Matthew 1:1
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
You've probably never read the genealogy of Christ in Matthew, have you? Most people haven't. That's okay. Genealogies are a snooze–unless you know something about the people in them. Then they get interesting. Matthew's audience knew about these people. They were Jews, you see, and naturally interested in whether Jesus was, in fact, the "son of David, the son of Abraham". A proposed Messiah who, whoever nifty, was not sprung from the line of David and who did not, in fact, fulfill what the prophets of Israel had prophesied was not Messiah. God gave these criteria to Israel for a reason: the Messiah was to be rooted in history and reality, not in wishes and cloud cuckoo myth. It's part of what happens when the Word is made flesh: he had to come from somewhere and have a particular blood type, hair color and lineage. That's what real people have and Jesus is real, not a wish.