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ultima on 29 July 2013
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happydolphin said:
ultima said:

No, that's wrong. From 6 o'clock to 7 o'clock is one hour. Inclusive/exlusive makes absolutely no difference here, we are dealing with a continuous variable.

It's also wrong to start at one when counting generations. How many generations are there from father to son?

But honestly, it shouldn't really matter, as long as you're consistent, since you'll just be adding one. If you like at Matthew 1 and Luke 3, you see that the number of generations from Abraham to Joseph is very different with respect to the two accounts.

It can be exclusive in one account, and inclusive in the other. I haven't gone in depth in the matter but at this level of debate that much should be obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_(mathematics)#Excluding_the_endpoints

Lol, I'm a math major. Excluding the endpoints of a nontrivial interval (meaning it's neither empty nor consisting of a single element) of a real line does not change the length of the interval.

Answer my question, how many generations are there from father to son? There's no inclusive/exclusive convention. There's a well-defined way to count this. If you stray from the well-defined convention, then you're doing it wrong. I'm not exactly sure which passages you're talking about, but if Matthew was indeed counting it, by your terminology, inclusively, then he was doing it wrong. It's as simple as that.

Also, please do go look at Matthew 1 and Luke 3. The discrepancy in the number of generations is so great, that you can't use inclusion/exclusion to walk around it (and don't take this as a validation that your previous use of inclusion/exclusion was okay).