The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord | Page 5

alethos phainetai tois me ten aletheian egnokosian, hot' an tis ton huion tou theou, tou ta panta pepoiekotos, sarka aneilephota, kai en metra parthenou kuoporethenta . . . teponthota kei anestramenon legei." --
7. Origen.
In the De Principiis, Origen writes: "The particular points clearly delivered in the teaching of the Apostles are as follows: First, that there is one God, . . . then that Jesus Christ Himself who came [into the world] was born of the Father before all creation; that after He had been the minister of the Father in the creation of all things--for by Him were all things made--in the last times, emptying Himself He became man and was incarnate, although He was God, and being made man He remained that which He was, God. He assumed a body like our own, differing in this respect only, that it was born of a Virgin and of the Holy Spirit."*
-- * De Principiis, Lib. I., Pref., 4. "Species vero eorum quae per praedicationem apostolicam manifeste traduntur, istae sunt, Primo, quod unus Deus est . . . tum deinde quia Jesus Christus ipse qui venit, ante omnem creaturam natus ex Patre est. Qui cum in omnium conditione Patri ministrasset (per ipsum enim omnia facta sunt); novissimis temporibus se ipsum exinaniens, homo fictus incarnatus est, cum Deus esset, et homo, factus mansit quod erat, Deus. Corpus assumsit nostro corpori simile, eo solo differens, quod natum ex Virgine et Spiritu Sancto est." --
In his Treatise against Celsus he exclaims: "Who has not heard of the Virgin-Birth of Jesus, of the Crucified, of His Resurrection of which so many are convinced, and the announcement of the judgment to come?"+
-- + Contr. Celsum, i. 7. "Tini gar lanthanei he ek parthenou gennesis Iesus kai ho estauromenos kai he papa pollois pepistreumene anastasis autou, kai he katangellomene krisis." --
Think for a moment what all this agreement--this consensus of tradition implies. The testimony of these writers clearly shows that in the early part of the second century, and reaching back to its very beginning, the Virgin-Birth formed part of the tradition or doctrinal creed of the Church, and that this tradition was believed to be traced back to the Apostles. It has a place in the earliest forms of the Creed: it is insisted upon by the earliest Apologists. It is not merely in one Church or two Churches, in one district or in two, that this tradition is found. It is everywhere. In East and West alike. It is so in Rome and in Gaul (by the testimony of Irenaeus). It is in Greece (by the testimony of Aristides). It is in Africa (by the testimony of Tertullian); in Alexandria (by the testimony of Clement and Origen); in Asia (by the testimony of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Ignatius); in Palestine and Syria (by the testimony of Ignatius and Justin Martyr). Irenaeus, if any one, should know what the Apostles taught, for before he came to Rome he had been the pupil of Polycarp in Asia, who had himself sat at the feet of St. John. "Everything that we know," says Mr. Rendel Harris, "of the Dogmatics of the early part of the second century agrees with the belief that at that period the Virginity of Mary was a part of the formulated Christian belief."* How could the belief in the Virgin-Birth have taken such undisputed possession of so many widely separated and independent Churches unless it had had Apostolic authority?+ What other explanation can be given for the fact? There is as complete a consensus of tradition as could reasonably be asked for. It is impossible to imagine that the doctrine of the Virgin-Birth can have been suddenly evolved in the early years of the second century. The only adequate explanation is that it was a substantial part of the Apostolic tradition. It may be worth while here to quote the words of so distinguished a scholar as Professor Zahn, of Erlangen. "This [the Virgin-Birth] has been an element of the Creed as far as we can trace it back; and if Ignatius can be taken as a witness of a Baptismal Creed springing from early Apostolic times, certainly in that Creed the name of the Virgin Mary already had its place .... We may further assert that during the first four centuries of the Church, no teacher and no religious community which can be considered with any appearance of right as an heir of original Christianity, had any other notion of the beginning of the [human] life of Jesus of Nazareth .... The theory of an original Christianity without the belief in Jesus the Son of God, born of the Virgin, is a fiction."#
-- * See Texts and Studies (Cambridge, 1891), vol. i. No. I, p. 25. + "Ecquid verisimile est, ut tot