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Polyglot Bible: Luke 3 from Sacred Texts)
:sorry1: ...but your explanation about Greek doesn't work for me as well.
Good work! I'm happy to withdraw my earlier point then. Some of my 'freinds' gave me a bum-steer on this one. Doh!
However, you are not quite right. I checked (properly this time) and the original Greek simply says 'of'. Translations such as Young's put the word [son] in brackets, while Darby's more correctly leaves it out altogether. But, the word 'of' applies to all of the blokes in the line, so while I was right about Joseph/Eli, I stuffed up on the rest.
Now here is where I turn into a pain in the butt because I am going to re-introduce my earlier point in a corrected form. Here's what I see: Joseph was 'of' Heli, Heli was 'of' so and so, and so on. But only Jesus/Joseph was
nozimo. Why would Luke try to establish Joseph's lineage when he has already disconnected Joseph from the picture? When I add to this the possibilities raised by the heritage traditions I mentioned earlier it seems to me that there is more than enough room for this to be Mary's lineage. And no, as silly as it may sound at first, I don't understand why Luke would have wanted to put Mary's name in there as he has already established her motherhood earlier.
I cannot rule out the possibility that Jacob was Joseph's father and Heli Mary's, with Joseph taking on that name as allowed by precedent. I'd be dishonest with myself if I called this one a contradiction without something more substantial.