Jesus Christ of Nazareth
8th cousin 67 times removed
To claim Jesus as a family member sounds a bit trite, yet makes sense genealogically. For we can all without great effort establish our family relationship with Jesus (see the reason here) if we are capable of tracing our families back to any nobility and royalty. Here I use the genealogy of Luke 3:22 to list the ancestors of Jesus. It is the most correct since Luke has 43 generations to bridge the 970 years from king David up to Jesus. Matthew in
1:1-14 has only 27 generations which is obviously wrong since it would be "an absurdity to suppose that 27 following generations should all be old bachelors before they married" as already Thomas Paine noted in "Age of Reason." Otherwise the genealogies in the Old Testament seem impressively correct when compared with Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian chronology since it was written by many scholars. The genealogies are - as Matthew shows - less correct in the New Testament which was
written by individuals who had witnessed the life of Jesus, but probably only heard of his ancestors from hearsay, as Luke himself admits in 3:23. Luke's over all list is probably correct given the amazing historical and genealogical awareness of common Jews at the time, but he might have forgotten 3-4 generations between Simon the Just and Jesus since it is not as long as the proven historical list of king Herod's ancestors. Herod himself was an old man by the time Jesus was born year 5 B(efore) C(hrist). |
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