genealogy: an account or record that traces a person's line of family descent
The word is built from the ordinary Greek words for a generation and for giving an account, so at heart it means the recounting of who came from whom: a family tree, or the act of tracing one. In the wider Greek and Jewish world it ranged widely. It could mean a hero traced back to a god, a branch of history writing devoted to pedigrees, or, most weightily in first-century Judaism, the official registers by which priests proved their descent and their right to serve at the temple.
In the New Testament, though, the noun appears only twice, and both times as something to avoid. Paul warns Timothy against people who give themselves to "myths and endless genealogies" (1 Timothy 1:4), and tells Titus to steer clear of "foolish controversies and genealogies and quarrels about the law" (Titus 3:9). The complaint is not that family records are wrong, but that a certain fashion for spinning them out was producing arguments instead of faith.
Exactly what these genealogies were is debated (see the disputes below), but the clues around them, teachers who wanted to be experts in the law and pushed Jewish myths, point to Jewish or Jewish-Christian lore built out of the Old Testament ancestry lists. Whatever their precise content, here the word carries a dismissive edge: a pursuit that looks learned but leads nowhere.
Disputed
What the "endless genealogies" condemned in 1 Timothy 1:4 and Titus 3:9 actually refer to.
- majoritySpeculative Jewish or Jewish-Christian haggadic elaborations of Old Testament patriarchal narratives, of the kind found in Jubilees, Pseudo-Philo, and Josephus's Antiquities. This is the settled majority reading, anchored in the letters' own signals that the opponents were would-be teachers of the law (1 Tim 1:7), of the circumcision (Tit 1:10), promoting Jewish myths (Tit 1:14).; Friedrich Büchsel, TDNT 1:662-665, s.v. γενεαλογία; J.N.D. Kelly, A Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles (Black's/Harper's NTC, 1963); I. Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles (ICC, 1999); William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles (WBC 46, 2000), 19; Philip H. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (NICNT, 2006), 109-11
- minorityLiteral disputes over priestly, Levitical, and Davidic descent, that is, actual pedigree registers and tribal claims rather than narrative speculation, made contentious once the archives were disrupted.; Charles J. Ellicott, The Pastoral Epistles of St. Paul (1856)
- minorityGnostic aeon-emanations of the Valentinian systems. Traced to Irenaeus, who opens Adversus Haereses by quoting 1 Tim 1:4, and revived by the Tübingen school to date the letters to the second century, but now held by only a few.; F.C. Baur, Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe des Apostels Paulus (1835); H.J. Holtzmann, Die Pastoralbriefe (1880); Jens Herzer, in the debate over 1 Tim 6:20 and 'falsely called knowledge' (2014)
- minorityConventional anti-sophist polemic: a stock cluster of insults (myths, genealogies, controversies, word-battles) whose precise referent cannot be securely reconstructed, so the term functions partly as a slur like "old wives' tales".; Robert J. Karris, 'The Background and Significance of the Polemic of the Pastoral Epistles', JBL 92 (1973): 549-564; Michael Wolter, Die Pastoralbriefe als Paulustradition (1988), 263