Tool Beta
Is It Actually in the Bible?
Phrases people quote as Scripture. The real verse, or the honest answer that there is not one.
"The book of the generation of Jesus Christ" (Matthew 1:1) sounds like it's introducing a chapter about the generation of people Jesus grew up among.
'Generation' in Matthew 1:1 means genealogy or lineage, not a group of people born around the same time.
Matthew 1:1, in every translation this tool compares.
Matthew opens his Gospel with, "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham," immediately followed by a genealogy tracing Jesus's ancestry back through Israel's history. "Generation" here echoes the Hebrew idiom used in Genesis 5:1, "the book of the generations of Adam": meaning a record of descent, an origin-and-ancestry document, not an age cohort.
Modern English uses "generation" almost exclusively for people born in the same era ("millennials," "the wartime generation"), so a reader can completely miss that Matthew is titling a genealogical record, not describing Jesus's contemporaries.
