Not Your Normal Birth Certificate

Word of the Week

December 6, 2025

Not Your Normal Birth Certificate

 

Jacob was the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, by whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah

 Matthew 1:16 NASB

 

We all have a birth certificate stashed somewhere  with other important documents.  Maybe in a safe deposit box or a special safe.  We use it to prove our legal right to citizenship, to get a passport or a Social Security card.

In the first century, people didn’t have our kind of birth certificates, but they kept careful records of their family tree.  They could trace your ancestry back through your parents to link you with earlier ancestors.

It’s no surprise then, that we have a genealogy for Jesus.  Two, in fact!

Linked inextricably to the Christmas story are the twin documents that trace his lineage far back into history.  The two versions are not contradictory; they each serve a different purpose.  But they also make it clear that Christ’s birth was unlike any other on record.

A closer look at the Greek form of these genealogies makes it clear that his birth was a miracle.  We call it the Virgin Birth because Mary became pregnant without any human involvement.

We can take literally the verse that appears on so many Christmas cards:  “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son” (Matthew 1:23).  For the first time in history, a baby began to develop in the womb of a woman who had never had sexual relations with a man.

The Greek of this verse uses the word parthenos,  which unmistakably refers to a woman with no sexual experience.  See the article on this at Parthenos: the virgin mary had a baby boy for the facts behind this claim.

People in the first century understood “the facts of life” as clearly as we do.  They knew that this was supposed to be impossible.

But Scripture clearly makes this outlandish claim.

You can see it reflected in the precise Greek wording of each of His genealogies in the New Testment.

Matthew’s Family Tree

The Gospel of Matthew portrays Jesus as the promised King of the Jews, and Matthew’s rendering of His genealogy traces his ancestry back to David the king and then back to Abraham, the founding father of the Jewish nation (Matthew 1:2-16).

When you start reading the list, you will immediately notice that it follows a very structured pattern:

Abrahm was the father of Isaac,

Isaac the father of Jacob,

Jacob the father of Judah . . .

Judah the father of Perez,

And so on.

The same pattern holds firm all the way through the record with a few additions,, but no variation.

Until you reach the end.

If you followed the pattern of the rest of the genealogy, you would expect it to end with:

Joseph the father of Jesus.

But that’s not what it says.  Instead, it reads:

Joseph the husband of Mary, by whom Jesus was born (Matthew 1:16).

It doesn’t describe Joseph as the father of Jesus.  Instead, his role was strictly limited to being Mary’s husband.

The Greek makes it even clearer in the next phrase.

“. . . by WHOM Jesus was born”

In English, you might wonder if the word “whom” referred back to Joseph or to Mary. Either is possible.  However, in Greek every pronoun like “whom” comes with an ending that labels it as either masculine, feminine or neuter.

And in this verse, the “whom” has a feminine spelling.  It pinpoints Mary as the one who gave birth to Jesus, eliminating Joseph from the process.

But how about the other genealogy of Jesus?

Luke’s Family Tree

The Gospel of Luke includes a parallel genealogy for Jesus.  Some segments are identical to the one in Matthew, while there are some differences.

Why?

Luke takes the record past Abraham, going all the way back to Adam.  I believe that is because he was presenting Jesus as the perfect human, not just the promised Jewish king.

In addition, the line of names descended from David is different.  I believe that is because Luke gives Mary’s side of the lineage rather than Joseph’s line.  Both young people were descended from alternate branches of David’s descendants.

Now how about Luke’s handling of the virgin birth?

Luke’s rendering of the genealogy follows a strict pattern, just as Matthew did.  It starts with Jesus and works backward to Adam, so you find entries like “Judah, the son of Jacob, the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham” (Luke 3:34).

The crucial point comes at the beginning.

When He began His ministry, Jesus Himself was about thirty years of age, being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph (Luke 3:23).

Notice the added phrase:  “as was supposed.”  This comes from the Greek word nomizō [nah-MIDZ-oh], which describes the customary opinion, the idea that people assumed was true.

You get a good sample of the meaning just one chapter earlier.  Jesus and his parents had spent Passover in Jerusalem and it was time to head back home.  Luke 2:44 says that Mary and Joseph traveled the first day and “supposed” that He was with some friends in the caravan.  They found out that their supposition was wrong, so they had to return to Jerusalem the next day to look for him.

In the same way, Luke’s genealogy tells us that people commonly believed that Joseph was the father of Jesus.  However, public opinion was wrong.  Joseph was the legal father, but not the physical father.

The record, you see is consistent.  Even His “birth certificate testifies that the birth of Jesus was truly miraculous.  He was conceived by the act of God, not the act of any human.  And that’s only the beginning of His miraculous story!

 

Study Hint:

Greek grammar works differently from English when it comes to gender. In English, we have some pronouns that indicate male, female or non-person (he/she/it).  But that’s about it.

In Greek, every noun comes with a gender label attached: masculine, feminine or neuter.  To our way of thinking, they sometimes make illogical choices: love and wilderness are both feminine, child is neuter, and stars are masculine.  In a verse like this, however, you can count on the usual distinction between a man and a woman.  The gender label of the pronoun won’t lead you astray.

 

Coming Up

For the next two weeks, we will stroll through the Christmas story as told in the Gospel of Matthew, noticing a few places where the Greek illuminates the narrative.

©Ezra Project 2025