The one, no doubt the more ancient of the two, considered Jesus as the child of Joseph and Mary, and the ingenuity of his biographers has not succeeded in obliterating the traces of this tradition (Mt. xiii. 55). Another and much later one, treated him as the offspring of Mary without the aid of a human father. Those who believed in the first and more authentic story had busied themselves with the discovery of a royal descent for their hero, in order that he might fulfill what they considered the conditions of the Messiahship. They had naturally traced his ancestry upwards from his father, not from his mother, according to the usual procedure. But the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written entirely on the hypothesis that he had no father but God; all necessity for showing that Joseph was of the house of David was therefore gone. Nevertheless the writers or the editors of these Gospels did not like to neglect entirely what seemed to them to strengthen their case, and, forgetful of the ridiculous jumble they were making, inserted an elaborate pedigree of Joseph along with the statement that Jesus was not his son. Let us now examine the genealogies in detail, placing them in columns parallel to one another. Luke begins a stage earlier than Matthew, making God his starting-point instead of Abraham. From Abraham to David the two authorities proceed together. Matthew, who has cut his genealogical tree into three sections of fourteen generations each, makes this his first division. After this the divergence begins:—