• “We Have Found the Messiah”!
    The Watchtower—1992 | October 1

    • Jesus’ Lineage

      3. What do the Gospels of Matthew and Luke detail about Jesus’ lineage?

      3 Jesus’ lineage is the first evidence the Christian Greek Scriptures give in support of his Messiahship. The Bible foretold that the Messiah would come from the family line of King David. (Psalm 132:11, 12; Isaiah 11:1, 10) Matthew’s Gospel begins: “The book of the history of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.” Matthew backs up this bold claim by tracing Jesus’ descent through the line of his adoptive father, Joseph. (Matthew 1:1-16) Luke’s Gospel traces Jesus’ lineage through his natural mother, Mary, back through David and Abraham to Adam. (Luke 3:23-38)a Thus the Gospel writers thoroughly document their claim that Jesus was an heir of David, both in a legal and in a natural sense.

      4, 5. (a) Did Jesus’ contemporaries challenge his descent from David, and why is this significant? (b) How do non-Biblical references support Jesus’ lineage?

      4 Even the most skeptical opponent of Jesus’ Messiahship cannot deny Jesus’ claim to be a son of David. Why? There are two reasons. One, that claim was widely repeated in Jerusalem for decades before the city was destroyed in 70 C.E. (Compare Matthew 21:9; Acts 4:27; 5:27, 28.) If the claim was false, any of Jesus’ opponents​—and he had many—​could have proved Jesus a fraud simply by checking his lineage in the genealogies in the public archives.b But history has no record of anyone challenging Jesus’ descent from King David. Evidently, the claim was unassailable. No doubt Matthew and Luke copied the salient names for their accounts directly from the public records.

      5 Second, sources outside the Bible confirm the general acceptance of Jesus’ lineage. For instance, the Talmud records a fourth-century rabbi as making a scurrilous attack on Mary, the mother of Jesus, for ‘playing the harlot with carpenters’; but the same passage concedes that “she was the descendant of princes and rulers.” An earlier example is the second-century historian Hegesippus. He related that when the Roman Caesar Domitian wanted to exterminate any descendants of David, some enemies of the early Christians denounced the grandsons of Jude, Jesus’ half brother, “as being of the family of David.” If Jude was a known descendant of David, was not Jesus as well? Undeniably!​—Galatians 1:19; Jude 1.