The Bible Study Podcast, episode 107. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues the study of the

gospel of Luke with the end of chapter 3.

Welcome to the Bible study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. As we get in here to Chapter 3 in Luke, I mentioned last week that this isn't necessarily my favorite section of Luke.

In fact, it's probably one of my least favorites. And that's the genealogy of Jesus.

For one thing, I've got to try and pronounce all of these names, and I guarantee I won't be doing it correctly.

But I will do it with confidence, which is how I recommend you read the Bible when you read

it in public.

But I should note that these verses have been very important at times to some groups of people.

I know that there are churches in the Philippines, for instance, that when the Wycliffe

Bible translators went to translate the Bible into their language,

they saved some of these genealogies, Matthew's genealogy, and Luke's till the end,

because they did all the important verses first. And when they got to those verses, the people said,

why didn't you do these first? Because this was a culture that placed great value on genealogies.

And they said, now we know what you're telling us is true.

Well, the culture of Jesus' time also placed importance on genealogies.

And so this is one of the reasons why these verses are in the Bible.

One thing we should say is that Matthew and Luke both present genealogies, Matthew tracing Jesus back to Abraham because he's writing for a Jewish audience, and Luke tracing Jesus back to Adam because he's writing again for a more universal audience.

And the interesting thing, the first interesting thing you notice when you go to compare the two

is Joseph's father is given as different people, and there's a different genealogy in the two

places. The most common understanding, the most common belief by commentators is that Luke's

genealogy is actually the genealogy of Mary. And it's quite possible, since Mary has a sister is listed in the Bible,

but there are no lists of brothers that Joseph has taken over his father-in-law's line

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