I have read over almost all of the posts in this thread. There is only one comment I can make.

Personally, I do not think the virgin birth is at all crucial to the Gospel or Jesus’ divinity. If God wanted his presence, the Messiah, to be manifested through human terms, then what does it matter? After all, God throughout history has chosen to work with humans to do his will, so what would it matter if the Messiah was born in an ordinary human way? Nevertheless, Matthew and Luke both illustrate Jesus as being born from a virgin miraculously. The only way we can say Jesus was not born of a virgin, is if we say the accounts were later altered, or the authors weaved their own thoughts into the accounts, and saying such things is treading on dangerous ground. Even if the texts were altered, how ever unlikely it may be, this still does not make Jesus any less of a Messiah. There is one thing, however, I cannot reconcile with the view that Jesus was not born of a virgin, which gives me all the more reason to faithfully embrace the texts as we have them today.

If Jesus was created through Joseph and Marry having sex, meaning Jesus descended from both Joseph’s bloodline and Mary’s bloodline, how can we reconcile the curse of Jehoiachin mentioned in Jeremiah 22:30 with the whole idea? If Jesus was created through sexual intercourse, then what set him apart from his brothers and sisters (assuming his brothers and sisters were born from Marry)?

The virgin birth is only a necessity based on Jeremiah 22:30 in my opinion. If the virgin birth did indeed happen, then that means, as I see it, that Jesus’ adopted father was of a royal bloodline, but that bloodline was not genetically passed unto Jesus, meaning Jesus only inherited the genes of Mary’s family (which seems to be recorded in Luke), therefore meaning Jesus was not of Jehoiachin’s seed.

What do you think? I’m actually very confused about the genealogies recorded in Matthew and Luke. The view that Matthew records Joseph’s bloodline and Luke records Mary’s (father’s) bloodline makes the most sense to me so far. How do you reconcile the differences in the genealogies?