(February 9, 2016 at 5:05 pm)athrock Wrote:(February 9, 2016 at 4:54 pm)Irrational Wrote: Enlighten me.
Because the Jews of antiquity were not as concerned with verbatim accuracy in the details of these genealogies. Consequently, it was not important to them to catalog every single generation.
In the case of Matthew, he makes a clear point of delineating the symmetry of the generations, and he even says this here:
Matthew 1:17
So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.
14 and 14 and 14. That's 42 overall. Some folks get all into the numerology of the OT prophets, but that's not the point which is that no one really believes that these were the exact numbers of generations separating these major figures in Jesus' family tree.
For the Jew, one person was a descendant of another person even if there were two or three generations in between instead of just one as we moderns tend to require.
Yes, Matthew did get into that numerology with his genealogy, true, but there's no evidence to suggest that he intentionally skipped generations to do so. So once again, this is all based on speculation.
