Who Was Jesus’ Biological Father?
Examining the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke
Was Joseph Jesus’ biological father or adoptive father? Joseph is a major figure in the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke. Along with Mary, he is depicted at Jesus’ birth in this 16th-century painting by Lorenzo Lotto. Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Was Joseph Jesus’ biological father? If not, who was Jesus’ biological father?
The annunciation stories in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke recount that Jesus was conceived without the participation of a human male. Ancient views on the biology of conception—based on Aristotelian theory—differed from our modern understanding of genetics and biology. For Jesus to have been considered fully human by our modern standards—and not a semi-divine or special being—he would have needed complete human DNA. While Mary would have supplied the X chromosome, who supplied the essential Y chromosome? God? Joseph?
Andrew Lincoln of the University of Gloucestershire tackles these questions in his article “How Babies Were Made in Jesus’ Time” in the November/December 2014 issue of BAR. Starting with the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke, he examines what early Christians thought about conception and explains how views about this subject have changed over time.
Who was Jesus’ biological father? As modern readers, we might wonder how the product of a virginal conception could truly be human—since the Y chromosome did not come from a human father. Andrew Lincoln explains that this issue would not have been troubling to an ancient audience or to the writers of the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke:
Their understanding of conception, shaped by a patriarchal culture, would have been some variation of the dominant Aristotelian theory. On this view, the male semen provides the formative principle for life. The female menstrual blood supplies the matter for the fetus, and the womb the medium for the semen’s nurture. The man’s seed transmits his logos (rational cause) and pneuma (vital heat/animating spirit), for which the woman’s body is the receptacle. In this way the male functions as the active, efficient cause of reproduction, and the female functions as the provider of the matter to which the male seed gives definition. In short, the bodily substance necessary for a human fetus comes from the mother, while the life force originates with the father.
Those who heard the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke would have considered Jesus to be fully human since his mother supplied all of his bodily substance. Lincoln clarifies: “In terms of ancient biology, even without a human father, Jesus would have been seen as fully human. His mother, Mary, provided his human substance, and in this case God, through the agency of the divine Spirit, supplied the animating principle instead of a human father.”
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According to the New Testament, was Joseph Jesus’ biological father or just his adoptive father?
The annunciation stories in Matthew and Luke claim that Jesus was conceived without a human father, but later in the Gospel of Luke, Joseph is listed as Jesus’ parent and father (Luke 2:27, 33, 48; 4:22). Indeed, through Joseph’s lineage, Jesus is shown to have descended from King David (Luke 3:23–38). Do these accounts contradict the annunciation stories?
The traditional way of reconciling these seemingly incongruous accounts is that Joseph was Jesus’ adoptive father.
In his article, Lincoln offers another way: He posits that knowing the genre of the Gospels helps make sense of this apparent contradiction. As a subset of ancient Greco-Roman biography, the Gospels can be compared to other Greco-Roman biographies, such as Plutarch’s biographies of Theseus, Romulus and Alexander the Great. In these examples, the central character is given two conception stories, one natural and the other supernatural.
Read “Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible” by Lawrence Mykytiuk from the January/February 2015 issue of BAR >>
Dual conception stories for the same figure was not uncommon in Greco-Roman biographies, and Lincoln suggests that this was a way of assigning significance and worth to those “who were perceived to have achieved greatness in their later lives.” In this genre, those who accomplished great things in their adult lives deserved an equally great—even supernatural—conception story.
Lincoln’s approach is certainly intriguing—especially when applied to the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke. To read Lincoln’s entire treatment of the matter and learn more about what early Christians thought about conception, read the full article “How Babies Were Made in Jesus’ Time” by Andrew Lincoln in the November/December 2014 issue of BAR.
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This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on November 3, 2014.
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According to the Talmud, Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier named Ben Pandira.
Jesus was not of the seed of David anyway.
Sorry, but none of this discussion explains the miracles or the resurrection except – God incarnate.
Ok for all the “educated beyond their intellects” idiots that inspired, wrote and then commented on this article. The answer is God the Father. Denial of this truth means God incarnate has not come for you and therefore Christianity is a complete lie. At which point “Biblical” archaeology is also a farce because the Bible is itself just a fantastical collection of useless stories, rules and fairy tales.
JOSEPH (Adoptive Father of Jesus)
Why did Joseph contemplate giving Mary a certificate of divorce when the two were only engaged?
According to Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph learned that Mary was pregnant while she “was promised in marriage to Joseph” but before they were united. Not knowing that Mary was pregnant “by holy spirit,” Joseph must have thought that she had been unfaithful to him, and thus he intended to divorce her.—Matthew 1:18-20.
Among the Jews, engaged couples were viewed as already married. The two, however, did not begin living together as husband and wife until the wedding formalities had been completed. Engagement was so binding that if—because of a change of heart on the part of the bridegroom or for some other compelling reason—the marriage did not take place, the young woman was not free to marry until she had obtained a divorce certificate. If an engaged woman’s husband died before the wedding, she was considered a widow. On the other hand, if she committed fornication during her engagement, she was considered an adulteress and was sentenced to death.—Deuteronomy 22:23, 24.
Joseph evidently pondered the consequences of Mary’s becoming a public spectacle. Though he felt obligated to bring the matter to the proper authorities, he wanted to protect her and avoid scandal. Thus, he decided to divorce her quietly. A single mother’s possession of a divorce certificate would, after all, indicate that she had already been married.
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200273159
SEED (Offspring) OF ABRAHAM
Some 2,000 years after Abel’s day, Jehovah gave the patriarch Abraham this prophetic promise: “I shall surely bless you and I shall surely multiply your seed like the stars of the heavens . . . And by means of your seed all nations of the earth will certainly bless themselves.” (Genesis 22:17, 18) Those words linked Abraham with the fulfillment of the first prophecy. They indicated that the Seed through whom Satan’s works would be brought to nothing would appear in Abraham’s lineage. (1 John 3:8) “Because of the promise of God [Abraham] did not waver in a lack of faith” and neither did other pre-Christian witnesses of Jehovah who “did not get the fulfillment of the promise.” (Romans 4:20, 21; Hebrews 11:39) Instead, they maintained faith in God’s prophetic word.
The apostle Paul identified God’s promised Seed when he wrote: “The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. It says, not: ‘And to seeds,’ as in the case of many such, but as in the case of one: ‘And to your seed,’ who is Christ.” (Galatians 3:16) The Seed through whom the nations were to bless themselves did not include all of Abraham’s offspring. Descendants of his son Ishmael and of his sons by Keturah were not used to bless mankind. The Seed of blessing came through his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob. (Genesis 21:12; 25:23, 31-34; 27:18-29, 37; 28:14) Jacob showed that “peoples” would be obedient to Shiloh of the tribe of Judah, but the Seed was later restricted to David’s lineage. (Genesis 49:10; 2 Samuel 7:12-16) First-century Jews expected one person to come as the Messiah, or Christ. (John 7:41, 42) And God’s prophecy of the Seed was fulfilled in his Son, Jesus Christ.
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200273113
Thanks Chris for pointing out the apparently not-so-obvious obvious fact: Jesus was a Jew. I think the trouble arises from the relatively immediate Graecizing of Him via literature. It would be very interesting to see Eastern (Syriac etc) literature accounts. And thanks Steven B for background info regarding Jewish customs. I do think your assumptions sometimes assume too much though. Scholars caution about relying too much on the Talmud for pre-Talmudic times.
The Talmud and the Greek scriptures are the best we have when trying to uncover Jesus’ first-century Galilean Jewish life though. So, we need to be detectives and use the (few) facts we have to judiciously come to as few assumptions as we can. Like Job, we need to finally realize we don’t know what we don’t know.
@ KING #21 – I would invite you to search YouTube for “Hebert Basser”, specifically his two lectures “Mistakes and Misconceptions” and “How Reliable Are The Talmudic Teachings About Jesus?” Rabbi Prof. Hebert W. Basser is an Orthodox Jew. Now that Prof. David Flusser is no longer with us, I submit that Rabbi Basser is the pre-eminent Jewish scholar on the historical man, Yeshua ben Yosef.
The point made by Chris is the most pertinent response to this article — namely, that by ignoring the Jewish law, environment and values that actually applied to Jesus’s life, Andrew Lincoln’s article despite all its learning regarding Greek and Roman values and law is almost entirely irrelevant. (I will come back to the “almost” caveat in a moment. It turns out to be important.) But Steven B.’s seemingly full, detailed and informative comment regarding Talmudic and other issues relating to marriage also misses the most important point of all, a glaring point that must strike anyone familiar with ancient Jewish law, which is evidenced already in the authoritative Scriptural accounts of lineage and inheritance that governed Judean life and which is specified clearly in Talmudic law too, which is that there is no adoption in Jewish law. (On this, see the articles on “Adoption” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica and in the on-line great classic Jewish encyclopaedia from the early 20th century, The Jewish Encyclopaedia.) There was guardianship, which could be almost everything that adoption was but without the lineage or inheritance rights, but there could be no adoption as such nor therefore assumption of born children’s lineage or inheritance. A simple instance is that if a Jewish family adopts (in secular terms) a child, it does not become by that even a Jewish child; the child must affirm Judaism as such, at the time of maturity, for him- or her-self: that makes the adoptive child a “Jew.” The ancestry and lineage of the Jewish parents does not become the ancestry of the child. And its birth parents remain (in Jewish law) its natural parents, who must be honored as much as possible.
That means that if Mary had a child by anyone other than Joseph, that child did not share Joseph’s Davidic lineage (assuming that he had one). In that case, providing the two very different Davidic ancestral genealogies of Joseph in Luke 3:23-38 and Matt. 1:1-17 cannot apply to Jesus in Jewish law, and invalidates right from the start any claim that Jesus was of the line of David and therefore could be the Davidic messiah prophecised by the Prophets of Israel. Put briefly, if Jesus was God the Son, he could not be the Messiah. If he was the Messiah, he could not be God the Son. So the Gospel account is called into doubt right at the start. Its associated claims of the Virgin Birth etc. could not be true. Jewish law provides no way out of this self-refutation, the same Jewish law that Jesus is quoted in Matt. 23:2 as saying is authoritative and must be followed, even to every jot and tittle (Matt: 5:17-19, etc.).
A chief reason why there is no adoption in Jewish law is given in the Ten Commandments themselves (cited by Jesus himself as fundamental to everything in Jewish piety and law, Matt. 19:16-21): Honor your father and mother. Why is that on the first tablet of the two tablets, culminating the commands to know that God is and should be acknowledged as such? Because, the Torah tells us, through procreation humans attain to the divine image of being male and female together and creating life: it therefore is a holy thing of the highest sanctity (Gen. 1:27-28); as Steven B. pointed out it is taught by the Rabbinic Sages that God is present in every procreative act that creates a new human being. God seals and witnesses every creation of a new human person. This being so, it cannot be set aside by any merely human law or institution.
Now I come back to the fact that the Gospel account shows no awareness of these basic Jewish laws and values that governed Judean society and piety and were taken for granted by Jews. As Andrew Lincoln demonstrates, instead the account assumes Graeco-Roman laws of adoption and inheritance — i.e., this demonstrates yet again that there was a sweeping and extensive later gentile Christian editing of the Gospels which simply did not know much of Judaism.
There are two problems with this article that’s been a problem foe Western cultures for centuries.
The first problem is a mistranslation of the meaning of one single simple word: virgin. In the Middle East, both in ancient times and now, a virgin is simply an unmarried female of marriageable age. The term “virgin” didn’t gain any sexual aspect until around the 1100-1300s [C.E.] when Christian monks and the priesthood who were translating Biblical Texts had a rather jarring realization: they took a vow of celibacy that was really a mistake. Their conclusion basically comes down to that if they [the monks] aren’t getting any, then neither did Mary. This also allowed the monks/priests to share something else with Mary, now both are considered virgins. Unfortunately, it missed the small detail that marriages in Biblical times were still very much arranged, that marriages based on two people who actually love each other and on their own want to marry each other was close enough to non-existent as makes no odds.
When you hear about the fanatical Muslims who’re performing acts of terrorism for the reward of 70 virgins, they’re not looking for 70 women who’ve never had sex, they’re actually aiming for 70 potential and viable wives. (Polygamy was very common among during Biblical times, women were effectively property, and having more wives was a direct reflection of wealth.)
The second problem is another translation glitch is that modern Christians in Western societies end up taking a very Greek view of Jesus rather than a Jewish one. The reason the story of Jesus caught on with the Greeks was they already had a similar story in their history (a birth involving a human woman and a deity), that of Hercules. Unfortunately, this misses something entirely that’s rather important. ALL religious Jewish males consider themselves to be sons of God and ALL religious females consider themselves daughters of God. In this respect, God has a similar aspect to Odin as both are effectively considered all-fathers. When Jesus spoke to the masses and referred to himself as “son of God,” he was telling his Jewish audience that he was in fact one of them.
Until those two very important aspects are taken properly into account, along with Talmudic law, etc, the beginings of Jesus’ story aren’t going to make proper sense.
Boy, any mention of Jesus really brings out the kooks. Bring it on! Each in their own way, every tongue will confess….