29.
Added to this; there is another way peculiar to the Jews, in which a man might be the son of another of whom he was not born according to the flesh. For kinsmen used to marry the wives of their next of kin, who died without children, to raise up seed to him that was deceased. 1 So then he who was thus born was both his son of whom he was born, and his in whose line of succession he was born. All this has been said, lest any one, thinking it impossible for two fathers to be mentioned properly for one man, should imagine that either of the Evangelists who have narrated the generations of the Lord are to be, by an impious calumny, charged so to say with a lie; especially when we may see that we are warned against this by their very words. For Matthew, who is understood to make mention of that father of whom Joseph was born, enumerates the generations thus: "This one begat the other," so as to come to what he says at the end, "Jacob begat Joseph." But Luke--because he cannot properly be said to be begotten who is made a child either by adoption, or who is born in the succession of the deceased, of her who was his wife--did not say, "Heli begat Joseph," or "Joseph whom Heli begat," but "Who was the son of Heli," whether by adoption, or as being born of the next of kin in the succession of one deceased. 2
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Deut. xxv. 5; Matt. xxii. 24. ↩
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Of these two solutions, (1) that Joseph may have been the adopted son of Eli, or (2) the son of his wife who, as the next of kin, married Jacob after his decease, the latter is stated by Africanus (Eus. H. E. i. 7) to be traditional and derived from kinsmen of the Lord's. It may be the more likely, in that the name of the wife of Matthan and Malchi (Estha) is also handed down, through whom, though half-blood, Heli and Jacob became, at all events, near kinsmen. Else in the Jerus. Talm. (ap. Lightfoot ad loc.) St. Mary is called the daughter of Heli, and her genealogy might be counted as his, to whom, according to the above statement, she was nearly related. The name Heli, indeed, is no way connected (as some have thought) with Eliachim, i.q. Joachim; but this name of the father of the Blessed Virgin is said by St. Augustin to have been taken by the Manichees from apocryphal books (comp. Faust. xxiii. 9), so neither is it any hindrance. St. Augustin remarks (Quaest. Ev. ii. 5) that any one possible explanation is sufficient, and yet that it would be rash to say that there were only the two that he had named. He treats it then as "madness" to ground any charge against the evangelists thereon; inasmuch as it can be solved, faith is indifferent to the "how," since God has not explained it. ↩
