The genealogy of Jesus

From Adam to Christ

Jesus, the Second Adam, and the New Humanity

Luke's genealogy runs all the way back to Adam, and that reach is the key to a great biblical theme: Jesus is the second Adam. The first Adam was the head of the human race and brought sin and death into the world; Jesus is the new head who brings righteousness and life. Where Adam fell, Christ stood; where Adam's disobedience ruined many, Christ's obedience saves many. The line from Adam to Christ is the story of a broken humanity being given a new beginning.

And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.1 Corinthians 15:45 (KJV)

A genealogy that reaches the first man

Luke did something Matthew did not. He did not stop at Abraham but ran the family line of Jesus all the way back to the very first human being. That choice opens up one of the deepest ideas in the whole New Testament, the idea that Jesus is a second Adam, a new head for the human race.

By linking Jesus to Adam, Luke tells us that Jesus is not only the King of Israel but the representative of all humanity, everyone who has ever descended from that first man. And that sets the stage for the comparison the apostle Paul would draw out in his letters, between the two men on whom the destiny of the whole race has turned: the first Adam and the last.

The first Adam: how the trouble began

To see what Jesus came to do, we have to see what the first Adam did. Adam was made in the image of God and given the world, and in a garden he was given one command. He broke it, and in breaking it he did not fall alone. As the head of the human family, he pulled his whole line down with him.

Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.Romans 5:14 (KJV)

Death reigned from Adam, Paul writes, and he calls Adam the figure of him that was to come, the pattern, that is, of the greater man who would answer him. This is the tragic backdrop of the whole human story. Every child of Adam is born into a world under the shadow of his fall, subject to sin and death. The genealogy that ends at Adam is, in that sense, a family history of a race that lost its way at the very top. But Luke names Adam only to point past him, to the one who came to undo the ruin.

The last Adam: a new beginning

Against the first Adam, Paul sets Jesus, and gives him a title that gathers up the whole meaning of Luke's long list. Jesus is the last Adam, the second man, the founder of a renewed humanity.

And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.1 Corinthians 15:45 (KJV)

The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit, that is, a life-giving spirit. Adam received life; Christ gives it. Adam was the head of the old, dying race; Christ is the head of a new, living one. Where the first Adam faced temptation in a garden and fell, Jesus, straight from this very genealogy in Luke, goes out into the wilderness to be tempted, and does not fall. He walks the whole road the first man failed to walk, in perfect obedience, and so becomes a new starting point for the human family.

One man's obedience: the great exchange

Paul draws the two Adams together in a single, breathtaking comparison. The whole of Romans five turns on the parallel and the contrast: what the one man ruined, the other man restores, and more than restores.

For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.Romans 5:19 (KJV)

As by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. There is the exchange at the heart of the gospel. The disobedience of the first Adam made a whole race sinners; the obedience of the last Adam, all the way to the cross, makes a whole people righteous. Elsewhere Paul puts it even more simply: as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. Two men, two families, two destinies, and the good news is that anyone in the first family can be moved, by faith, into the second.

Notice the word many on both sides of the sentence, and the way one man stands for a multitude on each side. Paul is not saying the two Adams are merely equal and opposite. Everywhere he draws this comparison he insists that the gift is greater than the trespass, that grace abounds much more than sin. The ruin the first Adam worked was real and vast, but the rescue the last Adam brings is greater still, reaching further, going deeper, and lasting longer. The story does not simply return the human race to where it started before the fall. In Christ it is carried higher than Eden ever was, into a life that can no longer be lost.

Into which family do you belong?

The doctrine of the two Adams is not a riddle for scholars. It is the most personal thing in the world. Every person is born into the family of the first Adam, sharing his fallen nature and his death. The gospel is the offer of a second birth into the family of the last Adam, sharing his righteousness and his life.

To be in Adam is to belong to the old, dying humanity by nature. To be in Christ is to belong to the new, living humanity by grace, through faith. The whole aim of the story that runs from Adam to Christ is that the children of the first man might become the children of the second, and pass from death to life. That is why the genealogy reaches back so far: so that no descendant of Adam, anywhere, would think themselves outside the reach of the new Adam's grace.

The Savior of all humanity

From Adam to Christ is, in the end, the whole Bible in a single arc. It begins with one man's fall and the ruin of the race, and it ends with one man's obedience and the rescue of all who will receive it. Luke's decision to trace the line to Adam, and to God, was a way of saying that Jesus belongs to everyone and came for everyone.

He is the son of David for Israel, the seed of Abraham for the nations, and the second Adam for the entire human family, from the first man onward. There is no one born of Adam who is not invited into the life of Christ. The family tree that began in Eden and fell in Eden is made new in him, and its final branch is not death but resurrection, and a whole new humanity alive in the Son of God.

This is the quiet triumph hidden in a list of ancient names. To read Luke's genealogy backward, past David and Abraham and Noah, all the way to the first man who came from the hand of God, is to watch the whole human family gathered up and laid at the feet of one who came to save it. None of those names is a stranger to grace, and neither are you. The last Adam entered the line of the first precisely so that the story of Adam's children might not end where it began, in exile and death, but in a homecoming to the Father. That is the promise the genealogy carries from the first man to the last: that in Christ the whole family of Adam can be born again and brought home.

A note for all readers: the genealogy of Jesus has been studied lovingly across the whole church for two thousand years. Where there are real questions, such as how Matthew and Luke relate, this page presents the main faithful explanations without claiming a certainty the text does not give. What both genealogies agree on is the heart of the matter: Jesus is the promised Messiah, the son of David and son of Abraham, and the Savior of all humanity from Adam onward.

Continue: The genealogy in Luke · Son of David, son of Abraham · The women in Jesus' genealogy · The genealogy of Jesus