Did Mary come from the line of David?

Answer 1

We simply do not know whether Mary was from King David's family line, and there is nothing in The Bible to suggest that she was. One Christian tradition is that her father and mother were Saints Joachim and Anne. A careless misreading of the gospels has led others to believe that her father was Heli, whose genealogy says that he was descended from David, in spite of Luke 3:23, which clearly states that Heli was the father of Joseph.

Both Matthew and Luke provide detailed genealogies for Joseph, back through the line of King David, with Matthew giving Joseph's father as Jacob and Lukecalling him Heli. It is undoubtedly because of this embarrassing discrepancy that some have sought to say that Luke's genealogy was really intended to be that of Mary ( although Luke 3:23 says, "... Joseph, which was the son of Heli.") As to which is the actual genealogy of Joseph, the answer is: neither. Not only do the two genealogies differ from each other, they even differ in significant detail from the Old Testament genealogy of King David. We also find that Matthew says that the father of Salathiel was called Jechonias, while Luke says that the same man's father was called Neri. Both authors improbably sought, in different ways, to use numerology to prove that Jesus was destined for greatness. Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament) says that there is little likelihood that either is strictly historical.

So, not only do we not know the ancestry of Mary, we do not even know the ancestry of Joseph. Perhaps one or both of them were descended from David, or perhaps not.