Matthew 1:16 is the sixteenth verse of Matthew 1

Matthew 1

Matthew 1 is the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. It contains two distinct sections. The first lists the genealogy of Jesus's legal father Joseph from Abraham...

 of the Gospel of Matthew

Gospel of Matthew

The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...

 in the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

. The verse is the final part of the section that traces the genealogy

Genealogy

Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members...

 of Joseph

Saint Joseph

Saint Joseph is a figure in the Gospels, the husband of the Virgin Mary and the earthly father of Jesus Christ ....

, the father of Jesus

Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

 down from Abraham

Abraham

Abraham , whose birth name was Abram, is the eponym of the Abrahamic religions, among which are Judaism, Christianity and Islam...

.
See also: Genealogy of Jesus

Genealogy of Jesus

The genealogy of Jesus is described in two passages of the Gospels: Luke 3:23–38 and Matthew 1:1–17.* Matthew's genealogy commences with Abraham and then from King David's son Solomon follows the legal line of the kings through Jeconiah, the king whose descendants were cursed, to Joseph, legal...

In the King James Version of the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 the text reads:

And Jacob begat Joseph

the husband of Mary, of

whom was born Jesus,

who is called Christ.

The World English Bible

World English Bible

The World English Bible is a public domain translation of the Bible that is currently in draft form. Work on the World English Bible began in 1997 and was known as the American Standard Version 1997...

 translates the passage as:

Jacob became the father of

Joseph, the husband of Mary,

from whom was born Jesus,

who is called Christ.

For a collection of other versions see BibRef Matthew 1:16

This section begins with Jacob, Joseph's father, a figure about which nothing else is known. This also conflicts with Luke 3:23 that states that Heli

Heli (Bible)

Heli is a Biblical individual mentioned in Luke 3:23 whom many Protestant scholars consider is the father of Mary, mother of Jesus.The Lukan genealogy mentions Joseph, not Mary, but does not have the word "son of" in the Greek text, leading to the suggestion that "son-in-law" of Heli is...

 is Joseph's father. There have been a number of explanations to explain this discrepancy, that Heli is actually Joseph's father in law, that Jacob is Joseph's birth father but after a Levirate marriage

Levirate marriage

Levirate marriage is a type of marriage in which the brother of a deceased man is obligated to marry his brother's widow, and the widow is obligated to marry her deceased husband's brother....

 Heli became his legal father. These suggestions are not impossible, but there is no evidence for any of them and they are generally only believed by those committed to Biblical inerrancy

Biblical inerrancy

Biblical inerrancy is the doctrinal position that the Bible is accurate and totally free of error, that "Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact." Some equate inerrancy with infallibility; others do not.Conservative Christians generally believe that...

.

The father of the Old Testament's Joseph is also named Jacob, and Davies and Allison note that this could mean that the author of Matthew is trying to link Joseph with his OT namesake. There are several other links in the text, both Joseph's are spoken to in dreams, both travel to Egypt, and both have similarly righteous personalities.

Matthew breaks with the pattern that has held throughout the genealogy, Joseph did not beget Jesus, but was simply the husband of the woman who did, implying the Virgin Birth

Virgin Birth

The virgin birth of Jesus is a tenet of Christianity and Islam which holds that Mary miraculously conceived Jesus while remaining a virgin. The term "virgin birth" is commonly used, rather than "virgin conception", due to the tradition that Joseph "knew her not till she brought forth her firstborn...

. In the original Greek, the word translated as whom is unambiguously feminine. The shift to the passive voice

Passive voice

Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...

 also symbolizes the Virgin Birth.

Brown

Raymond E. Brown

The Reverend Raymond Edward Brown, S.S. , was an American Roman Catholic priest, a member of the Sulpician Fathers and a major Biblical scholar of his era...

 notes that this verse has attracted considerable scholarly attention because the ancient sources show several different versions of it. Brown translates the Codex Koridethi

Codex Koridethi

The Codex Koridethi, also named Codex Coridethianus, designated by Θ, 038, or Theta , ε 050 , is a 9th century manuscript of the four Gospels. It is written in Greek with uncial script in two columns per page, in 25 lines per page...

 as:

Jacob was the father of Joseph,

to whom the betrothed virgin

Mary bore Jesus, called the Christ

The Old Syriac Sinacticus has

Jacob was the father of Joseph,

to whom the virgin Mary was

betrothed, was the father of Jesus

Some scholars see these versions as evidence against the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, especially the OSS version that states that Joseph was Jesus' father. However, both alternate versions actually add the word virgin. Another theory is that the original version of Matthew simply continued the earlier pattern and had "and Joseph was the father of Jesus," without necessarily meaning biological parentage. However the ease of misinterpretation led later transcribers to try to make the verse more clear, with each coming up with their own version.

Brown himself feels that the alternate versions have nothing to do with the Virgin Birth. Rather he argues that an important issue at the time these later copies were made was that of the perpetual virginity of Mary

Perpetual virginity of Mary

The doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, expresses the Virgin Mary's "real and perpetual virginity even in the act of giving birth to Jesus the Son of God made Man"...

and that both the Koridethi and OSS versions were attempts to do away with the word husband.

Another issue raised by this verse is that if Joseph is no more than the husband of Jesus' mother then why did Matthew devote the last fourteen verses relating his genealogy? While Matthew makes clear that although Joseph was not Jesus' biological father, he was his legal father, and at the time legal kinship was generally considered more important than biological descent. Thus Jesus could properly be a member of the House of David despite only being an adopted son.