29. Added to this; there is another way peculiar to the Jews, in which a man might be
the son of another of whom he was not born according to the flesh. For kinsmen used to
marry the wives of their next of kin, who died without children, to raise up seed to him that
was deceased.1787 So then he who was thus born was both his son of whom he was born,
and his in whose line of succession he was born. All this has been said, lest any one, thinking
it impossible for two fathers to be mentioned properly for one man, should imagine that
either of the Evangelists who have narrated the generations of the Lord are to be, by an im-
pious calumny, charged so to say with a lie; especially when we may see that we are warned
against this by their very words. For Matthew, who is understood to make mention of that
father of whom Joseph was born, enumerates the generations thus: “This one begat the
other,” so as to come to what he says at the end, “Jacob begat Joseph.” But Luke—because
he cannot properly be said to be begotten who is made a child either by adoption, or who
is born in the succession of the deceased, of her who was his wife—did not say, “Heli begat
Joseph,” or “Joseph whom Heli begat,” but “Who was the son of Heli,” whether by adoption,
or as being born of the next of kin in the succession of one deceased.1788
30. Enough has now been said to show that the question, why the generations are
reckoned through Joseph and not through Mary, ought not to perplex us; for as she was a
mother without carnal desire, so was he a father without any carnal intercourse. Let then
the generations ascend and descend through him. And let us not exclude him from being
a father, because he had none of this carnal desire. Let his greater purity only confirm rather
his relationship of father, lest the holy Mary herself reproach us. For she would not put her
own name before her husband; but said, “Thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing.”1789
Let not then these perverse murmurers do that which the chaste spouse of Joseph did not.
1787 Deut. xxv. 5; Matt. xxii. 24.
1788 Of these two solutions, (1) that Joseph may have been the adopted son of Eli, or (2) the son of his wife
who, as the next of kin, married Jacob after his decease, the latter is stated by Africanus (Eus. H. E. i. 7) to be
traditional and derived from kinsmen of the Lord’s. It may be the more likely, in that the name of the wife of
Matthan and Malchi (Estha) is also handed down, through whom, though half-blood, Heli and Jacob became,
at all events, near kinsmen. Else in the Jerus. Talm. (ap. Lightfoot ad loc.) St. Mary is called the daughter of Heli,
and her genealogy might be counted as his, to whom, according to the above statement, she was nearly related.
The name Heli, indeed, is no way connected (as some have thought) with Eliachim, i.q. Joachim; but this name
of the father of the Blessed Virgin is said by St. Augustin to have been taken by the Manichees from apocryphal
books (comp. Faust. xxiii. 9), so neither is it any hindrance. St. Augustin remarks (Quæst. Ev. ii. 5) that any one
possible explanation is sufficient, and yet that it would be rash to say that there were only the two that he had
named. He treats it then as “madness” to ground any charge against the evangelists thereon; inasmuch as it can
be solved, faith is indifferent to the “how,” since God has not explained it.
1789 Luke ii. 48.
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Of the agreement of the evangelists Matthew and Luke in the generations…