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>Modern scholars have largely assumed that the accusation that Jesus was an “illegitimate” memzer was just a fictional reaction against the Christian claim from the gospels of Matthew and Luke that Jesus was born of a virgin, but there is a rarely discussed admission in the Gospel of Matthew that the accusation of adultery was not reactionary myth. The beginning of Matthew's gospel has a genealogy that lists 40 men but only four women. As religious studies scholar James Tabor and others have pointed out, those four women are not the most important are the most memorable women from the Hebrew Bible. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba are instead cited as controversial figures because of their scandalous sexual reputations from the Bible. In three of the cases, excluding Rahab, the sinful sex act itself is instrumental in bringing about the current genealogy being listed. So the whole point of including the names of those four women is to try and mitigate the damage from the accusation that Jesus could not be the Messiah because he was a memzer, but rather than defend Mary's virginity, the genealogy implicitly admits that Jesus was “born in sin” while reminding the reader that there were other important women from the Bible who were less than pure but were nevertheless important to the history of the Jewish people
