Some people may be aware of the fact that the genealogies in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are not identical to each other. If you look closer, they are not even in harmony with each other. Matthew works forward and Luke works backward. When you align the genealogies, you’ll see that Matthew starts with Abraham, and where that genealogy meets with Abraham in Luke’s Gospel, they are harmonious through 13 generations. At that point, Luke’s Gospel follows David’s son Nathan, while Matthew’s Gospel follows Solomon in the line of kings. They split for 13 generations, where they come together with Shealtiel and Zerubbabel, around the time of the exile. Then they diverge again until meeting again with Joseph.

A couple of things to point out:

1. This doesn’t look like a simple error. It would be one thing if in the long list of names there were a couple that were off. That is not the case here. These two lists follow almost entirely different genealogies from the time of David, and they have completely different numbers of generations.
2. Biblical genealogies leave out generations—sometimes numerous generations. For example, the amount of time spoken of between Obed and David is a few hundred years. There was pretty certainly more than three generations in that time. This is a variable that can be very difficult to account for.
3. There are three main theories for why these diversions exist.

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