Why is the genealogy of Jesus not in Mark's Gospel?

Answer 1

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First of all, the reason the Gospel of Mark does not contain a genealogy is that the author did not know the ancestry of Jesus. For that matter, neither did the authors of Matthew or Luke, as we can tell by the very clear discrepancies, not only between the two genealogies but also between each of those genealogies and the Old Testament genealogy.

It was not important for the Gospel of Mark to contain a genealogy because its author was not attempting to use numerology to prove that Jesus was destined for greatness. Furthermore, while he stated that Jesus was descended from King David, he appears not to have seen a need to prove this, as the authors of Matthewand Luke did. Matthew 1:17 tells us what its author was trying to achieve: "So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations." Luke's Gospel, with a different version of the same supposed genealogy, back through the male line from Joseph, has great men occur at intervals of seven generations, and once again demonstrates that Jesus was descended from David.

It is also a matter of conjecture that the gospels that contain a genealogy were written for audiences that either placed great store on genealogies or the power of numerology, but we do not know who the authors really were, nor who the intended audiences really were.

Answer 2

A:Have a look at the two genealogies that we do have for Jesus, in Matthew's Gospel and Luke's Gospel. Matthew says that Jacob was the father of Joseph (Matthew 1:16); Luke says that Heli was the father of Joseph (Luke 3:23). These are far from the only irreconcilable differences in the two accounts, and New Testament scholars dismiss these genealogies as unlikely to be historically true. That consensus should be understood to mean that we really do not have any genealogy of Jesus.

Mark's Gospel was the first to be written, and was written before anyone gave any thought to the need to provide a genealogy of Jesus.