(3) The verb ἐγέννησεν is used throughout of legal, not physical, descent.(80) This inference is drawn from the artificial character of the Genealogy. Its omissions are obvious, and must have been so both to the compiler and his readers. “The contemporaries of the Evangelist knew their Bible at least as well as we do. They knew that there were more than fourteen generations between David and the Captivity, that Joram did not beget Uzziah, and that Josiah did not beget Jeconiah” (Burkitt, _Evan. Da‐ Meph._, ii, p. 260). If the passage Mt. i. 18‐25, as well as the Genealogy, comes from the hand of the Evangelist, the verb ἐγέννησεν must clearly indicate legal parentage; but there is sufficient ground for this view within the Genealogy itself. (4) The references to women in the Genealogy are unique, and are best explained as due to an apologetic purpose. They cannot be so well explained as reflecting a universalistic interest (Heffern, quoted by Moffatt, INT., p. 251). In contrast to the Genealogy in the Third Gospel, that in Mt. traces the descent no farther back than to Abraham; it is fundamentally Jewish. There can be little doubt but that the writer’s purpose is to rebut Jewish slanders already current regarding the birth of Jesus. “Throughout the whole Genealogy the Evangelist appears to be telling us in an audible aside that the heir had often been born out of the direct line or irregularly. Thamar the daughter‐in‐law of Judah, Rahab the harlot, Ruth the Moabitess, and the unnamed wife of Uriah, are forced upon our attention, as if to prepare us for still greater irregularity in the last stage” (Burkitt).(81) If these are the characteristic features of the Genealogy, it is clear that _from the first it was compiled with the Virgin Birth presupposed_. It is, in fact, an attempt to present that belief in connexion with the claim that Jesus was of Davidic descent, through the legal relationship in which He stood to Joseph.(82) Thus, the Matthaean Genealogy is unique; it differs altogether from that in Lk. If to us its form seems forced and unreal, that is because we fail to come to it from the historical point of view. From this standpoint we may ask, with W. C. Allen (ICC., St. Mt., p. 6): “If the editor simply tried to give expression to the two facts which had come down to him by tradition—the fact of Christ’s supernatural birth and the fact that He was the Davidic Messiah, and did not attempt a logical synthesis of them, who shall blame him?” We are not here concerned with the question of the truth of the Virgin Birth tradition, but simply with the view that the compiler of the Genealogy held that belief, and for this inference a high degree of probability can be claimed.