NOTES for Luk 3:23-38
Genealogy is a very ancient literary genre, and to today's reader, at first glance, it seems boring and strange. The perception of the Gospel genealogies is further complicated by the differences between the one that the Evangelist Luke provides in today's reading and the one we find in the Evangelist Matthew. Nevertheless, genealogy as a genre, and the Gospel genealogies in particular, carry a quite definite semantic load and occupy an important place in the system of the biblical narrative.
The main ideas expressed by the genealogies in Holy Scripture can be called continuity, unity, and historicity. The listing of ancestors and descendants directly reflects the genetic, as we would say now, connectedness of people, for example — the inheritance of the promises of the ancestors and their inherent standing before God. However, since in ancient literatures (and probably in ancient vocabulary) there was no abstract concept of genetic continuity, a wide variety of authors (not only in biblical narratives, but generally in ancient Near Eastern literatures) expressed this thought by providing genealogies. Furthermore, a genealogy expresses the participation of those included in it in a certain single nature, a single phenomenon. In modern language, we would say "all people are brothers, descendants of Adam." The ancient author expresses this thought by providing the genealogy of Adam's descendants. Finally, the life events of those mentioned in the biography are assumed to be included in a single stream of common history, where one phenomenon follows from another and inherits from it. The symbolic numbers of generations, as in the genealogy of the Gospel of Matthew, emphasize the historical rhythm and regularity of events. Thus, people's life events acquire their historical ground and context in a genealogy. This is especially important precisely in the biblical narrative, because history is its living fabric.
The genealogy of Christ provided by the Evangelist Luke, unlike the genealogy in Matthew, is completely subordinated to the main thing. Its key word is the last one. The Evangelist lists: "Jesus... was, as was supposed, the Son of Joseph... of Adam, of God." By deliberately concluding the long listing with an impossible juxtaposition, the evangelist vividly emphasizes the symbolic character of the entire genealogy. After all, Adam is God's creation, and not His son in the strict sense of the word. And therefore Jesus' belonging to the entire given series of generations becomes relative, entirely dependent on the fact of the Incarnation. Furthermore, the law of the levirate operated in Israel, according to which a relative of a man who died childless would marry his widow, and the firstborn of this marriage was considered the son of the one who died childless. The Evangelist Luke, unlike the Evangelist Matthew, provides the genealogy in accordance with this law, which also emphasizes its conditional character. But despite all this, the genealogy of Jesus unequivocally expresses the fullness and reality of His belonging to our race. The main thought that the evangelist wants to convey to the reader with this literary device is briefly this: Jesus is the Son of Man and the Son of God, Whose coming became the culmination of the entire sacred history.