Saviours had to have royal blood to give them dignity, but they had to have a humble birth to allow them to be identified with the struggling masses. Their unpretentious births in poverty in stables or caves were intended to make a virtue of abject conditions. The genealogy of saviours is not always given in their myths but certainly some other saviours besides Christ were descended from kings and began their life in humble circumstances to suggest the benefits of poverty and humility.

Buddha is directly traced through a royal pedigree. His mother was betrothed to a rajah, and her son belonged to the same royal caste as Krishna. The Prophet of Islam, Mohammed, began life humbly and, like Christ, had nowhere to lay his head. A cloak spread on the ground served him for a bed, and a skin filled with date leaves was his pillow. The genealogy of the God Yu of China is traced through a line of princes to a very remote origin, though Yu only became the most prominent Chinese God in popular culture from about 600 AD. His whole life was a lesson of practical humility, and he proclaimed at every step the mantra of Christianity:

This is the way. Walk ye in it.

The dubious birth narratives of Matthew and Luke each include a genealogy that shows Joseph as the father of Jesus, and trace his lineage back to David, Abraham, and even Adam. The Jewish messiah was to be a son, meaning a descendent, of David. The Old Testament predicted that the messiah was to be of “the seed of David” as the Pharisees are made to remind Jesus in the gospels. So the evangelists made Davidic genealogies—which seems to have been unknown to Jesus when the Pharisees wanted his pedigree—for Joseph. Joseph was the father of Jesus except in one sense—he had not impregnated his wife!

The virgin birth narratives kick both these genealogies into touch. The birth stories in the two gospels come from different sources and differ widely but both contradict their central thesis that Jesus’s mother was a virgin by giving a genealogy to show that Joseph was descended from David, an irrelevancy if Joseph had not impregnated his wife. The original idea was obviously to trace Jesus’s lineage through Joseph to David to fulfil messianic prophecy. Then the idea of making Jesus more divine through a virgin birth arose and was tacked on spoiling the object of the genealogy. Then they could no longer serve their purpose of showing Jesus as descended from David. That is no problem to Christians, keen to find the most ingenious ways of upholding what they call the “Truth”, and simultaneously proving that, for God, all things are possible.

The editors of both gospels see the problem and try to avoid it. For Christians, the line of Mary was sufficient for the Davidic descent, so that both Joseph and Mary were in the line of David. QED! To establish this, though, a cacophany of unlikely things have to be yelled out, and direct evidence such as the Syriac Matthew found in 1892 has to be ignored. This work, confirmed by an ancient citation of it, states unequivocally that “Joseph begat Jesus who is called Christ”, though Mary is mentioned as the betrothed of Joseph. Thomas Boslooper (The Virgin Birth) notes that another Syriac text, describing the appearance of the angel to Joseph, has it announcing, “She shall bear to thee a son”.

In Luke, it was done by inserting “as people thought” to show Jesus was not really Joseph’s son and in Matthew by slyly separating Joseph from his son by inserting, after Joseph, “the husband of Mary, of whom was begotten Jesus”. The genealogies of Joseph in Matthew and Luke (Mt 1:2-17; Lk3:23-38) give Joseph different fathers. Did the gospel writers intend to show that Jesus was so remarkable that, not only was God his father but he had two mortal fathers as well, because the two Josephs must have been different men having, in the male line, different grandfathers?

Christian commentators try to suggest the two genealogies are not both of Joseph. That in Luke is really Mary’s, even though Luke says it is Joseph’s (Lk3:23), and Jesus was of the house of David through his mother’s lineage. But if the intention was to imply that Mary was begetting Jesus then the person inserting the story was either ignorant or depended on the ignorance of his readers, for only men could beget according to Jewish convention. In the Syriac Matthew, “Joseph begat Jesus”.

Fertilisation of the ovum by the sperm was only discovered in the nineteenth century. Though Genesis3:15 refers to the seed of the woman, implying that the Jews knew about eggs carried by women. Perhaps some did, but not average people. Jews, like the Greeks, thought the whole human being was present in miniature in the male sperm. The woman was simply the soil for the seed to grow. They wrote of a woman who had no children as a spent field, as infertile or barren. This idea was carried into Christian Europe and held until the Middle ages. Christians had no idea that women had their own seed. This is why Mary nor any other woman could participate in a genealogy. Matthew’s inclusion of four women in his genealogies was for other reasons and their presence would have highlighted them to an educated Jew.

The reason Christians believe Jesus was in the line of David has little to do with any evidence that he really was the heir to the throne. Though the Jews were assiduous keepers of genealogical tables to enable them to prove their nobility, we have to believe that they kept these records accurately for over a thousand years, through the disruptions of multiple conquests, loss of the leading classes in exile and so on. The habit probably stems, as most things Jewish really do, from the “return” from “exile”. The colonists were keen to establish themselves as the true Israel, and quite different from the locals. They therefore set up their right to the priesthood on hereditary grounds and, at some stage claimed descent from Aaron and Zadok who had become legendary. Thereafter, they freely altered the record to according to the political circumstances.

In 1000 years at a reproductive rate of a generation every 25 years there could have been a million million descendants of David, even if each family had only two surviving children. In a small country, these descendants were interbreeding considerably, impying that everyone in Palestine, except for the most recent immigrants, must have had some of the blood of David coursing in their veins. Almost everyone could have traced their lineage to David, given the genealogical tables. Jesus must have had some Davidic blood, had his great ancestor existed, but it is most unlikely that he could have proved he was heir to the throne. He was a waif taken in by the Essenes according to their custom. An excellent reason for him to have been left with them by his mother is that he was illigitimate.

Jesus could not have been first in line to the throne of David, even if the order of precedence was known. Christians admit that by any natural standard, Jesus was illigitimate—her husband did not impregnate Mary and Jesus was not the son of her husband. He was therefore not a son of David whether he was the son of God or the common bastard of a Roman soldier. It is certain that Jesus was not a son of David because Jesus himself, according to the synoptic gospels denies it. In Mark12:35–37 and parallel passages at Matthew 22:42 and Luke 20:41, Jesus pointedly explains that the messiah could not be the son of David.

Jesus’s proof that the messiah was not a son or of the line of king David satisfied the attendant crowd. They accepted that a son of David was a man in the mould of David and not necessarily of his stock. The only reason he could have had for making such a reply was that everyone knew he could not fulfil the Davidic criterion of messiahship. Jesus was not a claimant to the throne of Israel by lineage. He was a star, a man whose destiny it was. Son of David was a position to be attained or granted by God not one that came by birth.

Mark can have had no reason for including any passage in which Jesus seems to deny what the church already accepted unless it was genuine tradition and he felt obliged to put it in this particular spot, and the authors of both Matthew and Luke felt obliged to copy it. Since in Mark, Jesus refutes the idea that he is the son of David, he had no need to provide genealogies that contradicted this teaching of the Christian Christ. The authors of Matthew and Luke reproduced the same refutation of Jesus’s descent from David without noticing that they had done their best to prove it earlier. It is that Hopeless Ghost asleep on the job again. So, though the genealogies were unnecessary from Jesus’s own teaching and from the imposition of God as the actual father, they remained in the gospels. The Davidic descent was a myth the Christians liked.

Ask any Christian whether Jesus was a son of David, meaning a descendant of the ancient Jewish king, and they will ready assent that he was. Ignatius (ca. 100 AD) writing respectively to the Ephesians and to the Trallians that Jesus Christ was conceived by Mary of the seed of David and of the spirit of God and was truly born. Either Mary was of the seed of David or the Holy Ghost was but Joseph was not involved. The apocryphal gospels and Justin Martyr had the same view.

How is the view of these early Christians compatible with Jesus’s own refutation of it in the synoptic gospels. Nobody denies that Mark’s gospel at least must have been written by the time of Ignatius, and Matthew and Markwere also in circulation by the time of Justin. So, it seems that the correct tradition in Markwas overlaid by the romantic necessity of having a messiah with proper Davidic credentials. These were provided by the genealogies in the early editions of Matthew and Luke but then the birth narratives were added. The truth that Jesus was illigitimate therefore is rejected in the genealogies then re-admitted in the birth narratives in the Greek convention of having a demi-god conceived by a God.

Why then do Christians think that Jesus was the son of David. Since both Matthew and Luke refute their own assertion that Jesus was the son of David by putting in birth stories that show he was not, the idea that Jesus was the son of David must have been an early misconception. It is not surprising. It was the messianic preconception that the messiah was the son of David, and it was the old tradition rather than the truth which prevailed.

In Mark, Jesus refuted the idea and, in this gospel, it only reappeared when blind Bartimaeus addressed Jesus as the Nazarenes were leaving Jericho. Luke accepted these as the only two instances but nevertheless included a genealogy which purported to prove that Jesus was a son of David. Matthew did the same, and although he mentioned “son of David” ten times, it is mainly as the title chosen by unclean spirits or the blind in addressing Jesus. Jesus did not want to be seen as a messiah in case the authorities should get to know, so his disciples had instructions to silence anyone addressing Jesus with a messianic title.

Once Jesus was accepted as the Messiah, he was given messianic features whether he had them in reality or not. The acceptance of Jesus as a son of David by the church was one of the first pious sins of omission of the bishops. Not the apostles, though. Revelation and Acts do not state that Jesus was a son of David. Nor, interestingly enough does John which otherwise was keen on building up the legendary aspects of Jesus Christ. Indeed in John 7:41-44 the dispute among the multitude about the messiah coming from Galilee instead of Bethlehem and of the seed of David refutes both the Davidic origin of Jesus and the myth created by Matthew that he was born in Bethlehem.

The only epistles of the apostles to speak of it are Romans 1:3 and 2 Timothy 2:8 where Paul pointedly admits it was his gospel not the gospel. Paul of course, knew of no miraculous births categorically saying in Galatians 4:4 as if to refute any contrary suggestion that Jesus was “born of a woman under the law” (in short legitimately). Paul, knowing nothing else, was ready to accept messianic convention—the messiah was the son of David. We must conclude that Paul, who knew hardly anything of the real circumstances of the life of Jesus, spread his own gospel that Jesus was of the line of David.