Why are there two Josephs in the Bible and each one was the father of Jesus?

Answer 1

The Bible does not indicate there were "two Josephs," each the father of Jesus. The "two" are the same man, and the gospel accounts of Matthew and Luke both point out that Joseph was not Jesus' father. If he had been, the natural conclusion to Matthew's genealogy would have been, "…Jacob begot Joseph, and Joseph begot Jesus." This is clearly not the case.

Matthew 1:16 says, "And Jacob begot Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus who is called Christ." Here, Joseph is identified as the offspring of Jacob and "husband of Mary," NOT the "father of Jesus." In Matt. 1:20, an angel tells Joseph: "…that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit."

Luke 3:23 says that it was "supposed" (meaning "commonly thought" or "assumed") that Jesus was the "son of Joseph" (the truth of the matter having been previously stated - see Luke 1:35), then says, "the son of Heli."

The structure of the genealogy in Matthew, working forward from Abraham with a series of "begots," makes it clear that Joseph's "side of the family" is in view, and that Joseph's father was a man named Jacob.

Luke's use of "supposed" is the key to understanding that "the son of Heli" refers to Jesus, not Joseph. (It's common for Scripture to refer to someone as the "son" of an ancestor, regardless of the number of intervening generations. A prime example is Matthew 1:1 - The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham:)

Matthew's gospel clearly establishes the fact that Joseph's father was named Jacob. Simple common sense then dictates that Heli must have been Jesus' maternal grandfather - Mary's father, not Joseph's, and that Luke's genealogy presents Jesus' maternal lineage.

Answer 2

In Matthew's Gospel, Joseph, the son of Jacob, is (supposedly) father of Jesus.
In Luke's Gospel, Joseph, the son of Heli, is (supposedly) father of Jesus.

This is not because they are two different people, but because the two different authors were writing without any knowledge of what the other wrote. They both copied much of their material from Mark's Gospel, which means that the gospels will more or less agree on events found in Mark. They also copied further sayings material from the hypothetical 'Q' document, providing further scope for agreement. However, the two evangelists had to create their own accounts of the nativity of Jesus and their own genealogies. They found clues in Mark and both knew that first century Jews anticipated a messiah to be born in Bethlehem, but then they wove their own stories around these foundations. As Raymond E. Brown says in An Introduction to the New Testament, there are many other differences from Matthew's genealogy to Luke's genealogy (even in otherwise parallel ancestries) and there is little likelihood that either is strictly historical.