Christians are even able to hold to the truth of both genealogies and the virgin birth, yet quite apart from the difficulties with believing a virgin birth, the gospel genealogies differ widely with each other and contradict the Old Testament. If Paul was right in saying, “Christ was descended from David according to the flesh”, Christians have to conclude he meant Mary’s flesh so as not deny the miraculous birth. If Jews allowed a descent via the mother, then the genealogies of Joseph are spurious and superfluous. Joseph is unnecessary to the story, and Mark did not mention him at all.

Luke, in his gospel, names forty-one generations from David, to Joseph, though he had previously represented it as being forty-two. Matthew says that from Abraham to David are fourteen generations, but according to his own list there are only thirteen. Then he tells us there are fourteen generations from David to the exile but, according to 1 Chronicles 3, there were eighteen. And the names in the lists of Matthew and Luke are so widely different from that found in Chronicles as to defy all logic. From David to Joseph, the two lists only agree twice, the names of Salathiel and Zerubabel alone agree in both lists.

Matthew tells us that the son of David, from whom Joseph descended, was Solomon, but Luke says it was Nathan. The next name in Matthew’s list is that of Rehoboam, but the corresponding name in Luke’s list is Mattatha. Matthew’s next name is Abijah, which Luke gives as Menna, while Chronicles supports Matthew and gives it as Abijah. Matthew says Joram begat Uzziah, but Chronicles virtually declares Joram had no such son, although he had a great-great-grandson Uzziah. But Luke says, in effect, there was no such person in the genealogical tree, or family line, as either Joram or Uzziah.

Matthew says Josiah begat Jechoniah and his brethren, about the time they were carried away to Babylon. But Chronicles declares that Jechoniah was Jehoiakim’s son, and not Josiah’s, and that Josiah had no such son. We also learn, from 2 Kings 13, that Josiah was killed eleven years before the exile to Babylon, and could not well beget a son after he had been dead a decade.

Matthew, after naming twenty-four generations as filling out the line, and making it complete between David and Jacob, concludes with his and “Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary”. Luke, besides making his list fourteen generations more than Matthew’s, declares that Joseph was the son of Heli. So that Joseph either had two fathers, Jacob and Heli, or Matthew or Luke, or both, were glaringly wrong, with all their inspiration by the Holy Ghost. One Christian answer—their excuse for the ineptitude of the Holy Ghost—is that Joseph’s mother married twice, and one line is through Joseph’s natural father, Jacob, while the other is through his step father, Heli. We have to believe, therefore, that a stepfather can “beget” a stepson, and Christians assure us he can. What is true of Joseph is true of Jesus, so that Joseph, merely Jesus’s stepfather, could beget Jesus.

Again, Luke says that Salathiel was the son of Neri, but Chronicles says he was the son of Jechoniah. And after Chronicles had registered Zerubabel as the son of Penniah, Matthew and Luke both declare that he was the son of Salathiel. They agree here in contradicting Chronicles, which is the only instance but one of their agreement in the whole list of progenitors from David to Joseph. With this exception they contradict each other all the way through, and in many instances that of Chronicles, too. Such is the harmony in the words of divine inspiration which Christians admire so much. Pious liars need gullible believers.

Because Christians liked the idea of a Davidic descent, they had to try to explain it in the light of the Virgin Birth, and for long they argued that Luke’s was the genealogy of Mary, Heli being her father, Joseph being Heli’s son-in-law, not his son. We must accept that Jews saw no need to distinguish a son from a son-in-law since Heli is described as begetting Joseph, not Mary. The author of the genealogy was conscious that Jewish women did not beget, and to make her seem to do so would have declared Jesus as fatherless—a bastard.

Luke’s genealogy appears in an odd place (Lk 3.23), when Jesus begins his ministry at 30 years of age not at his birth, but the birth narrative of the first two chapters of Luke is in a style and language distinctive from the rest of Luke. It is Greek with a strong flavour of Hebrew as opposed to the normal Greek of the rest. It is as if someone today deliberately wrote in biblical English. Theologians claim it is a deliberate stylistic device to give continuity with the Old Testament.

However, the elaborate dating given in Luke at the start of Jesus’s ministry (Lk 3:1) suggests that the original gospel started here and the birth narrative in its peculiar style was added. The genealogy therefore originally came near the start of the gospel, where it would be expected, but associated with Jesus’s baptism on his thirtieth birthday. It shows that Jesus was a king after the fashion of the Pharaohs who were reborn at their thirtieth birthday and, indeed, Essene practice was to consider people mature only at their thirtieth birthday. The Damascus Rule says that the Essenes kept lists of the “Sons of Zadok, the elect of Israel, according to their generations”. These lists will have offered a source for the genealogies of Matthew and Luke.

Luke’s genealogy gives Adam as “the son of God” making all men sons or descendants of God, though he missed out the word “son” in each case except the first, as if to suggest they were not literally “sons of”. Adam was made of the dust of the earth, and the gospels recognise that God had the power to raise sons from stones. Why then did God have to make his redeeming son by impregnating a human woman supernaturally, like the Greek gods? Christians might respond that the saviour had to have a human mother to be human but the Virgin is now a goddess, herself immaculately conceived, so how is she human? The gradual accumulation of pious lies has led in Christianity to absurd contradictions like these, yet Christian punters are never detered by the irrational.