Why are the women in Matthew's genealogy included?

There are ongoing disagreements about why Matthew refers to Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba in Matthew 1:3-6. It's sometimes suggested that they're included because of the theme of God's acceptance of Gentiles. That theme is prominent in early Christianity, including in the gospel of Matthew, as the magi in chapter 2 illustrate. But Bathsheba apparently was Jewish. She lived in Isarael. In 2 Samuel 11:3, her father is referred to as Eliam, with no further qualifier, whereas the same verse qualifies Uriah as "the Hittite". See, also, 2 Samuel 23:34. If Ahithophel was the grandfather of Bathsheba, which would be further evidence of her Jewishness, that would help explain why Ahithophel betrayed David (because of what David did to Bathsheba). Matthew 1:16 includes Mary, who was Jewish, in a way similar to how the other women are included earlier. Furthermore, when Bathsheba is referred to in verse 6, she's identified as the wife of Uriah, not "the wife of a Hittite", "the wife of Uriah the Hittite", or some other such thing. And she's referred to as Uriah's wife in a context about giving birth to Solomon after marrying David. She wasn't Uriah's wife at the time, yet Matthew chose to mention that she had been Uriah's wife. The focus seems to be on the adulterous origins of her relationship with David, not any connection to Gentiles. Matthew probably didn't think Ruth was guilty of sexual sin, and he didn't think Mary was, so he didn't think the women had sexual sin in common. Even the women who were sexually immoral were so in significantly different ways. For example, Rahab's background as a prostitute is substantially different than conceiving the child mentioned in the genealogy by means of sexual immorality. It also seems unlikely that the women were all thought to have had a low social status independent of issues like sexual immorality (being born into a disreputable family, being of low economic status, etc.). As explained above, Matthew highlight's Bathsheba's involvement in adultery, which is distinct from the sort of social status issues I just referred to. What's the common thread with these women, then?

Christmas Resources 2025

Since Jesus' childhood spanned so many years and so many issues are involved, there's no quick and easy way to address everything. But I've put together a collection of approaches that can be taken to begin an argument for a traditional Christian view of his childhood. See here.

It's important to be knowledgeable about how much Matthew and Luke agree concerning the childhood of Jesus. They agree more than is usually suggested. See the post here for forty examples of the agreements between Matthew and Luke. For a discussion of the agreements among other early sources, go here. The post here discusses some neglected evidence related to the church of Ephesus. For some recommendations about how to argue that the early sources agree more than people often suggest, see this post.

Isaiah 9:1-7 is significant in the context of Christmas (e.g., what it tells us about Jesus' self-perception, demonstrating continuity between the accounts of his childhood and the accounts of his adulthood). Here's a collection of posts about the passage.

Here are some examples of our posts on Christmas issues, with many others available in our archives:

They Would Have Died To Pray As We Do

In addition to being grateful for prayer, we should be grateful for the types of prayer we can offer:

And when we look back, we have so much more to say than they [the pre-Christian Israelites] did, don’t we? Our past is even better than their past, because we know Jesus. They could remember what God did in Egypt, in the wilderness, and in Canaan, but we have Bethlehem and Calvary. We can pray,

Jesus, you came into our world, born in a manger.
For our sake, you were obedient to the point of death/on a cross.
You were pierced for our transgressions.
You were crushed for our iniquities.
You were wounded so that we might be healed.
You were poor so that we could become rich.
You suffered, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God.
And three days later, you rose to conquer death and give us life.

The Sons of Korah couldn’t say that yet, so they said, “You restored. You forgave. You covered.” They would have died to pray the kinds of prayers we get to pray, the prayers we pray every day — in Jesus’s name.

(Marshall Segal)

How Often The Church Fathers "Demeaned" Mary

Boniface Ramsey, in his translation of the sermons of Maximus of Turin, refers to passages in which Maximus "demeans" Mary (The Sermons Of St. Maximus Of Turin [Mahwah, New Jersey: Newman Press, 1989], n. 1 on p. 365). Given Roman Catholicism's history of claiming that Mary is God's greatest creation, that she was sinless throughout her life, that she cooperated with Jesus' work in the world at every moment of her life, and so on, it doesn't take much to say something that demeans Mary from a Catholic perspective. For example:

Implicit Exclusions Of Baptismal Regeneration In Early Christian Literature

As I discussed in another post, we find baptismal regeneration contradicted in a large number and variety of ways in the extrabiblical sources before the Reformation. Sometimes an exclusion of baptism as a means of justification is implicit rather than explicit.

And people will often object to the use of implicit evidence. But we all rely on it. For example, we depend on implicit evidence when deciding how to translate a word in a document, basing our conclusion on what the surrounding context seems to imply. Christians have often said, rightly, that it's unreasonable for a Muslim to ask us for a passage in the gospels in which Jesus says "I am God. Worship me." or some equivalent. A term like "Trinity" doesn't have to appear in the Bible for Trinitarianism to be Biblical. Roman Catholics often use arguments from typology that aren't explicit. And so on. Advocates of baptismal regeneration rely on implicit argumentation in the context of supporting that doctrine. The appeal to alleged references to baptism in terms like "water" in John 3:5 and "washing" in Titus 3:5 relies on implicit argumentation, so does their reasoning that baptismal regeneration has been in effect during certain circumstances and not in others (e.g., not being applicable during the Old Testament era and some portion or all of Jesus' public ministry), etc. Since proponents of baptismal regeneration rely on implicit argumentation in their reasoning about the subject, they're not in a position to object to their opponents' use of implicit argumentation. The fact that we prefer explicit evidence doesn't mean that implicit evidence has no value. Something can be less valuable, yet still have value to some extent. The nature of life is such that evidence comes in both implicit and explicit forms, with people sometimes disagreeing about whether something is implicit or explicit, and we have to take all of the evidence into account.

How Later Church Fathers Disagree With Earlier Ones

Sometimes a disagreement is more obvious, such as the comments of a later church father who explicitly refers to his disagreement with the premillennialism of Papias or Irenaeus. Other times, the disagreement is more subtle.

For example, I've written before about how Irenaeus compares Mary's virginity to the virginity of soil that was "as yet" virgin, but would later lose its virginity. Contrast his comments with those of Maximus of Turin, who wrote more than two centuries later, after the perpetual virginity of Mary had become more popular. I'll quote Irenaeus, then quote Maximus with emphasis added to highlight a difference:

"And as the protoplast himself Adam, had his substance from untilled and as yet virgin soil ('for God had not yet sent rain, and man had not tilled the ground'), and was formed by the hand of God, that is, by the Word of God, for 'all things were made by Him,' and the Lord took dust from the earth and formed man; so did He who is the Word, recapitulating Adam in Himself, rightly receive a birth, enabling Him to gather up Adam [into Himself], from Mary, who was as yet a virgin." (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3:21:10)

"For Adam was born of the virgin earth and Christ was begotten of the virgin Mary; the maternal soil of the one had not yet been broken by hoes, while the hidden place of the other's maternity was never violated by desire." (Maximus of Turin, Sermon 50A:2, Boniface Ramsey, trans., The Sermons Of St. Maximus Of Turin [Mahwah, New Jersey: Newman Press, 1989], 122)

Where Irenaeus sees a parallel, Maximus goes out of his way to describe a contrast. (And you can read my post on Irenaeus linked above for further evidence that he didn't think Mary was a perpetual virgin. For more about the larger historical context surrounding Irenaeus, in which we see other opponents of the perpetual virginity of Mary in many places for hundreds of years, see here, here, and here, for example.)

How strong is the Christian argument against polygamy?

Polygamy has been getting some attention lately in response to a pastor's announcement that he's married a second wife. Ben Shapiro recently addressed the subject on one of his programs and had Matt Fradd on to discuss it with him. Both men made a Biblical case against polygamy, but far less of a case than they should have made. Their comments about the extrabiblical evidence likewise fell well short of what could have been offered. Matt was focused on church authority and didn't say much about the church fathers and other early extrabiblical sources, where there's early and widespread evidence against polygamy. The use of Roman Catholicism's authority claims is problematic, since those claims are false and end up leading Catholicism's defenders to making unverifiable appeals to doctrinal development, what ecclesiology they think would be fitting, and so forth.

Support for polygamy has been increasing substantially in recent years. More than one out of five Americans consider it morally acceptable now, which is about a tripling of its support over the past couple of decades. See Gallup's polling results on moral issues here. And here's an article on the subject published by Gallup in 2017. Support for polygamy has gone up a few more percentage points since then.

About twenty years ago, I wrote a post discussing the evidence against polygamy in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the early extrabiblical sources. I added some other posts over the years in the comments section of that thread, including some interactions with defenders of polygamy. Matthew Schultz posted an article here in 2011 that discusses how negatively polygamy is portrayed in the Bible. My initial thread on polygamy, linked above, discussed a lot of extrabiblical sources, but didn't include Minucius Felix. Here's a later post in which I cited his comments about the Christian rejection of polygamy.

More About Maximus Of Turin And Eternal Security

I've written some posts over the years about belief in eternal security before the Reformation. Contrary to what's often asserted by critics of eternal security, the concept was held in various forms by some extrabiblical sources before the Reformation, as my series linked above argues.

In one of those posts, I cited some comments the Roman Catholic scholar Brian Daley made about Maximus of Turin. Since then, I've read a collection of Maximus' sermons, and I think Daley's comments should be supplemented. While there is some material in Maximus that seems to support eternal security, there's also some that seems to go against it if taken in isolation. I think more should be said than what Daley provides, so you can scroll to the bottom of that post just linked for an update I just added.

Encouragement To Keep Writing

We should be involved in both oral and written discussions with people, and both have advantages and disadvantages. I've written before about my philosophy regarding activities like evangelism and apologetics, based partly on what Paul articulates in Colossians 4:5. Christians should be making the most of whatever opportunities they have, which obviously can't be limited to contexts involving writing. But, as I mentioned in another post, it's become common for people to make derogatory, dismissive comments about the internet (as they often have about other forms of new technology and new platforms on existing technology), and a majority of the opportunities most people have on the internet involve writing.

What originally attracted people to platforms like YouTube and Twitter?

They've changed since they originated, and we need to distinguish between what these platforms are offering today and what they offered in the past. The fact that Twitter now allows people to post larger amounts of material doesn't change the fact that you could only post smaller amounts when the platform originated. And now that people can post more, how many users make use of that feature? The large majority of users don't post anything. And among those who do post, probably the large majority of those individuals still just post brief comments, often one sentence or a fragment of a sentence, typically without any supporting arguments, documentation, etc. And when a user posts something lengthier, there will often be complaints that it's too long, even if it's only a few sentences or some other small amount. Similarly, the fact that you can get somewhat good transcripts of YouTube videos today doesn't mean that you could do so when YouTube originated or that more than a small percentage of users access that feature now that it's available.

The Popularity Of Being Overly Negative About The Internet

Since it's so popular to be highly negative about the internet, often to the point of saying nothing or far too little about the many positive aspects of it, I want to discuss the positives. I'm grateful to live at the time in history in which God has placed me, and that's partly because I consider the internet so beneficial.

What should Christians do with things like the internet and social media platforms?

More than 1500 years ago, Augustine expressed some of his reasons for preferring a written debate over an oral one:

Why is there so much neglect of the argument from prophecy?

It's widely neglected both in terms of quantity and quality. There are some pastors, apologists, and other individuals who are otherwise highly involved in relevant contexts, yet I don't recall ever seeing them argue for Christianity from the evidence for prophecy fulfillment. Or somebody will only use the argument to a ridiculously small extent. I occasionally hear people go as far as to say that they don't think there's any value to the argument from prophecy or that they think there's only some extremely small number of prophecy arguments they consider worth using. Contrast that to how prominent prophecy is in the Old Testament and how prominent appeals to fulfillment are in the New Testament and the early extrabiblical literature.

Steve Hays ebooks 6

Led by the Shepherd has led the way to a triumphant end! This is the last of Steve Hays' ebooks, and (as Steve intimated shortly before crossing the river Jordan) one of his most personally beloved. Many thanks again to Led by the Shepherd for his fine work. I trust the Lord will reward him for faithfully shepherding Steve's work to completion. And may the Lord gather and guide on the pilgrim path each who reads this ebook so we walk it to meet in the Promised Land. SDG. (Previous batch here.)

• Pilgrim through This Barren Land (epub)
• Pilgrim through This Barren Land (pdf)

By the way, the great John Hendryx over at Monergism has done beautiful editions of each of Steve's eBooks as well. Please consider supporting him if able. Monergism has done a tremendous service for the Lord and his people over many years which continues unabated today, and the newly revamped Puritan and other eBooks look better than ever. Here is the Monergism edition of Steve's latest eBook, Pilgrim through This Barren Land.