‘The names of the families in Israel were reckoned either by nature or by law; by nature, when there was genuine offspring to succeed; by law, when another man fathered a child in the name of a brother who had died childless. For as no clear hope of being raised from the dead had yet been given. they portrayed the promise Of the future with a mortal 'raising up', in order that the name of the deceased might be preserved for  all time. These genealogies therefore comprise some who succeeded their actual fathers, and some who were the children of one father but were registered as children of another. Thus the memory of both was preserved — of the real and nominal fathers. Thus neither of the gospels is in error, since they take account of both nature and law. For the two families, descended from Solomon and Nathan respectively, were so interlocked by the remarriage of childless widows and the 'raising up of offspring, that the same persons could rightly be regarded at different times as the children of different parents — sometimes the reputed fathers, sometimes the real. Thus both accounts are perfectly true bringing the line down to Joseph in a manner complex, perhaps, but certainly accurate.
 

What I am trying to say will become clear if I explain the interrelation Joseph's father. If we follow Luke and reckon from David's son Nathan the corresponding third from the end is Melchi. Joseph being the son of Heli, Meclchi's son, Joseph then being the subject of our study, I have to explain how each appears in the records as his father, Jacob, tracing his descent from Solomon and Heli from Nathan. Before that I must explain how those two, Jacob and Heli, were brothers, and before that how their fathers, Matthan and Melchi, members of different families, are stated to have been Joseph's grandfathers. Well now, Matthan and Melchi, successive husbands of the same wife, fathered half-brothers, for the law allows a woman who has been either divorced or widowed to marry again. The wife in question, whose name is given as Estha, first married Matthan the descendant of Solomon, and bore him Jacob; then on the death of Matthan the widow married Melchi, whose line went back to Nathan and who belonged to the same tribe, though not to the same family, and by him had a son Heli. Thus though the families were different, we shall find that Jacob and Heli had the same mother. When Heli died childless, his brother Jacob took his wife and by her became father of Joseph in the third generation. According to nature Joseph was his son — and according to reason, so that scripture says. 'Jacob begot Joseph'; but according to law he was Heli's son; for Jacob as a good brother 'raised up' offspring to him. It follows that the genealogy in which he finds a place cannot be invalidated, though Matthew the evangelist in his account says, 'Jacob begot Joseph' whereas Luke says, 'Who was, as people imagined' — note this comment — 'the son of Joseph, the son of Heli the son of Melchi'. It was impossible to express legal descent more explicitly, and never once from beginning to end did he use the word 'begot' with reference to this type of fatherhood, as he traced the line in the reverse direction, to 'Adam, the son of God'.