Early in his Gospel, St Matthew traces the descent of Joseph, our Lord’s adoptive father, from Abraham, while St Luke in his Gospel traces it back through Abraham to Adam.  Their two genealogical lists are not in complete accord with each other, making them a subject of continual debate among theologians, but including them in the narrative was clearly important to both evangelists. 

The discordance between the two lists need hardly surprise us.  Consider our own situation.  If, for this purpose, we take one generation (meaning a step in the successive cohorts of grandparents, parents and children) as equivalent to twenty-five years, then a person born in 2000 would have sixteen great-great-grandparents born around 1900.  The latter, in turn would have 256 predecessors born around 1800.  If we go back as far as 1500 that number increases to more than one million, giving our Zoomer that number of distinct bloodlines stretching through five centuries. 

What we envisage here is a web of descent where each person is the child of two persons who are completely unrelated to each other.  In fact, there are a number of reasons why this is unlikely to be the case, the most obvious being that many persons marry their first or second cousins or other close relatives.  This greatly reduces the number of bloodlines, and also allows us to trace back to our forebears by more than one line, which is what the Gospel writers do. 

The picture is further complicated by children born of irregular unions.  The seventeenth-century King Charles II of England acknowledged paternity of at least twelve of the children of his mistresses, and there may, of course, have been others (of his mistresses’ maids, for example) whom he did not acknowledge.  Those children then had children who disappeared into the woodwork.  As a person born in England who has come out of that woodwork, I believe I have a bloodline going back to Charles II and so I claim royal descent. 

Alongside the question of well-defined bloodlines is that of ethnicity.  Peoples of a common culture often claim impeccably-pure genetic origins, with everyone being of the same stock.  This, too, is highly unlikely to be the case, unless those people have lived in isolated places like the Amazon Forest or the Papua New Guinea Highlands.  In most communities, some people emigrate while others immigrate.  Britain, for example, sent people to far-off places like Canada and Australia while receiving a constant stream of people from continental Europe and elsewhere. 

Taken together, these factors make a story of well-defined and ethnically-pure bloodlines something of a myth.  Despite this, many people still value and claim immaculate bloodlines.  In our contemporary Canadian society, such claims with reference to Indigenous people have become a contentious issue, and given our attempt to achieve reconciliation between descendants of the colonialists and the colonialised, it is not difficult to see why. 

Here again though, the matter is complex.  While the French-speaking Métis people are recognised as a distinct people, they are descendants of early immigrant French men who married Cree women.  More generally, it is reasonable to conjecture that all ‘pure laine’ Québecois have Indigenous women among their forebears.  My own Québecoise daughter-in-law, for example, has a known Algonquin great-grandmother, so three of my grandchildren can claim Indigenous bloodlines.

We find this preoccupation with immaculate bloodlines in the Scriptures, as our reference to St Matthew and St Luke has indicated.  Similar Scriptural references are used to validate current claims to the land of Canaan, now known as Palestine, but again the reality of the situation calls the claims into question.  Apart from the time scale involved (more than three thousand years as against the five hundred years of our discussion so far), this land connects the ancient lands of Egypt and Mesopotamia and was for centuries the route taken by traders and invading armies.  It seems unlikely that they passed through without leaving any progeny behind.  Furthermore, when Hebrews from Canaan were exiled to Babylon they intermarried with the daughters of their abductors and, returning with them to Canaan, corrupted the bloodlines, as the Book of Ezra laments.

 Who, then, are the children of Abraham?  According to St Paul, “those who believe are the descendants of Abraham”.  He is referring here to descent by faith but, as I have attempted to show, he could almost equally well have been referring to biological descent.  If we acknowledge the reality of indiscriminate interbreeding, then we are all related to one another.

Why, then, did St Matthew and St Luke claim for Jesus what I have called ‘immaculate bloodlines’?  They were, I believe, responding to the circumstances of their time.  As for our time, however, circumstances differ.  Happily for us, and in accordance with Gospel teaching, immaculate bloodlines are of no account.

Our faith in Jesus springs from our response to his teachings and his actions.  Once having accepted those teachings, we find it helpful to explore the history of the culture in which he lived and taught as recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures but, in accepting him as Lord, who his ancestors were is irrelevant.  As far as God’s promises are concerned, we are all Children of Abraham.