Lives of Scripture

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The Two Genealogies of Jesus

Matthew 1:1-16 and Luke 3:23-38 both trace Jesus' descent back through David and Abraham, but by different routes. This chart lays both out as one joined family tree: where they run through the same names, where each has its own line, and the two places their lists rejoin.

Both genealogies list Joseph, Mary's husband, as their final named generation (Matthew 1:16; Luke 3:23) — but Matthew names Joseph's father as Jacob, while Luke names him as Eli ("as was supposed," Luke 3:23). Scripture never states directly how the two fit together; two harmonizations are traditionally offered — that Jacob and Eli were half-brothers joined by a levirate marriage (so Joseph was Jacob's son by birth and Eli's by law), or that Luke traces Mary's own descent through her father Eli, with Joseph named because a genealogy was reckoned through the husband. Both are traditional harmonizations, not something the text states outright, so neither is asserted here as fact. Two smaller textual points: some Luke manuscripts read a name ("Admin") between Amminadab and Ram in Luke 3:33 that most manuscripts, and this chart, don't include; and Luke 3:36 names a second "Cainan" between Arpachshad and Shelah that has no counterpart in Genesis 10–11's Hebrew text — see the note in Luke's full list below. This dataset does not yet have a dedicated profile page for Jesus himself (the person_id "jesus" belongs to a different New Testament figure, "Jesus who is called Justus," Colossians 4:11), so the final "Jesus" box below is not a link.