Matthew 1:1 is the opening verse of the Gospel of Matthew

Gospel of Matthew

The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...

 in the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

. Since Matthew is traditionally placed as the first of the four Gospels, this verse commonly serves as the opening to the entire New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

.

The original Koine Greek

Koine Greek

Koine Greek is the universal dialect of the Greek language spoken throughout post-Classical antiquity , developing from the Attic dialect, with admixture of elements especially from Ionic....

, according to Westcott and Hort

The New Testament in the Original Greek

The New Testament in the Original Greek is the name of a Greek language version of the New Testament published in 1881. It is also known as the Westcott and Hort text, after its editors Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort...

, reads:

βιβλος γενεσεως ιησου χριστου

υιου δαυιδ υιου αβρααμ

In the King James Version of the Bible it is translated as:

The book of the generation

of Jesus

Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

 Christ

Christ

Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...

, the son of

David

David

David was the second king of the united Kingdom of Israel according to the Hebrew Bible and, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, an ancestor of Jesus Christ through both Saint Joseph and Mary...

, the son of Abraham

Abraham

Abraham , whose birth name was Abram, is the eponym of the Abrahamic religions, among which are Judaism, Christianity and Islam...

.

The modern World English Bible

World English Bible

The World English Bible is a public domain translation of the Bible that is currently in draft form. Work on the World English Bible began in 1997 and was known as the American Standard Version 1997...

 translates the passage as:

The book of the genealogy

of Jesus Christ, the son of

David, the son of Abraham.

For a collection of other versions see BibRef Matthew 1:1

The opening of Matthew's Gospel fits with the theory of Markan priority

Markan priority

Markan priority is the hypothesis that the Gospel of Mark was the first written of the three Synoptic Gospels, and that the two other synoptic evangelists, Matthew and Luke, used Mark's Gospel as one of their sources. The theory of Markan priority is today accepted by the majority of New Testament...

. Scholars believe that the author of Matthew took Mark 1:1 "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God

Son of God

"Son of God" is a phrase which according to most Christian denominations, Trinitarian in belief, refers to the relationship between Jesus and God, specifically as "God the Son"...

;" and replaced "the son of God" with the beginning of the genealogy.

The phrase "book of the genealogy" or biblos geneseos has several possible meanings. Most commonly it is seen as only referring to the list of ancestors that immediately follows, and most scholars agree that this interpretation is the most logical. However the phrase could also be translated more generally as "the book of coming" and could thus refer to the entire Gospel. Such opening phrases summarizing an entire work were common in an era before books had titles to serve this purpose. Jerome

Jerome

Saint Jerome was a Roman Christian priest, confessor, theologian and historian, and who became a Doctor of the Church. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...

 adopted this translation for the Vulgate

Vulgate

The Vulgate is a late 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It was largely the work of St. Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 to make a revision of the old Latin translations...

. Davies and Allison consider this to be the most likely meaning. "Book of the genealogy" is not a typical phrasing to introduce a genealogy. This phrase does appear in Genesis 5:1, but there it introduces a list of descendants rather than ancestors. The phrase also appears in Genesis 2:4, and there is has no relation to genealogies. Both 2:4 and 5:1 introduce elements of the creation story, and Davies and Allison feel it is likely that this verse is linked into the notion of a new genesis. They also point out that nowhere else in the New Testament does book refer to anything or than an entire work. Alternatively the phrase could have been deliberately created to serve the dual purpose of both introducing the entire work and the genealogy.

Brown

Raymond E. Brown

The Reverend Raymond Edward Brown, S.S. , was an American Roman Catholic priest, a member of the Sulpician Fathers and a major Biblical scholar of his era...

 mentions a third translation is "the book of the genesis brought about by Jesus" implying that it discusses the recreation of the world by Jesus. This stretches the grammar considerably, however. The term genesis was at the time the gospel was written already attached as the name of the first part of the Torah, so the use of the term here could be a deliberate reference. Geneseos also appears at Matthew 1:18

Matthew 1:18

Matthew 1:18 is the eighteenth verse of Matthew 1 of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. This verse opens the description of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus.-Text:The original Koine Greek, according to Westcott and Hort, reads:...

, but there it is almost always translated as birth.

The now-common phrase "Jesus Christ" is used by the author of Matthew. What exactly is meant by this is much discussed. Christ, the Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 word for messiah

Messiah

A messiah is a redeemer figure expected or foretold in one form or another by a religion. Slightly more widely, a messiah is any redeemer figure. Messianic beliefs or theories generally relate to eschatological improvement of the state of humanity or the world, in other words the World to...

, literally translates as "the anointed one". In modern times both titles apply exclusively to Jesus, but Matthew is not specific as to whether Jesus is the Christ or merely a Christ. In fact the form Matthew uses indicates that the word Christ is being used as a title, which is unusual as this is a usage only adopted some time after the death of Christ. Elsewhere Matthew uses "the Christ".

Davies and Allison note that both "son of David" and "son of Abraham" were titles in use in that era. "Son of David" was a common messianic title, while "son of Abraham" was an expression that could refer to any Jew. According to Brown some have theorized that David's name comes before Abraham's as the author of Matthew is trying to emphasize Jesus' Davidic ancestry. Brown doubts this, feeling the arrangement is merely to provide a lead into the genealogy that follows. Gundry

Robert H. Gundry

Robert Horton Gundry is a Biblical scholar. He received a B.A. and a B.D. degree from the Los Angeles Baptist College and Seminary, and his Ph.D. from Manchester University in Manchester, England in 1961 and has taught for several decades at Westmont College in California...

 states that the structure of this passage attempts to portray Jesus as the culmination of the Old Testament genealogies.

Why the author of Matthew chooses to immediately begin his Gospel with a lengthy genealogy is an important question. As Fowler notes, the long list of names is of little interest to modern readers and potentially discourages people from reading further in the Gospel. Many editions of the Gospel essentially present it as beginning at Matthew 1:18

Matthew 1:18

Matthew 1:18 is the eighteenth verse of Matthew 1 of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. This verse opens the description of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus.-Text:The original Koine Greek, according to Westcott and Hort, reads:...

 for this very reason. This disinterest would not have been true, however, to the Jewish audience the Gospel was directed to. Lineage and descent were of great importance in Jewish society of the time, and a descent from David and Abraham was crucial to accepting Jesus as the Messiah. The names, at least in the first part of the genealogy, would have been well known to the readers. Some feminist scholars have posited that the prominent position of the genealogy is also an implicit reinforcement of the patriarchal nature of society. They argue that beginning the Gospel with a long string of "X father of Y" clearly exemplifies the masculine domination. Fowler argues that the genealogy also serves to immediately humanize Jesus, by placing him clearly in the family of men.