“The New Testament provides two accounts of the genealogy of Jesus, one in the Gospel of Matthew and another in the Gospel of Luke.[1]

The lists are [almost] identical between Abraham and David, but differ radically from that point. Matthew has twenty-seven generations from David to Joseph, whereas Luke has forty-two, with almost no overlap between the names on the two lists.⁠ Notably, the two accounts also disagree on who Joseph’s father was: Matthew says he was Jacob, while Luke says he was Heli.[2]

Traditional Christian scholars (starting with Africanus and Eusebius[3]) have put forward various theories that seek to explain why the lineages are so different,[4] such as that Matthew’s account follows the lineage of Joseph, while Luke’s follows the lineage of Mary, although both start with Jesus and then go to Joseph, not Mary.

Modern critical scholars like Marcus Borg and John Crossan state that both genealogies are inventions, intended to bring the Messianic claims into conformity with Jewish criteria.[5]”