In their attempts to accomplish their object, the biographers of Jesus have made such poor work of it, that all the ingenuity Christianity has yet produced, has not been able to repair their blunders.
The genealogies are contained in the first and third Gospels, and although they do not agree, yet, if either is right, then Jesus was not the son of God, engendered by the "Holy Ghost," but the legitimate son of Joseph and Mary. In any other sense they amount to nothing. That Jesus can be of royal descent, and yet be the Son of God, in the sense in which these words are used, is a conclusion which can be acceptable to those only who believe in alleged historical narratives on no other ground than that they wish them to be true, and dare not call them into question.
The Matthew narrator states that all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen, from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen, and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Jesus are fourteen generations.[161:1] Surely nothing can have a more mythological appearance than this. But, when we confine our attention to the genealogy itself, we find that the generations in the third stage, including Jesus himself, amount to only thirteen. All attempts to get over this difficulty have been without success; the genealogies are, and have always been, hard nuts for theologians to crack. Some of the early Christian fathers saw this, and they very wisely put an allegorical interpretation to them.
Dr. South says, in Kitto's Biblical Encyclopædia:
"Christ's being the true Messiah depends upon his being the son of David and king of the Jews. So that unless this be evinced the whole foundation of Christianity must totter and fall."
Another writer in the same work says:
"In these two documents (Matthew and Luke), which profess to give us the genealogy of Christ, there is no notice whatever of the connection of his only earthly parent with the stock of David. On the contrary, both the genealogies profess to give us the descent of Joseph, to connect our Lord with whom by natural generation, would be to falsify the whole story of his miraculous birth, and overthrow the Christian faith."
Again, when the idea that one of the genealogies is Mary's is spoken of:
"One thing is certain, that our belief in Mary's descent from David is grounded on inference and tradition and not on any direct statement of the sacred writings. And there has been a ceaseless endeavor, both among ancients and moderns, to gratify the natural cravings for knowledge on this subject."
Thomas Scott, speaking of the genealogies, says: