Does the way Joseph’s name is used in the genealogy in Luke 3:23–38 indicate that this is actually Mary’s genealogy?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1990.

Your letter raises some very interesting points about our Lord's genealogy.

The author of the article in 'The Vineyard', Mr Arnold Fruchtenbaum, may well be correct in what he says about the Jewish custom of not mentioning the name of a woman in genealogies; though on some occasions Jews were intensely interested in the genealogy of a man's mother. This was particularly so in the case of the high priest. Great care was taken to examine his mother's descent over three or four generations in order to make sure that she was not disqualified under the terms set out for the lineage of a high priest in the Old Testament.

But it is particularly the next part of his observations that I find difficult. He claims that in Luke's genealogy the absence of the definite article in front of Joseph's name—while all the other names in the list have the definite article—indicates that the genealogy was not really Joseph's, but his wife Mary's.

To start with, he is commenting on the genealogy in the Greek of the New Testament. In Hebrew, as far as I understand it, you would not have the definite article in front of any of the names in a genealogy. So his claim—that the use, or the non-use, of the definite article in the genealogy indicates that the genealogy was not really Joseph's but his wife Mary's—could only apply to the Greek and not the Hebrew. Is it true that the Rabbis would have founded such an important point upon Greek usage, when the same usage was not available in Hebrew?

Secondly, Mr Fruchtenbaum's observations seem to me to be based on a misunderstanding of the Greek. It is true that Greek sometimes uses the definite article in front of a personal name, but it does not always do so. The tendency is that, when a personal name is used for the first time in any context, it does not have the definite article; but on the second occasion and thereafter, it does. The reason for that is that the definite article with a personal name still had in Classical Greek the force of a deictic pronoun.

To give an example: the first time Socrates was mentioned in a context, you would simply say 'Socrates'; but the second time and thereafter you would say 'the Socrates', meaning the aforesaid Socrates.

Of course, the question of the use or non-use of the definite article is more complicated than that. But I will not worry you with all the details, because in Luke's genealogy the definite article that stands each time before every name, except that of Joseph, does not mean what Mr Fruchtenbaum appears to think it means.

The definite article before the name Heli, for instance, does not belong to that name, Heli, but is standing in apposition to the previous name, Joseph. The sequence of meaning in the Greek is 'Jesus ... the son ... of Joseph, the of Heli'. The phrase 'the of Heli' sounds very odd to us. But in Greek it was common practice to identify a man as So-and-so, the son of So-and-so, e.g., George, the son of Alexander. Such phrases were, therefore, exceedingly common in Greek and, as a result, by straightforward idiom, Greeks tended to omit the word 'son' in such phrases and say simply 'George the of Alexander'.

And so it is throughout Luke's genealogy that the article invariably belongs to the preceding and not the following noun: Joseph the of Heli, the of Matthat, and so forth; that is, the (son) of Heli. That in turn means, of course, that all the other names in the list are exactly like the first name, Joseph: they do not have the definite article themselves. At least this is how a Greek would read Luke's list. Jewish scholars, for all I know, may have interpreted the Greek idiom in a non-Greek way in order to make a point; but it remains that no Greek reader left to himself would have taken that point out of the Greek.

I hope these observations, then, are of some use to you.

Yours very sincerely,