Can evangelists count?
In the opening verses of the Gospel of Matthew, the evangelist provides a genealogy of Jesus, beginning with the patriarch Abraham. When he’s done, he tells the reader that all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations. However, as it turns out, the “generations from Abraham to David” in the gospel only include thirteen names. Go ahead, count them yourself. I’ll be right here. The fourteenth generation is missing in every surviving manuscript of Matthew’s gospel. It’s one of the strangest glitches in the Bible, but it almost never turns up on the typical “Bible Contradictions” list: my suspicion is that so many readers’ eyes glaze over when they see yet another tedious genealogy that they don’t really think to count the names. What became of the missing fourteenth? Several answers to this question have been proposed over the
