#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

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Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get to the show. 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, 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 depose 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 know 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 would have imagined, you just kind of look at these pages and you're just like, dang, wouldn't

Joseph been like a chariot, not on a donkey? 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.

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. Okay. Because 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, and 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, you know, 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, it 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, if any common, 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.

Like, 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, and that's - 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 2000 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, right? 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, right? 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, 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, there's no problem here. There's not a problem, except we don't know what the answer is.

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, 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 history?

Is what? Wouldn't that just be like history? Just like keeping record? Yeah, history. 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. 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 it, 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 are 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 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? Like if you wanna make a genealogical tree today, you need two documents to support every fact you want to put on ancestry .com.

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. 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 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 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, I didn't think about it like that.

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've been - Why does that matter here? 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. 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 is, 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 been, 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. I need 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 spiders' webs with all these interesting directions. Dr. Curtis, 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 is 100%. If a king adopted a pauper, that pauper is 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. I want to take a minute and say thank you to the recording service that has made this podcast possible,

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Thank you so much. 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 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 was born. If Jesus crucified at 33, a 53 year old man is an old man in 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. Yeah, yeah.

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 the

Zerubbabel 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 Zerubbabel, 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 going to 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 going to be destroyed. And the Babylonians came and destroyed

Judah and brought the survivors to Babylon. 70 years later, a couple of 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. 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 language. 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, 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 yet, don't spoil it for me.

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.

One of them gets killed by Egyptians, one of them gets killed by the Babylon, two of them get killed by the

Babylonians. And it's really chaotic at the end of Judah, and then

Jerusalem's conquered, and the Jews are brought to Babylon. And then we have this guy named

Zerubbabel. He is mentioned in First Chronicles, he's also mentioned in Matthew, he's also mentioned in Luke.

So a really important figure scripturally, because he's the ancestor of Jesus, and he's a descendant of King David, and he's the first governor of Judah, and he's like a signet on God's right hand,

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Now, back to the show. So what do we do with that when it comes to a genealogy?

Is it just simply a bunch of coincidences or is there something here that's really kind of tying it all together?

But the problem comes in, in that he's mentioned in Matthew and Luke. If Matthew and Luke have different lists of names, how can the same person be in it?

Oh, if Matthew is a list of kings and Luke is a real genealogy, why Zerubbabel?

That's my solution. But if it's father -to -son relationships, you can't have a line that goes from one of David's sons and a line that goes from another one of David's sons that come together in the same person.

That can't be. We're talking about Y chromosomes here. We're talking about physical descent. You can't have two fathers.

Right. So Zerubbabel can't, it can't be the same Zerubbabel unless something else is going on.

Zerubbabel is the indicator that something else is going on. Yeah. Not that it's two separate genealogies, one for Mary, one for Joseph.

Yeah, and I'm hypothesizing that the scepter, the right to the throne of Judah, changed from the descendants of Solomon to the descendants of Nathan, both of them being sons of David in Zerubbabel.

He was a descendant of Nathan and he got the right to be the king. Okay. So if Jeconiah, in the book of Jeremiah, Jeremiah says of Jeconiah, let this man be accounted as having no sons.

Of Zerubbabel? And yeah, no, no, of Jeconiah, the second last king of Judah.

And he says, basically the Messiah cannot come from Jeconiah. So if that's true,

Zerubbabel can't be his grandson like he is in Matthew. But in Luke, Jeconiah is not in Luke's list.

So what I think happened was something complicated. There was an adoption, maybe a widow got married, maybe a widow who already had a son got married.

You know, in the Old Testament, this happened in the book of Ruth, Naomi had sold her land and moved to Moab and spent all the money.

Then both of her sons died and she comes back and she's got no money, but she's got Ruth and she wants her land back.

But to do that, you need someone to step in and buy your land. And here comes Boaz. He goes, oh,

I'll buy that land. Oh, and I get Ruth in the deal, ha, which is important because she's in the lineage of Jesus also. But before that could happen, he had to go down to the marketplace or the town gate and say, hey,

I want to buy this. And is there any other close relative? And someone goes, yeah,

I'm closer related to Naomi than you are, I'll buy the land. But then he says, oh yeah, but Naomi comes in with it.

Ruth comes in with it. And oh, no, I don't want to marry Ruth. You can have it. When in the

Old Testament - I remember that Boaz wanted to make sure that the closest related person should get it and he didn't, he was married already or he was too old and something like that.

Or he knew that his cousin wanted to marry this woman, he didn't want to cut in. Maybe.

In the Old Testament, there's something called a leveret marriage. It doesn't, it's not from Leviticus.

Levere is Latin for brother -in -law or brother. Isn't this the

Christ's Redeemer tradition? Yeah. Yes, that's, hold on a second, hold on a second.

We'll get there. In the Old Testament, if a man dies and doesn't have a son, the brother is obligated to marry the widow and raise up a son in the name of the dead man.

And I know that sounds, I mean, for the woman's perspective, that's kind of awful. I have to marry my brother -in -law? Ew. And yet, it means that the brother can't usurp his dead brother's stuff.

It means that a son is raised up in the name of the deceased brother and that includes all the land that the deceased brother would have had.

The brother can't steal it. It seems like a bad deal for the brother -in -law.

Yeah, it does sound like a bad deal for the brother -in -law in a lot of ways, except he does get a wife and he does kind of have a son, kinda.

But that son is legally the son of the other brother who died.

And that son will raise up and inherit the land. But it also means that the woman's taken care of.

She has a son and the son has land and that son will take care of her. So I know it sounds gross for the woman, but on the other hand, it's a saving grace because a woman with no son and no husband, what could she do in the ancient world to eat?

I have no idea. She could be a beggar. She could be a prostitute. I mean, what other options were there for a penniless woman?

And so this levirate marriage thing is a way to support a widow. And in that sense, it's kinda cool.

I mean, way to go, God, for taking care of the widows. But from our perspective, we look at it like, oh, that's really weird.

But there's another thing in the Old Testament in the book of Isaiah.

So 150 years before Jeremiah, Isaiah is talking to, oh, what's his head?

Another good king, another boy king. His name is skipping me at the moment. I should remember it, I'm just forgetting it.

And he says that a disaster is gonna come upon Judah and some of your own sons are gonna be eunuchs in the hall of the king of Babylon.

Whoa, well, that didn't happen in his lifetime. No, it was his great or great grandson's lifetime.

Jeconiah. We don't know what happened to Jeconiah.

We only know he's thrown into prison for 35 years. Jeconiah's a eunuch? Well, if the prophecy of Isaiah came true, he might be.

I highly suspect that. Well, I highly suspect that Daniel was. Because Daniel's overseer was the chief of the eunuchs.

And ancient kings often, I mean, because we know that Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego or Anhananiah, Mishael, and the third one before they got their

Babylonian names. We know that they were princes. They came from the royal household.

Oh, see, I've talked about Daniel in the past with Dr. Mark Clark and he made it seem like he was castrated but it was a sense of like torture.

Like it was like an abuse type of situation before the major exile. Like before the major walk into the exile to say like -

I can't say it happened and I can't say when it happened but it's likely because that's what happened in ancient kingdoms.

They did that all the time. They would capture princes and castrate them? Absolutely. Because then they didn't want any lineage.

Well, yeah, they didn't want them to propagate. It's a way to humiliate. But they would, a lot of servants, they find a young boy, he's very intelligent and he's skilled at writing, boom.

Now you're working in the king's household. You'll never have any kids but hey, you'll be working in the king's household.

I know. Never thought about that. Okay, so in the - So I suspect that was - How did you have -

Well, I suspect that was true of Daniel. And if that's true, that would fulfill the prophecy in Isaiah.

Because some of the descendants of that king really were eunuchs in the household of the king of Babylon.

I don't know if it happened to Jeconiah or not, but if it did, then

Zerubbabel is not his descendant. He has to be adopted. There's some adoptive relationship in there.

It has to be. And if that's true, then the curse from Jeremiah came true.

Let this man be accounted of having no sons. And so even though he got out of prison when he's 55 years old, either he had some wives and had a son and that's in Matthew's list.

So what that basically is saying is it has to, it's indicating, the text is supporting the fact that it was probably an adoption of some sort.

And it could have been anywhere. Because things like this happen all the time.

I mean, if a man's wife dies, he picks up a second wife. She might already have a child. Or kings especially, they're polygamous.

They can have more than one wife. Leverant marriages were mandated in the

Old Testament. In fact, if you did not marry your brother's widow, you would be accursed.

That's what it says in the Old Testament. It's absolutely required. Yeah, it's demanded.

You have to do it. Whoa. Yeah. So it's a big deal.

So basically I was looking for a solution that was probable, that things, you know, was something that happened commonly, and that followed the

Old Testament law. And what I realized is, to rationalize Matthew versus Luke, all you have to do is have

Jeconiah marry a woman who already had a son. And that son is the son in Matthew's, in Luke's lineage.

But in Matthew, it's a stepson. But you wouldn't know it because Matthew's not doing family relationships.

He's doing, who's the rightful king of Judah? Whoa. And after Jeconiah died, his stepson would be the rightful king of Judah.

Whoa. And so there's a totally different solution to the problem. Yeah. How would

I have known that if, you know, I mean, when you have Dawkins look at this and say, look, you know, we can all agree that like, we're all saying the same thing.

It doesn't line up. Like clearly there's something here, but you've brought so much context into this that introduces so many other possibilities.

How confident would you say you are in your suspicion that it's a king's list?

It is certainly possible that Matthew and Luke are

Joseph versus Mary. Okay. Okay. That's possibility number one. There's some other ones

I don't even want to talk about because it gets even more complicated. Possibility number two is Matthew's not a genealogy.

I like that second one because Matthew's got that Jewish flavor. Matthew's got that kingdom flavor to it.

And once you realize it's like, wait a minute, that fits Matthew beautifully. But one of the problems with the first solution,

Joseph versus Mary, is that Zerubbabel and actually Zerubbabel's father, a guy named

Shealtiel, are in Matthew and Luke. And you can't have a family line that comes together and splits again if it's father to son relationships.

It might be that two different families had a Shealtiel and a Zerubbabel. That's true. You could have

Bob, son of Fred, and then some other family has a Bob, son of Fred. That's possibly true.

But Zerubbabel's a pretty specific name. I also feel like you've brought up a lot of prophecies that were fulfilled that support your solution.

Yeah, the eunuch prophecy, the

Jeconiah, Cantum is having no sons prophecy, the Messiah is not coming from you prophecy.

Now, Jeconiah could have repented though. There are other places in the scripture where God absolutely 100 % condemns someone or even a group, and they relent and repent and he forgives them.

And later on in Jeremiah, chapter two later, basically says, I just want you to come back. And I think he would have forgiven them had they done that, but he destroyed them because they didn't.

Maybe all those years in prison, Jeconiah repented. That's what the Jews believe.

The Talmud says that. It's just the Bible doesn't say that. And so I can't say that.

Right. It is a possibility. How do you, just like personally, when it comes to understanding the

Bible, like you've all these facts, you have all of the studying, all of these like backgrounds, like how do you kind of sit with like, but I could still be wrong because the

Bible doesn't blatantly say it. But that's the nature of scholarship. I'm a trained scientist, right?

And a scientist, in fact, there's some people in my movement who don't speak carefully enough and it bugs me.

We're trained to say things like the data suggests, or according to this hypothesis, the next logical step would be that.

We don't say, I'm right, you're wrong. That's not a scientific statement.

Is that where we get these atheistic perspectives where people are saying, this is absolutely wrong and I'm absolutely right with my understanding.

It's like, we should be more careful. More circumspect, yeah, more careful, more circumspect in a lot of different fields.

And in fact, following that would kind of make more friendly relationships even amongst Christians or different branches of scholarship.

But I think a lot of solid Christian scholars would not like my answer because a lot of people that are

Christian scholars really don't believe the Bible. This is true. I mean, you don't have to be a

Christian to be a biblical scholar. Yeah. And after generations of, called liberal,

I don't know. I don't like that word really. But after generations of scholarship that has brought doubts about scriptural reliability to bring up something that suggests scriptural reliability, a lot of people have a gut reaction against that even within Christian scholarship.

But tough luck. There's no reason to - Because they just don't want to be certain?

Or why are they? Yeah, going back to the 1800s, there was a huge train of scholarship basically coming out of Germany, especially about doubting scripture, about dismantling the scriptures and pulling out all the little pieces.

And it wasn't a search for truth. It was a deconstructive method that left the

Bible in tatters. And so from a more conservative, biblical fidelity,

I don't know what phrase to use. I don't want to sound like a politician, right? Liberal versus conservative. No. But from a

Bible -first approach where I think the Bible is true, hey, guess what? Here's one more thing that I don't have to worry about because it's not actually contradiction,

Mr. Scholar. There's no reason to say that this is not actually the line of Christ in Matthew and Luke.

Just one's a kingly line and one's a biological line. Yeah. That's all.

Your work must be really hard. So for me, it was a eureka moment for me. It's like this weight came off my shoulder, said, oh, look at that.

I've got a solution to this massive problem. And I wanted to tell them. So in fact, I was so excited about it,

I wrote an entire book. And this little chart of Zerubbabel and Shealtiel and Jeconiah, that's chapter nine.

What are you, so is that gonna be the eureka moment for the book, is chapter nine, do you think? The book is titled

First Adam to Last Adam, Tracing the Lineage of Christ. That's a good title.

We worked hard on that title. But it's all different aspects of biblical genealogy, but not naming every name in the

Bible. Oh, that would be killer. But I talk about - Just every single person is the whole book.

It'd be a big book if I had to talk about every name in the Bible. But no, it's just tracing the line.

What are the important things? You know, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, but also the line of the priests is in there.

You know, the Bible does not have a lineage of priests all the way through the

Old Testament. You can't build it. It's outside of the Old Testament in Jewish writings, but it's not in the

Bible itself. The only lineage that goes from beginning to end is only one, and that's the line of Jesus.

There's only a line of one because the priests - There's only one person that can be traced throughout the entire

Bible, and that's Jesus. No other genealogy goes all the way through.

Whoa. Is the book basically what we talked about today, or does it take on different topics that we haven't covered?

No, no, we're just talking about half of chapter nine today. Really? I mean,

I've got a chapter on all of the tribes that surround Israel, like all the tribes of Canaan, who the

Geshurites, who the Anakim, and then later on, all the tribes that surround

Judah during the kingdom era, the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Philistines.

And just kind of what happens to them? Yeah, and who they are, where they came from, how they intersect with the story.

And a lot of times, one of those people marries into the lineage of Christ. So like, you know, the story of Absalom, who rebelled against David, and his sister

Tamar, who was raped by her stepbrother, or half -brother, that's a sad story.

But when you realize that their mother was a Canaanite, she's the daughter of the king of Geshur.

I think Geshur is up northern Israel in the Golan Heights today. I think that's the Geshur area. And David married the daughter of a pagan king.

And that was Absalom's mother. And Absalom later on proclaims himself to be king. He broke the law by doing that.

He wasn't even allowed to be in Israel, let alone be accepted as an Israelite. You know, it takes several generations before that clears away.

Now you can be an Israelite. So this book is really like the best supplemental explanation for kind of like why things are happening the way they happen in the

Old Testament. Yeah, a lot of things, yeah. I have a chapter, I call that the Soap Opera Kings.

I spent days building a family tree of the Herods. Herod the

Great, Herod Archelaus, and it was so hard, because they all intermarried. Mm, that's interesting.

And there's lots of inbreeding. It's not like a nice branching tree. No, it's like the intertwined tree. And I talk about all the

Herods that are named in scripture, and there's a lot of them. It's more than even I thought. It's like five or six people from that family that are mentioned, and I explain where they came from and how they fit into things.

So just, you know, now when we're reading the birth narrative of Christ, or even the book of Acts, you know, who is that person who died of worms?

What? He was a Herod, which one? And we just, it's all put together in a nice chart.

And I walk it through narrative, I explain it. Yeah, I feel like the Bible is so hard because it's so out of context, but it's so supernatural.

And you have to understand like, oh, Herods is more than one person with the same name that we're interpreting.

That's a very specific group of people. The Canaanites is like a lineage of paganistic gods. Like there's so many things that are happening, let alone the creation, you know, the

Messiah. The Herod who tried to kill Jesus, and Jesus and Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt, and then the angel comes and said, okay,

Herod is dead, come back. They came back, but then later on, Herod is overseeing

Jesus's trial 30 years later. And then there's a

Herod that Paul's dealing with. I feel like at that point you're like, so Herod is just like the

Hebrew word for king, you know, that's just. No, no, they just kept naming their sons the same name. Yes, yeah,

I wouldn't know that. How would I know that? Exactly. And see, so I got two things here.

One, I'm a teacher. I love teaching. But also, I love the Bible, and I've been very confused about Bible stuff my entire life.

The more you study it, like what is that? Where does that come from? Why does it say that? And so here

I am trying to figure the Bible out, and every time I try to figure something out, I'm thinking how would

I explain it to somebody? And so after years of study and drawing family trees and writing articles for creation .com,

I go to my boss and I said, hey boss, I wanna do a series of videos on biblical genealogy, but I know that I have to write some articles first.

I'm gonna write a series of articles on biblical genealogy. He shakes his head. He's like, no, no, no. I was like, oh man, I can't do it.

He goes, no, you can do it, but you're gonna write a book first. Yeah. So that was two years ago.

And the book is finished. I mean, I've seen the proofs all printed out. I've read through the whole thing and edited it, and the graphic artist, we told him, pull out all the stops and make this the most beautiful book you've ever made.

And he did, and it's just lovely. I mean, the colors, the fonts, the graphics, and it's full of charts, not complicated ones, and images, and it's got all this classical artwork in it.

I mean, it's a beautiful book. Wow. And like, we can't get it on Amazon until a certain date, or can we pre -order?

We will come the new year sometime, start pre -orders in creation .com.

In fact, if people go to creation .com, sign up for our newsletter, which is right there on the front page, click here, just with an email address, and you will definitely be notified when the book becomes available.

Okay, yeah, yeah, because you're going on a world tour for this one. Yeah, I can't wait.

I mean, this is super exciting, because the nerd in me wants something out there that's understandable.

Yeah, and this is, are you more excited about this than you are about timelines? Well, the timeline is chapter 10 or 11.

Oh, it's included. Oh yeah, yeah, it's in there, because one of the things that biblical genealogy does is it allows us to build a timeline of Earth's history.

Whoa. Because if it weren't for the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11, we would have no idea how old the

Earth is. Whoa. The biology is coming into it. What would you say is like, your goal for the impact of this book?

Like, what would you hope happens next when everyone in the world gets a hold of this book? In the beginning, and in the last chapter, is a gospel presentation.

I want people to believe that the Bible is true. I want people to believe that Jesus really was the king of the

Jews, and that Jesus really was a descendant of Adam, and that he really was

Adam's representative, and therefore the representative of all humans, just like Adam was, and he died for all people.

That's why we study Jesus. That's why we study his line. I tell all my fellow speakers here at Creation Ministries, is that if we're not preaching the gospel, we're wasting our time.

It's not about science. You know, I'm not gonna get up and talk, oh, I'm gonna talk about mitochondrial DNA, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, it's about the gospel.

And what we're trying to do is remove stumbling blocks for people to accept that the

Bible is true. And by dealing with this genealogy question, we can say, hey, look, the

Bible is true. The Bible is not full of errors. These genealogies all make lots of sense when you lay them out like that.

Oh, yeah, it's mutually self -consistent. Even weird things like, there are places where there's not a stated genealogy.

It's just, you know, in bits and pieces, you hear, oh, this person married that person, da, da, da, oh, this person married this person.

And when you put it together, but that person's father was this person over here who married this person over there who, and that spider web of relationships, there aren't any contradictions.

So with the incidental details in the Bible also line up. So the

Bible says, see if I can do it in my head. Moses' father was

Amron. Moses' mother was Jochebed. Jochebed was supposedly a daughter of Levi.

But Levi was born before they got to Egypt. And they're in Egypt for hundreds of years.

How can Jochebed be a daughter of Levi and a mother of Moses if you have, if she's in the middle of a hundreds of years span?

And - Yeah, I have no idea. Well, Moses' father married his aunt. He was a grandson of Levi.

You yuck. Yuck. How can even, you know, if they're supposedly in Egypt for 430 years, you cannot span that.

But a lot of people think that they're in Egypt for a lot less than that. That the 430 -year clock didn't start when

Jacob got to Egypt. It started with that smoking fire pot when

Abraham cut the animals in half and fell asleep and had a dream. Okay.

Deep Old Testament. Deep Old Testament in Genesis. This is God promising Abraham to make him a father of many nations.

He says, you're going to, maybe another prophecy, your descendants are gonna go into a foreign land and be slaves.

And the fourth generation are gonna come out. Well, at Exodus, when they come out of Egypt, it says 430 years to that very day.

Well, 430 years to what is the question? And so when you first read it, it sure sounds like they're there for 430 years in Egypt.

But almost all scholars, including a lot of really conservative ones, said no, no, no, no, no, no.

The clock started with Abraham. Oh. So you have about 215 or so years before the

Israelites get into Egypt. And 215 plus 215 is 430. Oh, so you think it was like Abraham to Moses 215 years and then -

Yeah. Now, I did not, for a long time, I did not. But when I wrote the article with my friend, the biblical minimum maximum age of the earth, we're trying to figure out how old the earth could be scripturally.

We knew that some people thought they were only in Egypt for 215 years, whatever. But we took the 430 year approach and said, oh yeah, there's other people over here and that might affect the number a little bit.

But after digging and digging and digging, I have flipped over.

Because one, if you go Levi, Kohath, Amron, Moses, oh, that's four generations.

But you can't have four generations in 430 years. You can't fit the ages in there.

There's too much space. But in 215 years, we know how Moses was 80 years old when he left

Egypt. We know that. So he's born 215 minus 80.

And we know that Amron was born after they got to Egypt and we know how old he was when he died.

And we know how old Kohath was when he died. And we know how old Jochebed was when she died.

And so all these people, we know how old they were and died and all the ages fit in a 215 year window with no problem.

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, that's insane. And then when you realize that, you know, this person married this other person from Judah.

And when you line the family trees up, there's no conflict. If there's missing generations, you couldn't line the trees up.

Oh. There would be a conflict somewhere. There'd be an irregularity. There'd be a problem. This doesn't quite work right if there's missing generations but if there's no missing generations and the names in the

Bible really are father -son relationships and daughter relationships and they all line up beautifully with the 215 year time in Egypt.

I think it's 200, actually it's about 210 years but that's a longer story. We really are just like studying the

Bible to be like, see, it still is true. It still is true. And Jesus is like, I thought you gave your life to Christ.

I thought you already decided that. But as Christians, we all struggle with it.

Yeah. You read something and you're like, I don't know about that part but at least we can take all this genie out and people don't read the genealogies.

I mean, the genealogical list in Genesis five and Genesis 11, those are the great killers of every year long

Bible reading plan. Yeah. It's even worse. If you've happened to survive until Chronicles, even

Chronicles three, you're like, I'm done. No more names. That and how to build a tabernacle, cubit by cubit.

Whenever we get to those, I'm just like, oh gosh. Yes, I know. I know. But at least we can take these genealogical things and say, look, there's answers.

There's not contradictions. Yeah. It all makes sense. It's almost like he knew that we needed more explanation.

Yeah. Well, I needed more explanation. Yeah, I only need explanation. I need all the explanation.

Yeah, yeah. I need something where I take this, what looks like a problem and get it answered so I can say, ah.

And I need that constantly because even though I might have a thousand things that have been answered in my past, there's something bugging me today.

Yeah. It's gonna bug me. And then I gotta tackle that one. And so here, I wrote this book for people to be encouraged that the

Bible is true. And if the Bible is true, then Jesus really is a son of God. Jesus really is a descendant of David.

Jesus really is a descendant of Adam. And he really is our substitute, the spotless lamb of God who died to take away the sin of the world.

I mean, what more do you need? Yeah. Oh, such a good conversation.

I honestly was very scared about this one, Dr. Carter, but you've made it very easy to understand. So thank you.

Even though we brought up the names of Rumble Bell. Even though we didn't follow any question that I sent you, this was wonderful.

I know. And I warned you. I said, I get off topic. We probably covered most all the questions. But afterwards, you'll be looking at the outline, be like, oh, we forgot that one.

I know, I know. You'll have to come back, I guess. Well, you wanna hit pause and read through the questions to make sure we didn't miss one?

No, no. I have to eat breakfast. But what's next for you? You're going to Egypt.

We've done timelines, we've done genealogies. You're going book tour. But is there a topic that you're about to go into next?

Yeah. My next book, which is slated, is,

I don't wanna give away the title yet, but it's, I'm gonna try to replace the out of Africa theory with a scriptural out of Babel theory and all the things involved.

Yeah, so explaining humanity from a biblical perspective instead of the evolutionary

African perspective. Could we really have come from Adam and Eve? Is that possible?

Can you get all the genetic diversity of people around the world into Adam and Eve? Can you get 8 billion people only from Adam and Eve a few thousand years ago?

How do you get black people and brown people and light -skinned people and Native Americans and Pacific Islanders?

Where do those people come from? Yeah. Yeah. Whoa, okay.

I can't wait to learn about that when you're done. Well, give me two years. Okay. We'll still be kicking over here.

Okay. Awesome, well, as always, thank you for your wisdom and your time, Dr. Carter. You're always welcome back.