a couple shows, right?

Yeah, several, yeah.

Which one's your favorite to be on?

The big screen several times. What's my favorite one? Probably Evolution's Achilles Heels. That's one documentary CMI made about 10 years ago. Oh, it's about, what we did is we interviewed Bible-believing PhD scientists, and we only asked them one question.

And the question was, what can evolution not answer in your area of expertise?

Whoa.

And so we talked about natural selection and genetics and radiometric dating, the rock record, the fossil record, Big Bang and astronomy, all the classic things that seem such good arguments for evolution, and we just flipped it over.

Evolution's Achilles Heels, also a book. So the book and documentary combo.

Okay, I'm definitely gonna be looking up that documentary.

That's really cool.

I feel like I've been having a lot of evolution conversations, and I look like a crazy person until I bring in the scholars.

So this is exciting.

Okay, so genealogies. How did you get into that? Genealogy.

Well, one, I'm a Bible nerd, and I just like details. But two, I started, after my first genetics class as an undergraduate, I started looking to my own family. Like, I wanted to know where the red hair came from.

I wanted to know various traits and various people in my family, and my mom brought out the box of stuff, and I didn't even know it existed. I'm 20 years old, and the first time I'm looking at records in Dutch and records in German, and the story of my people coming from Ireland and England and Norway.

I'm like, what is all this? And so that was 1990. So I've been studying my family tree all that time, learning genealogy, how to do it. Well, then you look at scripture, and there's a lot of genealogy in scripture.

Yeah.

And so I have spent the last two years really studying it really hard and just finished a book on this, which should come out in a month or so, on biblical genealogies and how fun they are. Not how daunting they are, but how fun it is to study and literally learn about the genealogy of Jesus, which is really cool, because that's in the Bible.

Yeah, why does that matter? Like, does the genealogy really just approve, like, see, we said that he was king, and he goes all the way back to Adam, and he's related to King David.

Here's the proof. Is that really what it is, or is that a little bit more?

Honestly, we don't need the genealogy of Jesus. It's not necessary to establish his humanity, because he's a human, duh, so therefore he's a human. The genealogies do tell us that all humans go back to Adam and Adam only, and that's important so that Jesus can be the substitution for people.

If someone wasn't descended from Adam, then Jesus can't be the substitute. So there's some theology in there also, but the fact that Jesus' genealogy is in there, going back to Adam, one, is amazing, but more importantly, it's his genealogy coming from King David.

Right.

Because God said, you know, if you look at salvation history, the Savior has to come from Adam, then Noah, then Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then Judah, and then King David. And so Christ has to be a descendant of David, and Matthew establishes that for us.

Okay, okay, does it?

It's a lot of names over here in Matthew chapter one. It's also just kind of being a Sunday school Christian, it's one of those like, okay, Jesus is related to King David,.

Then why was Joseph his father?

Joseph did not seem very princely, if I'm gonna be honest. Is that the wrong way to look at it?

There were no kings of Judah during the Roman Empire.

Oh, got it.

But there were descendants of King David during the Roman Empire.

Got it.

And somebody was the oldest son of the oldest son of the oldest son of the oldest son. I mean, just like today, there are surviving children of the King of Hawaii, right? There's a King of Hawaii, right?

Do you know this person's name? We deposed the last queen of Hawaii, who was a Christian queen, in the 1800s. But the eldest, the eldest, the eldest, that person knows their rightful claim to the throne of Hawaii.

And the same would have been true in Jesus's time. The descendants of King David and all those kings listed in the Old Testament, when the Babylonians destroyed the southern kingdom of Judah in 586 BC, they still knew who the descendant was.

And so 500 years later, here comes Jesus on the scene. Dude, that guy's the rightful King of Judah.

Interesting.

Yeah, I guess I like would have imagined, like you just kind of look at these pages and you're just like, dang, like wouldn't Joseph been like a chariot, not on a donkey? Like what is Joseph doing over here with this kind of lineage in his history?

Yeah, there are defunct kingdoms all over the world.

Yeah.

You don't think about that.

No, you don't. But you say it makes sense.

You don't. There's a rightful descendant of Napoleon. There's a rightful descendant of the last King of France, not Napoleon, but the last King of France all over the place.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so jumping into Matthew, you just kind of read it and it goes back to Abraham. Was that because Matthew's writing to the Jews? Is that simply why they went just back to Abraham and not back to anyone before that?

Let's give our audience a little more background. A lot of people aren't gonna know Matthew has a genealogy of Jesus. So Matthew chapter one, he provides a lineage of Jesus going back to Abraham, goes through all, Isaac and Jacob and Judah, and then all the kings of Judah from David all the way down, all those kings that we don't like to read because there's so many names and a lot of them are bad and God judges the nation because of them and all that story there in Chronicles and Kings.

But there's another genealogy and that's in Luke. So another gospel, the four gospels, Matthew and Luke both contain a genealogy of Jesus and Luke's genealogy goes back to Adam, all the way back to the very beginning to Jesus.

Yep.

But those two gospels are different. Matthew really, there's a lot of Jewish things in Matthew. It's like he's writing to a Jewish audience. And so if he's writing to a Jewish audience, what if Jesus was like the King of the Jews?

He would kind of put that into the genealogy that he created. Because it goes through all the kings of Judah and then a whole bunch of names that are not anywhere in the Bible except for Matthew. Because they're not in the Old Testament.

They're in between the end of the Old Testament and the start of the New Testament. Those 400 silent years where no books are written. So there's no stories, no accounts of the descendants of King David from 586 BC until Jesus is born.

That's Matthew's genealogy. Sounds, has a Jewish flavor to it. I think that fits in with the idea that he's tracing the line of David. I know, yeah, we're not gonna follow the outline. I don't know why you're bothered to look at the outline.

Just saying.

I'm looking at my Bible, first of all.

Oh, the Bible, all right.

Okay, walk me through how deep this rabbit hole goes. Because isn't it just as simple of looking at the Matthew and then looking at Luke and saying, okay, Luke just has a couple more names.

Because it goes back to Adam.

But all the names mentioned in Matthew are also mentioned in Luke. I haven't done the side-by-side comparison.

Oh, no, not even close.

What?

So that's where it kind of feels like. Richard Dawkins used the difference between Matthew and Luke as proof that the Bible's full of errors and nonsense. Oh, I see. If you go on rationalwiki .org, they have an article, the Bible can't be true because there's two different genealogies of Jesus.

Okay, yeah.

So the names from Abraham to David are the same. But then Matthew and Luke split and that the line goes through, one goes through Solomon, a king, through all of Solomon's descendants, but the other goes through, Luke goes through Nathan, another son of David.

You can't have two genealogies. You can't have two different lines. You can't have two different fathers. So which line is Jesus's? The one that goes through Solomon or the one that goes through Nathan?

Interesting.

Yeah, that's the problem. That's the huge glaring thing that has been sitting in the Bible for 2 ,000 years that people wrestle with today.

So what do we do with that?

Well, first of all, we look at church history. Before the Bible was even compiled as our New Testament, all the books of New Testament, they wrestled with a little bit. It took a while, and I know you've talked about this on your show.

It took a while to get what we call the canon. But before the end of the first century, the four gospels that we have today were in a bound set, and they're circulating all four gospels together. So Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John, they're bound together.

We know that. People had the four gospels early, and that includes Matthew and Luke, and their different genealogies that disagree with one another. So the early church did not have a problem with this.

They were smart. They could read. They knew this two different name lists, but they didn't think it was a problem. So they put the gospels together. So, okay, wait, there's no problem here. There's not a problem, except we don't know what the answer is.

Yeah.

By the third century, the early church fathers were coming up with different ideas. One common idea was that, and you hear it a lot today, that, oh, well, Matthew is tracing Joseph's line, and Luke is tracing Mary's line.

And if that's true

Do you agree with that?

I don't really agree with that, but if it's true, there's no problem.

Right?

The conflict is solved. Look, there's two different lists because one's Mary and one's Joseph. Of course you can have different names. There's two different people. Another thing, even, you know, so early church fathers said that, but they also said, oh, no, Matthew is a list of kings, and they didn't elaborate on it.

But a list of kings is not what we call a genealogy.

Yeah, wouldn't that just be like history?

Is what?

Wouldn't that just be like history? Just like keeping record?

Yeah, just, I mean, the examples I used in my book was the history of the kings and queens of England. Half of the time, the next king or queen was not the child of the last king or queen.

Right.

Half the time.

But it still was a lineage of kings.

That led to the next king.

That's right, yes. And so if you didn't know British history and you're reading history, and you're reading it, and you're writing, oh, this king, that king, that queen, this king, this king, you would think it's father, son.

Yeah.

But it's not. I mean, consider Queen Elizabeth I. Right, her sister was the queen. Her brother was the king. They're all children of King Henry VIII. When she died, who became king? King James of Scotland, her second cousin twice removed, I think.

Point is, they went up the family tree to find a descendant, not of Henry VIII, but of Henry VII, who happened to be living in Scotland, and he was a lot younger. So they actually skipped a couple of generations and it went.

Elizabeth James, and it's not mother, son.

Yeah.

So a king list is not a genealogy.

Yeah.

And that goes way back to the second or third century. Some early church scholars were saying that, but they didn't work out the details.

But the reason it has to be a genealogy, like we can't say, okay, it's a king's list. Let's just go with that, is because in Matthew chapter one, verse one, this is the genealogy of Jesus. So we have to treat it like a genealogy?

Yes, but I don't wanna get into the Greek right now, but that's an English translation of a complex Greek word. And yeah, one of the gospels says that, it says of, of this person, of that person, of this person.

It doesn't say son of.

Got it, got it.

And so there was. No, I mean, modern genealogy did not exist in the first century.

What did exist?

If you wanna make a genealogical tree today, you need two documents to support every fact you want to put on ancestry .com.

Oh.

You wanna put someone's birth year in there? Well, you better have two documents that says that birth year, or it's not accepted.

Whoa.

Yeah, they didn't have that in the first century. They had temple records though.

Ooh.

And Matthew went to the temple and he pulled the records of Jesus' genealogy. Or Luke went to the temple and pulled the records of Jesus' genealogy, but Matthew went to the temple and pulled the records of who the oldest legitimate son of the last, you know, possible king of Judah would have been.

Yep.

Yeah, or Matthew is tracing Joseph's genealogy and Luke is tracing Mary's. And if that's true, there's not a problem.

Right.

It's just, I think it's more deep than that. I think that's an easy answer and the actual answer is a lot more fascinating.

What is that?

Well, honestly, I think the answer is that Matthew's not a genealogy. That is the tracing the rightful king of Judah. So when Jesus appears before Pilate, Pilate only asked him one question, besides what is truth, but he asked Jesus one direct question and that question is, are you the king of the Jews?

Why would he ask him that question? Because he was.

Because that's what Jesus, oh.

Because he was born in Bethlehem, the city of David. And Bethlehem was a tiny town at that time, archeologically, it was not a big place. And then Herod goes and he kills off all the little boys under two years old in Bethlehem.

Inadvertently, maybe killing some of Jesus's cousins or second cousins, people who may have been able to claim the throne.

Yikes, backfire.

He cleared the field.

Yeah.

And church history, I don't trust church traditions, but there are church traditions that say that several of the apostles were Jesus's cousins.

Oh.

Four of them actually. Because Mary might have been. Well, because then the cousins would have known the claim. And think of, hey, you know, this guy really is a legitimate king of Judah and now he's got 10 ,000 people following him.

Oh, we're gonna restore the kingship. Here we go, we're gonna kick out the Romans and kick out Herod, ha ha. And Israel's coming back. Yeah, boys, here it comes. And then he dies.

Uh.

Can imagine deflation, but Christ was not coming to establish an earthly kingdom.

Yeah.

And that's important. Interesting. The other interesting thing that comes with Jesus or Matthew being a list of kings is that Jesus's father would have been the rightful king of Judah. Joseph.

Jesus's, oh, the guy on the donkey?

No, Mary's on a donkey. Yeah, the guy leading the donkey.

The guy walking miles?

Yeah.

So Joseph the carpenter would have been in that list. He had to die before the crucifixion.

He had to die. If that's true.

If that's true, he would have been the king of the Jews. Jesus would not have been the king of the Jews. If Matthew's point was to say that Jesus was the king of the Jews, then Joseph would have had to have been out of the picture before the crucifixion.

And he disappears from the gospels. After Jesus is 12 years old, he's never mentioned again.

Yeah.

And then when he's on the cross, he looks at the apostle John and he says to Mary, behold your son. And he says to John, behold your mother. Joseph would have, that would have been an insult to his father if he was still alive.

Yeah, saying behold to your, like to John?

Yeah, to John. So John took Mary into his house from that day forward.

John the Beloved.

Say again?

John the Beloved, just so.

Yeah, yeah, John the Beloved, yeah. Took Mary into his house.

You're adding so much context. I haven't thought about any of these things. So if Jesus, if Joseph was alive when Jesus was crucified, you're saying the problem would have been, what, what would have happened?

Okay, if, and it's a big if. I'm not saying it's true. It's a hypothesis, a fun hypothesis, because yeah, it runs into old spider's web and all those interesting directions.

I don't know.

If Matthew's point was trying to say that Jesus was the king of the Jews.

Yeah.

The only reason he could do that is because Joseph adopted him. And in Judaism, under the Old Testament, adoption's 100%. If a king adopted a pauper, that pauper's now a prince and would be the next king.

You inherit all of the father's rights and responsibilities and titles and land and money. It's, you are the heir. So as soon as Joseph accepted Mary's pregnancy and married her, he adopts Jesus.

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Now back to the show.

Therefore, when he dies, the responsibilities and rights to the scepter of Judah goes to Jesus. And he legit could have been, and I believe he was, the king of the Jews.

Got it. Got it.

It's just fun. It's a fun, fun little intellectual exercise that brings up all these interesting little nuances.

No, it 1000 does. And it adds reason for Joseph's disappearance. I feel like that was just like a sad aside up until now, but now it serves a greater purpose.

Yeah.

A lot of pictures of Joseph in artwork. I was lucky when I was in Egypt last year, we went to old Cairo, some of the old Coptic churches. And sure enough, they've got Mary, young woman pregnant, and Joseph's an old man.

He's got white hair, white long, white beard. And that's tradition. People have always depicted Joseph as an old man. So that he could be die early. And it's not a contextual problem in scripture. But even if he was a young man, let's say he's 20 years old when Jesus is born.

If Jesus crucified at 33, a 53 year old man is an old man. And biblical Judea, that's old. I mean, I would be, I'm 57, I think. I would be a very old person.

You'd be dust.

Most of the people my age would have been dead by that point in time.

Simply because of living conditions.

Yeah, because of living conditions. So even if he was a young man, it wouldn't be unusual for him to die before he's mid fifties.

Got it.

Or maybe he was an old man and he died a ripe old age. Who knows? We can't know. But the tradition is to depict him as an old man.

Interesting.

Okay, so it could be the King of the Jews, could not be.

What do we do with that?

Like, where do we go from here?

Well, what I like to say is that being that we have more than one solution to this horrible problem that Richard Dawkins talks about, this horrible problem that rationalwiki .org thinks disproves the Bible.

Guys, if any one of these things is true, then you're wrong.

Who's wrong?

The objectors, the skeptics, the people saying the Bible's not right, it can't be right. You can only say that if you take a really myopic view. Just read it real quick. Oh, do it for nameless, can't be right.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's do a scholarly approach here. Here's a possibility, here's a possibility. There's actually more than I've even talked about. There's three or four different possibilities. If any of them are true, it's not a problem.

Yes.

So the intellectual weight falls on the Bible being true. This is not a valid objection.

Interesting.

The fact that it just isn't the same list isn't a valid objection.

Yeah.

You brought some visual representations for those that are watching on YouTube.

What are some of the charts that you've brought?

Well, which one shall we do? Because you said you didn't want to get into this rub-a-bell question.

If you feel like it adds context, let's keep it dumbed down because I listened to some of your background.

Just to prepare for this.

And once you guys got to this rub-a-bell,.

I was like, where are we in the world?

So maybe we could just explain it better. Maybe it's me with ADHD. I'm the problem.

Well, no, this is one of the confusing parts of scripture is the time when they're in Babylon. So God promises David he's gonna have a kingdom. But he says, your kingdom will last forever unless they become wicked.

And Judah became wicked. And God warned them and warned them and warned them and warned them and warned them. And he finally says, I'm done with you. You're gonna be destroyed. And the Babylonians came and destroyed Judah and brought the survivors to Babylon.

70 years later, a couple kingdoms later even, one of the kings this time, not of Babylon anymore, but of Medo-Persia sends some survivors back. And the leader was a man named Zerubbabel. Big word, bell being a name of a Babylonian God.

So Zerubbabel is the leader of the Jews, the first governor of Judah, of Judea, after the restoration from the Babylonian captivity. He's a really important figure in scripture. But he's not talked about a lot.

He's in Nehemiah.

I've never heard of him.

Yeah, and the books have talked about the people coming back, he's there. But then that's the end of the Old Testament.

Literally ends with that.

It ends, yeah. The Old Testament ends with the people coming back and the restoration and then there's no more Old Testament. And we have 400 missing years of books where we don't know anything. And then all of a sudden we have John the prophet preaching in the wilderness.

And that's the start of the New Testament.

Yeah.

But Zerubbabel, big fancy word. He's a first governor of Judah after God restores them. The Bible says he's like a signet on God's right hand.

Oh, that's pretty important.

That's lovely language. That's beautiful.

Yeah.

But that contradicts, or that is a direct reversal of what God told a king named Jeconiah who's the second to last king of Judah.

He said.

A reversal?

A reversal in Jeremiah, the book of Jeremiah.

Yeah.

He says, if you were a signet on God's right hand he would tear you off.

Oh, so not a good thing.

Not beautiful.

No, not a good thing at all. And that he is taken by the Babylonians as a captive and he is put in prison for 37 years.

Zerubbabel or the other guy?

Jeconiah. He's only a king for three months. That's the end of Judah is so confusing because you have four kings. One of them reigns for 11 years. One of them reigns for three months. One of them reigns for 11 years and one of them reigns for three months.

They're all, all of them have more than one name and one of them dies in Egypt and two of them die in Babylon. It's so confusing.

That is so confusing.

And they're all different names.

And yeah, they're all different people. King, remember the story of King Josiah, the boy King?

No, I'm not that far in the book.

The last good king of the kingdom of Judah was a boy named Josiah. God had already prophesied he's going to destroy Judah but Josiah comes along. He does this giant spiritual reformation. He's trying to cleanse Israel of all the paganism but God still doesn't relent because his sons are all bad and three of his sons are king.