5.

Furthermore, as to those critics who find a difficulty in the circumstance that Matthew enumerates one series of ancestors, beginning with David and travelling downwards to Joseph, ¹ while Luke specifies a different succession, tracing it from Joseph upwards as far as to David, ² they might easily perceive that Joseph may have had two fathers,--namely, one by whom he was begotten, and a second by whom he may have been adopted. ³ For it was an ancient custom also among that people to adopt children with the view of making sons for themselves of those whom they had not begotten. For, leaving out of sight the fact that Pharaoh's daughter ⁴ adopted Moses (as she was a foreigner), Jacob himself adopted his own grandsons, the sons of Joseph, in these very intelligible terms: "Now, therefore, thy two sons which were born unto thee before I came unto thee, are mine: Ephraim and Manasseh shall be mine, as Reuben and Simeon: and thy issue which thou begettest after them shall be thine." ⁵ Whence also it came to pass that there were twelve tribes of Israel, although the tribe of Levi was omitted, which did service in the temple; for along with that one the whole number was thirteen, the sons of Jacob themselves being twelve. Thus, too, we can understand how Luke, in the genealogy contained in his Gospel, has named a father for Joseph, not in the person of the father by whom he was begotten, but in that of the father by whom he was adopted, tracing the list of the progenitors upwards until David is reached. For, seeing that there is a necessity, as both evangelists give a true narrative,--to wit, both Matthew and Luke,--that one of them should hold by the line of the father who begat Joseph, and the other by the line of the father who adopted him, whom should we suppose more likely to have preserved the lineage of the adopting father, than that evangelist who has declined to speak of Joseph as begotten by the person whose son he has nevertheless reported him to be? For it is more appropriate that one should have been called the son of the man by whom he was adopted, than that he should be said to have been begotten by the man of whose flesh he was not descended. Now when Matthew, accordingly, used the phrases, "Abraham begat Isaac," "Isaac begat Jacob," and so on, keeping steadily by the term "begat," until he said at the close, "and Jacob begat Joseph," he gave us to know with sufficient clearness, that he had traced out the order ⁶ of ancestors on to that father by whom Joseph was not adopted, but begotten.