What is in question: Luke names Joseph in Jesus' genealogy, but Matthew gives Joseph a different father, so readers ask whether Luke is tracing Joseph's line or Mary's line.

One reading

Luke traces Mary's line

minoritygraph path

Claim: Luke is read as giving Mary's ancestry, with Joseph connected to Heli by marriage rather than by birth.

Basis: Luke 3:23 qualifies Jesus as Joseph's son by saying "as was supposed" and then names Heli; Matthew 1:16 names Jacob as Joseph's father and says Jesus was born from Mary.

Who holds it: not attributed to a named source in this dataset

Verses:

Another reading

Luke traces Joseph's line

majority

Claim: Luke is read as tracing Joseph's ancestry; the difference from Matthew is then explained by legal, adoptive, or levirate marriage, a family-duty marriage in which a close male relative raises offspring for a deceased man.

Basis: Luke 3:23 names Joseph in the genealogy, while Matthew 1:16 names Jacob as Joseph's father, creating the need to explain why two fathers are named.

Who holds it: Julius Africanus, Letter to Aristides, as preserved by Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 1.7, for a levirate explanation

Verses:

Scholarly weight: The Joseph-line reading is more widely held in academic commentary. The Mary-line reading is a harmonizing minority view, even though it is the path this graph uses for navigation.

Graph note: For navigation only, the graph connects Heli to Mary and treats Joseph as Jesus' legal father; that encoding is not presented as the scholarly majority.

Heli -> Mary Luke's genealogy taken as Mary's line: 'son of Heli' read as son-in-law, Heli being Mary's father; Joseph's own descent is given by Matthew (Jacob). Literal alternative — Heli as Joseph's father — noted but not encoded as canonical.