Charles Ellicott Commentary Luke 3

The difficulty presented here allows for at least three explanations:

1. Joseph may have been the son of Jacob by birth and of Heli by adoption, or vice versa.

2. Jacob and Heli may have been half-brothers—sons of the same mother but by different fathers, Matthan and Matthat. Alternatively, these two names may be different forms of the name of the same person. In this scenario, one of the two brothers may have died without children, and the other married his widow to raise up children for his brother.

   On either of these first two assumptions, both genealogies give Joseph’s descent. This would be sufficient, as St. Matthew’s record shows, to place the Son of Mary in the position of the heir of the house of David.

   However, this theory (encompassing the first two explanations) requires us to account for the fact that two different genealogies were treasured in Joseph's family. The explanation commonly offered is natural enough: St. Matthew, it is said, gives the line of kingly succession—the names of those who were, one after another, the heirs of the royal house. St. Luke, in contrast, gives that of Joseph’s natural parentage, descending from David as the parent stock but through the line of Nathan, and taking by adoption its place in the royal line when that had failed. The fact that from David to Salathiel, St. Matthew gives us the line of kings, and St. Luke that of those who were outside the line, supports this hypothesis to some extent.

3. A third and, as it seems to the present writer, more probable view is that we have here the genealogy not of Joseph, but of Mary. The words “being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph” are a parenthesis, and the first link is Jesus (the heir, and in that sense, son, of Heli).

   On this hypothesis, the Virgin, as well as Joseph, was of the house and lineage of David. Our Lord was then literally, as well as by adoption, of the seed of David according to the flesh (Romans 1:3)—on the mother’s side through the line of Nathan, and on the reputed father’s side through that of Solomon.

   This view has at least the merit of giving a sufficient reason for the appearance of the two different genealogies. Furthermore, as we have seen in the Introduction, everything points to the conclusion that the materials for the first three chapters of St. Luke’s Gospel came to him through the company of devout women who gathered around the mother of Jesus. If so, what is more natural than that they should have preserved and passed on to him the document on which she rested her claim to be of David’s lineage?

The difference in the number of names presents no real difficulty. We have seen that St. Matthew omits three names in the list of kings in order to adapt it to the memoria technica of fourteen names in each group, and what he did in one case he may well have done in another for the same reason.

And he came into all the country . . .—The words paint the mission-work of John somewhat more vividly than those of St. Matthew and St. Mark, who represent the people flocking to Him from Jerusalem and Judea. The two facts together complete the picture.

The baptism of repentance.—See Notes on Matthew 3:1-11, and Mark 1:4-6. In his description of the Baptism, St. Luke agrees verbally with the latter.

There is, in the appearance in St. Matthew’s list of Jeconias (as in 1 Chronicles 3:17), and in St. Luke’s of Neri as the father of Salathiel, a problem to be solved; but an adequate, though necessarily conjectural, solution is not difficult to find. To assume that the Salathiel of the one list is not identical with that in the other is to cut the knot instead of disentangling it.

But it may be noticed that in the earlier records connected with the name of the historical Salathiel, father of Zerubbabel who was the leader of the Jews on their return from Babylon, there is an obvious complication. In 1 Chronicles 3:19, Zerubbabel is the son of Pedaiah, Salathiel's brother. The language in Jeremiah 22:30 at least suggests that Jeconiah died without an heir.

Therefore, what seems probable is that the royal line descended from Solomon and expired in Jeconiah, and that Salathiel, the son of Neri, the representative of the line of Nathan, took his place in the line of inheritance. It is not without significance that in the contemporary prophecy of Zechariah, the house of Nathan appears for the first time in the history of Judah as invested with a special preeminence (Zechariah 12:12). The difference in the number of the names can be explained in the same way as before.

The comparatively slight variation here is one that could easily have arisen during the process of transcription from an Aramaic document into Greek. The received reading, “Aram,” was probably a correction in order to bring the genealogy into agreement with St. Matthew’s.