Matthew 1:1 is the opening verse in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Since Matthew is traditionally placed as the first of the four Gospels, this verse commonly serves as the opening to the entire New Testament. Content The original Koine Greek, according to Westcott and Hort, reads: An alternative spelling of David's name in the Textus Receptus is δαβιδ. In the King James Version of the Bible this verse is translated as: The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. The modern World English Bible translates this verse as: The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. For a collection of other versions see Biblehub Matthew 1:1. Analysis The opening of Matthew's Gospel fits with the theory of Markan priority. Scholars believe that the author of Matthew took Mark 1:1 "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God", and replaced "the son of God" with the beginning of the genealogy. The phrase "book of the genealogy" or has several possible meanings. Most commonly it is seen as only referring to the list of ancestors that immediately follows, and most scholars agree that this interpretation is the most logical. However the phrase could also be translated more generally as "the book of coming" and could thus refer to the entire Gospel. Such opening phrases summarizing an entire work were common in an era before books had titles to serve this purpose. Jerome adopted this translation for the Vulgate. W. D. Davies and Dale Allison consider this to be the most likely meaning. "Book of the genealogy" is not a typical phrasing to introduce a genealogy. This phrase does appear in , but there it introduces a list of descendants rather than ancestors. The phrase also appears in , and there it has no relation to genealogies. Both verses in Genesis introduce elements of the creation story, and Davies and Allison feel it is likely that this verse is linked into the notion of a new genesis. They also point out that nowhere else in the New Testament does book refer to anything other than an entire work. Alternatively the phrase could have been deliberately created to serve the dual purpose of both introducing the entire work and the genealogy. Raymond