Why Matthew and Luke Give Jesus Two Different Family Trees

Read Matthew 1 and Luke 3 side by side and something looks wrong. Both trace Jesus through King David to Joseph. Yet Matthew says Joseph's father was Jacob, and Luke says it was Heli. Between David and Joseph the lists share only two names, and Matthew's own count comes up one short.

The map below draws both lists as railway lines, so you can see where they run together and where they part.

How to read the map

The wine-red line is Matthew and the gold line is Luke. Luke lists the names backwards, from Jesus up to Adam, so the map turns his list around and both run oldest to newest. Where both Gospels name the same man, the lines run side by side and the stop is a capsule. Diamonds mark the women Matthew names. Tap, hover or tab to any stop for its verses.

Matthew sorts his list into three groups, and says so:

“In all, then, there were fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.”

(Matthew 1:17, BSB)

Matthew promises 42 names and lists 41

Turn on “Count the 14s” and count along. Abraham to David is 14 names. Solomon to Jeconiah is 14. Shealtiel to Jesus is 13.

Jeconiah is the only name Matthew writes twice. He closes the second group, “Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon” (1:11), and opens the third: “After the exile to Babylon: Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel” (1:12). Count him in both groups and the third reaches 14.

Another view reads the Jeconiah of verse 11 as his father Jehoiakim, whose name looks very like his in Greek. Josiah's sons were Jehoiakim and his brothers (1 Chronicles 3:15), so on that reading the two verses name two different men.

One theory links the number to David himself. Hebrew letters double as numbers, and D-V-D adds up to 4 + 6 + 4 = 14. The text never says so, and Matthew wrote in Greek, where the sum gives nothing.

Matthew leaves out four kings

Matthew 1:8 says “Joram the father of Uzziah.” The royal list in 1 Chronicles 3:11-12 has three more kings between them: Ahaziah, Joash and Amaziah. Uzziah is the king Chronicles calls Azariah (2 Kings 15:1), so he was Joram's great-great-grandson. Matthew also goes straight from Josiah to Jeconiah, where 1 Chronicles 3:15-16 has Jehoiakim in between. The map's second switch puts all four back as dashed stops.

For an ancient genealogy this was normal. “Father of” can mean ancestor, just as Matthew 1:1 calls Jesus “the son of David” across a thousand years. Lists were often shortened to fit a pattern or to be remembered, and dropping three kings is exactly what brings the second group down to 14.

Five women in a list of fathers

Genealogies of this kind name fathers. Matthew names five women, and none of their stories is tidy.

Tamar (1:3), Judah's daughter-in-law, was denied the husband she was owed. She disguised herself and conceived twins by Judah, who admitted, “She is more righteous than I” (Genesis 38:26). Rahab (1:5) was “a prostitute named Rahab” in Jericho who hid Israel's spies (Joshua 2:1). Her story has its own study, Rahab, the prostitute in the bloodline of Jesus.

Ruth (1:5) was a Moabite (Ruth 1:4) and became David's great-grandmother. Bathsheba appears only as “Uriah's wife” (1:6). Matthew names her first husband, the man David had killed, instead of her.

Mary (1:16) breaks the pattern of the whole list. Matthew does not write that Joseph was the father of Jesus. He writes “Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ (Greek: Χριστός, Christos, “anointed, the Messiah”).”

Rahab and Ruth were foreigners, and Bathsheba was married to a Hittite. One reading sees a family open to outsiders from the start. Another sees the irregular unions preparing the reader for the most irregular birth on the list.

The lines part at David and meet at Joseph

From Abraham to David the lists agree, apart from one spot. Where Matthew has Ram, as do Ruth 4:19 and 1 Chronicles 2:9-10, Luke 3:33 in the BSB has two names, Admin and Arni. Luke also spells Salmon as Sala.

After David, Matthew follows Solomon and the kings of Judah. Luke follows Nathan, another son of David by Bathsheba (1 Chronicles 3:5), down a branch with no kings on it.

Around the exile the lines touch. Both name Shealtiel and his son Zerubbabel, who helped rebuild the altar in Jerusalem (Ezra 3:2). Even there they differ on Shealtiel's father: Jeconiah in Matthew 1:12, Neri in Luke 3:27. Then the lines part again until Joseph.

Luke needs 41 men where Matthew uses 26

Between David and Jesus, Matthew has 26 names, Solomon to Joseph. Luke has 41, Nathan to Joseph. Both cover roughly the same thousand years, so Matthew's list is by far the more compressed.

Matthew starts at Abraham, because his first verse calls Jesus “the son of David, the son of Abraham” (1:1). Luke keeps going for 20 more generations, 77 people in all, and ends with “the son of Adam, the son of God” (3:38).

Why two trees?

The question is old. One of the earliest answers survives because the church historian Eusebius copied it into his Church History.

Luke gives Mary's family

On this view Heli was Mary's father, and Joseph is his son by marriage. Supporters point to Luke's wording, “He was regarded as the son of Joseph” (3:23), and to his birth story told from Mary's side. Others answer that Mary's name is not in the list, and that genealogies of the time ran through fathers.

One line is legal, the other natural

Julius Africanus, in a letter that Eusebius preserves (Church History 1.7), says this answer came from Jesus' own relatives. Matthan, on Solomon's line, and Melchi, on Nathan's, married the same woman one after the other, so Jacob and Heli were half-brothers. Heli died without a son, and Jacob married his widow, as the law asked of a brother:

“The first son she bears will carry on the name of the dead brother, so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel.”

(Deuteronomy 25:6, BSB)

Joseph was then Jacob's son by birth and Heli's by law, and each Gospel records one of the two. Africanus admits he has no proof. His version also makes Melchi the father of Heli, where Luke's list has Matthat and Levi in between.

A curse on Jeconiah

Some point to a prophecy about Jeconiah, who sits on Matthew's line:

“Enroll this man as childless, a man who will not prosper in his lifetime. None of his descendants will prosper to sit on the throne of David or to rule again in Judah.”

(Jeremiah 22:30, BSB)

On this view Joseph passes on the legal right to David's throne through Matthew's royal line, while Jesus' descent by blood runs another way, so the curse never reaches him. Others reply that the verse covers Jeconiah's lifetime, or that it was later lifted. Haggai 2:23 calls his grandson Zerubbabel God's “signet ring”, the image Jeremiah 22:24 used against him.

A further view treats both lists as arrangements built to make a point about who Jesus is, rather than as family records.

Both lines end at the same stop

Matthew starts with the promise to Abraham. Luke starts with Adam. Their lines take different roads through a thousand years of names, touch once near the exile, and pull into the same final stop: Jesus.

Sources

• Berean Standard Bible (public domain), Matthew 1:1-20, Luke 3:23-38, 1 Chronicles 2:9-15, 3:5, 3:10-19 and the other passages quoted. Every name, verse reference and count on the map.
• Eusebius, Church History 1.7, preserving Julius Africanus' Letter to Aristides. New Advent translation.
• “Genealogy of Jesus”, Wikipedia. Overview of the Mary's-line, levirate, adoption and Jeconiah's-curse explanations, the skipped kings, and the Admin/Arni reading in Luke 3:33.
• “Matthew 1:17”, Wikipedia. The ways of counting the three fourteens.
• CEFC, article on Matthew 1, for the DVD = 14 reading.
• “Siege of Jerusalem (587 BC)”, Wikipedia, for the date of Jeconiah's exile, 597 BC.