Along that side note, the kohanim are descendants of the high priest Aaron. Many Jews today still proclaim that they are cohens, meaning they are part of a direct patrilineal lineage from Aaron, and that’s where the surname derives.
Aaron is not part of the ancestor list for Jesus, however. I don’t remember whether this is a signal to Jews that Jesus is not the messiah, but I’m sure somebody here could fill that in.
The most common resolutions are:
A. Matthew listed Joseph’s ancestry; Luke, Mary’s. (Joseph would be heir of Heli as Mary’s husband.)
B. Matthew listed the kings and what we’d term today as pretenders to the throne of David; Luke gave the actual bloodline. This explains why both Joseph and “Salathiel” (Shealtiel) are shown as having different parentage in the two. I.e., after the death of Jehoaichin/“Jeconiah” during the exile, the surviving heir of line was Nathan’s descendant Shealtiel and then his (grand)son Zerubbabel; Jacob the “father” of Joseph in Matthew’s line died childless, leaving kinsman Joseph bar Heli (from Luke) as his heir.
C. They’re both made up of whole cloth.
The first one is utter nonsense, totally unsupported either by the text of Luke or by any Jewish genealogical traditions (they didn’t trace matrilinear lines).
The second is more clever, but still not satisfactory because only the real bloodline would matter with regards to Messianic credentials, so it’s not credible that Matthew would intend to imply anything else.
Occam basically leaves us with the third option, though it’s probably a tad too snarky to say they were completely inventing things out of nothing at all. They were using whatever sources they could and (to their minds) trying to infer things and piece them together, following their individual theological assumptions and interpretations of whatever data was available to them. They weren’t so much intentionally lying as putting together what they thought would be plausible “reconstructions.”
Aaron is irrelevant to messianic claims, except to disprove them. The Messiah is supposed to be a male-line descendant of King David, who was of the tribe of Judah, not a Kohen. In fact, the Pharasaic Rabbis of the time that the Hasmoneans ruled over Israel were very critical of them - being that they were Kohanim - taking the mantle of kingship, which is supposed to be the prerogative of the tribe of Judah and David’s descendants. (And at that time, there was the public office of “Nasi”, which was held by descendants of David, through the line of Zerubabel.)
The signal to Jews that Jesus is not the Messiah is that he has not done any of the things that Jews believe the Messiah is meant to do (gather in the exiles of Israel, for example).
I don’t see how people can justify that one. My translation uses “son of” for Joseph and Heli, just like the whole genealogy uses “son of.” Its plain meaning is that Heli was Joseph’s father.
On the other hand, it is supported by the text. Matthew is very clear that he’s talking about the lineage of Joseph. Luke says “Joseph, husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born.”
Since Joseph was not a proper father in the biological sense (as even Matthew notes), it isn’t such a reach that Luke gave a list of Mary’s fathers.
No it doesn’t. Matthew says that.
Joseph was not a biological father in either story, and Luke unambiguously says that Joseph was "the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Melki…etc. on down the line.
Mary’s lineage would have been irrelevant anyway since Messiaship could only be inherited through the father.
Regarding the European genealogical tradition: yes, claims are frequently made for descent from Vortigern or Wotan or whoever, and they are almost undoubtedly spurious (or, if correct, coincidentally so). In this case, “Vortigern” is a title (“Great Lord”) and Wotan is a god, so even their understanding as individuals is problematic. It’s not necessarily outright lying: it is customary to have an impressive royal genealogy, and it might be better to think of it as an art form than a misrepresentation, at least in Biblical and Medieval times.
Usually, anyone important is worked in somewhere. I think this is what Polycarp is suggesting and his post is consistent with my understanding of tradition.
It seems to me that the simplest answer is: The genealogies came from the same source as the rest of the historical record.
I don’t know why the OP is singling out the genealogies for this question. Where did the story about Noah’s Ark come from? Where did the story about slavery in Egypt come from? Isn’t it reasonable to figure that they all came from the same source, or similar sources?
No, I don’t think it’s necessarily reasonable to assume they came from the same source.
Presumably, the books were recordings of oral tradition. Now I doubt that the (very extensive) genealogies were passed down orally. So where did they come from? Were the authors referring to written genealogies that were maintained somewhere? Or were they just making them up? That is the nature of the question. Does that clear up your confusion?
To the extent the books may be re-writes of earlier books or other written sources (as may be the case with Matthew and Luke), one still has to ask where the genealogies came from. Assuming they were contained in the earlier (now lost) written work, where would the author of that work have gotten them?
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Please save this kind of comment for Great Debates threads. It is inappropriate in GQ.
(no warning issued)
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Could you explain the source of your doubt? If you accept the presumption that the books were recordings of oral tradition, why do you doubt that the genealogies were part of that tradition. I’m not attacking you; I’m just asking you to explain the distinction that you see.
Many of the stories are quite detailed. Many of the laws are even more detailed. Why don’t they have similar probabilities for being passed via oral tradition?
Let’s take, for example, the list of the ten plagues. Why would someone accept that the ten plagues are part of the oral tradition, but ten generations of begats must come from elsewhere?
You might say that details in stories are easy to invent by the author. I don’t see why the names of long-dead generations are more difficult than that. In fact, it seems to me that if the stories are made-up fiction (which is not my personal belief) then the names of the generations are the easiest part, because any sort of name will work. Details of the story are difficult, because the narrative needs a certain degree of coherent logic or the audience will reject it, but who cares about the names?
Yes; many cultures do preserve exactly this sort of extensive genealogy in oral tradition. It’s not unreasonable. That’s a separate issue from the accuracy of the genealogy in question.
Because stories are interesting and entertaining and therefore easy to remember, while long lists of names and family trees are boring and dry and hard to remember.
I can tell you an interesting story one time, and you can probably repeat that story to me tomorrow in more or less the same form, with maybe a few personal embellishments. But if I recite a list of 75 names to you today, would you be able to recite them back to me tomorrow?
Laws, while perhaps detailed, at least have the benefit of practical application. (“Look, I know this is the law, because this is how we’ve always done it. And since I remember how we’ve done it, I can write down how it must be done.”)
The geneologies are the ‘glue’ that holds the mythology together, and binds the various tribes to it. Many of the Biblical myths may have had seperate origins, or have been the preferred myths of different tribes; all got added in and kneaded into a more or less coherent whole by the redactors (which is probably why for example there are two complete creation myths in Genesis).
For analogy - say for example, post-nuclear war, a tribe of cannibal suburbanite descendadnts, while they feast on the slightly radioactive bodies of investment bankers around bonfires of stock certificates, recount the story of Kirk and Spock, and how Kirk is the great-grandson of Luke Skywalker, and how their chief’s grandfather is a direct descendant of Kirk through the male line … 
About ten years ago I spent some time working on my own family tree, and could have told you (without looking) my paternal lineage going back seven generations. It’s quite easy to believe, in my estimation, that people in an oral culture who valued their lineage much more than I do mine would be able to recall a much longer list of ascendents.
All the way back to Adam?
Well they didn’t have as many ancestors as I do! 
Hesiod’s “Theogony”, is in effect, a genealogy of the Greek gods, and that was originally passed down orally. From the Theogony:
That’s pretty much just a list of names. And plenty of preliterate societies do the same thing. They keep genealogies, even without writing them down.
Well, IMO it’s much more nuanced than that. Taking my own family – three traditions were that (my paternal) grandma’s family was descended from the Earls of Lincoln, that my male-line ancestors were descended from (one of) “three brothers that came over from England”, and that my (maternal) grandfather’s family were French Canadian in origin. On doing some serious genealogy, I can prove out the Earls of Lincoln line – grandma’s paternal grandmother was a Harrington by birth, of the family that descended from a minor British knight who married a daughter of the Earl of Lincoln at the time. The other two? Dad’s male line dead-ends with my great-great-grandfather; Mom’s with my great-grandfather. If one was descended from the three brothers and the other from French Canadians, I cannot prove it.
More than a little wish fulfillment goes into genealogy – people try to demonstrate descent from somebody famous of the past, and will clutch at straws to do so. But on the other hand, oral tradition makes it a point to get things right in the absence of writing, since it is the only historical record preliterate peoples have. There’s a case of some Inuit rediscovered in the later 1800s who were able to tell in quite a bit of accurate detail about the previous expedition that had discovered them in the 1600s, big wooden sailing ships being worthy of historical remembrance.
To show what I’m getting at with a Biblical example, take the minor character Othniel son of Caleb, one of the judges touched on briefly in the Book of Judges. His father was somewhat more famous: Caleb son of Jephunneh, one of the two spies Moses sent into Canaan. And Othniel and Caleb are of the Tribe of Judah, less than ten generations in descent from the old patriarch. Ought to be simple to trace out these two somewhat significant figures using Biblical genealogies, right? Well, no. Their ancestry is nowhere given outside the (very late) First Book of Chronicles. And it includes three contradictory lines, none of them showing Caleb as son of Jephunneh, the one datum we have as certain, from the patronymic. So: 
I guess my point is, I tend to take the genealogies as somewhat reliable, but with a fairly large grain of salt admixed in.