The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord | Page 7

Birth of our Lord. "Historical accuracy is not a capricious and intermittent impulse," writes Bishop Alexander. "It is a fixed habit of mind, the result of a particular discipline. Historians of the school of the author of the Acts of the Apostles are not men to build a flamboyant portal of romance over the entrance to the austere temple of truth."#
-- * St. Luke i. 1-4. + Gore, Dissertations, p. 18. # Bishop Alexander's Leading Ideas of the Gospels, pp. 154, 155. --
(2) The account in St. Matthew's Gospel, if genuine, must have come from Joseph. It is his perplexities which are in question, and Divine intimations are given to him, on three occasions, how to act for the safety of the mother and the Child. The facts which appear in the Third Gospel are clearly prior to those reported in the First: the Annunciation, Mary's visit to Judaea, her return to Nazareth, precede Joseph's discovery and dream, which follow appropriately upon the Virgin's return. How this account has been preserved in the First Gospel we do not know, for we know so very little about the authorship of that Gospel; but there is nothing at all unreasonable in Bishop Gore's conjecture* that St. Joseph (who must have died before the public ministry of our Lord began) left some document detailing the circumstances of the Birth of Jesus Christ; that this document would have been given to Mary (to vindicate, by means of it, when occasion demanded, her own virginity), and that after Pentecost she may have given it to the family of Joseph, the now believing "brethren of the Lord," and from their hands it passed into those of the author of the First Gospel.
-- * Gore, Dissertations, pp. 28, 29. --
The Evangelist dwells, as is well known, on the fulfilment of prophecy; but in regard to the particular prophecy of Isaiah, "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call His name Immanuel,"* it cannot with any probability be said that the prophecy suggested the event; for it does not seem at all likely that there was any Jewish expectation that the Christ should be born of a Virgin. We can understand the prophecy being adduced in order to attest a story already current (this would be wholly after St. Matthew's method); but the prophecy itself, with one's eye on the Hebrew text of Isaiah,+ could scarcely have led to the fabrication of this particular story about the Messiah's birth. Probably the notion of a Virgin-born Messiah would have been alien to ordinary Jewish ideas.# In any case, the Jews did not so interpret the passage, and in fact, to quote Professor Stanton, "It is an instance in which the principle would hold that it is more easy to suppose the meaning of prophetic language to have been strained to fit facts, than that facts should have been invented to correspond with prophetic language."^ That is to say, it is wholly reasonable and entirely in keeping with the method of the first Evangelist, that when once he had come to know that the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem of a Virgin-Mother, he should have recognized in that wondrous birth the fulfilment of the ancient prophecy of Isaiah. He would then see that whatever primary and lesser fulfilment the words of Isaiah might have, they were only completely fulfilled in Him who is the end of all prophecy, who was conceived of the Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary.| -- * Isa. vii. 14. + See Note at the end. # So Dr. Chase. ^ Stanton, Jewish and Christian Messiah, p. 378. | See Eck, The Incarnation, p. 87. --
It is hard to bring one's self to speak of the theory put forward by Professor Usener, in which he says that the story of the Virgin-Birth is traceable "to a pagan substratum, and that it must have arisen in Gentile circles."* Surely this is wholly contrary to all probability. How can any serious student think that any but Jewish hands could have penned the first two chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel? "The story," says Professor Chase, "moves, like that of St. Luke, within the circle of Eastern conceptions; it is pre-eminently and essentially Jewish. Moreover, if time is to be found for the complicated interaction between paganism and Christianity which this theory involves, the First and Third Gospels must be placed at a date which I believe is quite untenable."+
-- * Encyc. Bibl., iii. 3352. + Chase, Supernatural Elements in our Lord's Earthly Life, p. 21. --
That there are differences and even discrepancies between the two accounts, which are manifestly independent of one another, serves surely to strengthen their witness to the great central fact in which they are at one--that Christ was