The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord | Page 7

disciples."* "It is an
account," says Bishop Gore, "which there is no evidence to show the
imagination of an early Christian capable of producing; for its
consummate fitness, reserve, sobriety, and loftiness are unquestionable.
What solid reason is there for not accepting it?"+ It is extraordinarily
difficult to imagine that St. Luke, whose accuracy and care have been,
in recent years, so severely tested and found not wanting, should have
been so careless as to append to his Gospel a spurious account of so
momentous an occurrence as the human 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