not to have omitted the strange dream in the second book of Esdras (x. 44-46) where Israel is a woman and the Temple is the son: "This woman whom thou sawest is Sion ... she hath been thirty years barren, but after thirty years Solomon builded the city and offered offerings, and then bare the barren a son." Does not this continuous stream of thought shew how natural it would be for the earliest Jewish Christians to adore Christ in their hymns as the son of the daughter of Zion, the son of the Virgin Mother? Add to this the prejudice among the Gentile converts against a human paternity for the Son of God, the influence of the Alexandrine Jewish philosophy and the still more powerful influence of Isaiah's prophecy about "the virgin," and I think you will see that the causes at work to produce the belief in the Miraculous Conception were so strong that I may almost say a miracle would have been needed to prevent it.
But it has been urged that St. Luke was a historian and a physician; that he had great power of careful description—as may be seen from his exact account of St. Paul's shipwreck;—that he describes the circumstances of the miraculous birth in a plain and simple manner: and that he assures us that he had taken every pains to make himself acquainted with the truth of the things which he records.[1] All this may be: but because a man can describe exactly a comparatively recent shipwreck, which he may have himself witnessed, or which at all events may have been witnessed by some who told him the story, it does not follow that he has exact information about a miraculous birth which occurred (if at all) upwards of sixty years—more probably upwards of seventy—before he wrote. The mother of Jesus had, in all probability, passed away when St. Luke was writing. Such obscurities and variations by this time attended the stories concerning
- ↑ Contemporary Review, Feb. 1886, p. 193.
