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<jats:p>If we follow Matthew's Gospel 1, 1-16, it seems that the ‘genealogy of Jesus Christ’ is extremely clear: son of David, son of Abraham, who fathered Isaac … Right up to Jacob, who ‘fathered Joseph, the husband of Mary, who bore Jesus, called the Chrisf. Luke 3, 23-8, which echoes Matthew, introduces a first discrepancy: after an exceptional ‘when Jesus began his work he was about 30’, he says he was ‘the son, as people thought, of Joseph’. This ‘as people thoughf casts doubt on the whole of the following genealogy, even though it goes back still further, as far as ‘Adam, son of God’: the ‘hiatus’ is clearly the ‘virgin birth’, ‘when I have no husband’, as Luke writes in 1, 34. So the very idea of descent, and with it the notion of sex associated with procreation, appears to be questioned at the very moment it is being stated. Far from being a paradox that only we moderns can see, the difficulty did not go unnoticed by many Fathers of the Church. The sole aim of what follows is to describe some of the responses attempted during Christianity's early centuries in order to patch over this break with classical rules of descent.</jats:p>