Originally Posted by Infidel

Hi Baz, welcome to the discussion.

I disagree with the theory that you've put forward to explain away the inconsistency.

Dr. Henry M. Morris, in his "The Defender's Study Bible" purports that the neither of the authors of Matthew or Luke "could unknowingly incorporate such a flagrant apparent mistake as the wrong genealogy in his record." In other words, 'they couldn't be wrong, so oe of them must have been talking about Mary.' This strikes me as a typical apologist attempt to reconcile the errors in the bible. Many other inconsistencies are readily apparent when the "gospels" are compared. This is just another one.

Why didn't one of them refer to Mary explicitly? This was no ordinary woman, this was allegedly the mother of Jesus. If the words for son and son-in-law were interchangeable, wouldn't it make total sense to clearly describe one genealogy as belonging to Mary and the other to Joseph, especially when the two are in different books written by different authors at different times? If both were described in the same book, then maybe the explanation would be more feasible.

How do you get on this "special list" of individuals and bloodlines that the Christian god apparently has?