Thanks and yes this is most perplexing to me. Just last year I ran into this. Josephs lineage is actually stated twice. Thats right. In mathew the lineage is his correct one(but boken thru King josiahs son). And again in Luke(marys lineage thru nathan the prophet)and mary is taken out ? And Joseph is put in ?. Is that bizar ...I know? So why? I believe this may be it(bare with me , im not a teacher, I just love the bible). A kingdom can not be established by a woman. It must be a man.Women are a secondary PART. Just as a woman gives up her name when married. So joseph had to be adopted into Marys lineage(an unbroken pure lineage thru nathan the prophet) to be the rightful adopter of Jesus in Jewish costumes. Josephs lineage was broken and in the old testiment, It says that God cursed Josiahs son(unmentionable sins)and said no king of your seed will EVER prosper. Then in Acts ,Paul ? says , "The kingdom line was broken but will be restored" Only a man has a seed.A woman has an egg. Seeds are the blessings or curses(spirit?). Eggs are just a carrier. Like a chickens egg , it may not produce a baby chick. Make sence.?(I dont really understand all this either) This is evident that God begot a son/not daughter. God chose that a man/first created,in his image from mud and God breathed life into him and chose him to be the seed(image of God). And if you recall the woman was actually made from man, she is a byproduct/counterpart of man.(equally intelligent) So in this context , when men bare girls they do not send down a blessing or curse(spiritual legacy).Only when men bare boys is the seed(spiritual legacy)handed down. (no disrespect to women they have a hard job to tolerate us men) So Joseph had to be graphited/adopted to Marys lineage. wooh, whats your thoughts

"Matthew 1:16 breaks with the pattern preceding it; it is at pains to distance Joseph from Jesus' actual parentage and point out that Joseph did not beget Jesus, but was simply the husband of the woman who was his mother. In the original Greek, the word translated as whom is unambiguously feminine. The shift to the passive voice also symbolizes the Virgin Birth. Matthew 1:16 has attracted considerable scholarly attention because unusually the ancient sources show several different versions of it. For example, the Codex Koridethi has: Jacob was the father of Joseph, to whom the betrothed virgin Mary bore Jesus, called the Christ While the Old Syriac Sinaiticus has Jacob was the father of Joseph, to whom the virgin Mary was betrothed, was the father of Jesus The first version represents the same pattern as that used in most modern translations - unlike the prior genealogy, its convoluted wording, shifting to the passive voice, is at pains to distance Joseph from the parentage of Jesus, to support a Virgin Birth. The other version states clearly that Joseph was actually the father of Jesus, and while it does appear to state Mary is a virgin, the word now translated virgin actually corresponds to the Greek word parthenekos which translates literally more as maid. Some scholars see these latter versions as evidence against the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, while others postulate that the original text only had words of the form "and Joseph was the father of Jesus", following the pattern of the prior verses, which later scribes altered to clarify that this didn't amount to biological parentage. Raymond Brown has proposed that these variants are not so much concerned with arguing for or against the Virgin Birth, but for the doctrine of perpetual virginity of Mary, which became prominent at the time the variants were created; both appear to be attempts to avoid making Joseph a husband to Mary, and hence to suppress the suggestion of sexual activity between them. Perhaps the most obvious issue of all surrounding this aspect of the genealogy is that if Joseph is no more than a step father to Jesus, the question arises as to why Matthew devoted the prior verses to his genealogy. At the time legal kinship was generally considered more important than biological descent, and thus by demonstrating that Joseph was a member of the House of David, even an adopted son would be legally considered part of the same dynasty." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_of_jesus Further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_birth_of_Jesus