XXV
My dear ——,
I had not forgotten that, in order to complete the brief discussion of the miraculous element in the New Testament, it is necessary to give some explanation of the origin of the accounts of the birth of Christ. Your last letter reminds me of this necessity, and you put before me two alternatives. "If," you say, "Christ was born of a Virgin, then a miracle is conceded so stupendous that it is absurd to object to the other miracles: but if Christ was not born of a Virgin, then, unless the honesty of the Gospel narratives is to be impeached, some account is needed of the way in which the miraculous legend found its way into the Gospels;" and you add that you would like to know what meaning, if any, I attach to the statement in the Creed, that Jesus was "born of a Virgin."
As you probably anticipate, I accept the latter of your alternatives, and I will therefore endeavour briefly to shew how the story of the Miraculous Conception "found its way into the Gospels." But first I must protest against your expression as inexact. The story of the Miraculous Conception, so far from having "found its way into the Gospels found its way into only two out of the four, namely, St. Matthew's and St, Luke's. And this fact, strong as it is, does not represent the strength of the negative argument from omission. Of the nine authors, or thereabouts, of the different books in the New Testament, only two contain any account, reference, or allusion to the Miraculous Conception. No mention is made of it in any of the numerous Epistles of St. Paul; nor in any of his speeches, nor in those of St. Peter, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, nor in any part of that book; nor in the Epistles of St. John, St. James, St. Peter, St. Jude; nor in the Apocalypse; nor in the Gospels of St. Mark and St. John! Even the two Gospels that mention it contain no evidence that it was known to any of the disciples during the life-time of Jesus, and one of these (Luke iii. 23) traces the genealogy of Jesus from Joseph and expressly declares that He "was supposed" to be "the Son of Joseph."[1] This negative evidence becomes all the more weighty if you consider how very natural it was, and I may almost say inevitable, that the story of a Miraculous Conception should speedily find its way into the traditions of the early Church. The causes that worked toward this result were, first, Old Testament prophecy; secondly, traditions and expressions current among a certain section of the Jews; thirdly, the preconceptions of pagan converts.
Recall to mind what was said in a previous letter concerning the importance attached by the earliest Christians to the argument from prophecy. Now there is a prophecy in Isaiah which, if separated from its context, might seem to point to nothing but the Miraculous Conception of the Messiah: "The Lord himself shall give you a sign: behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel." But a careful study of the context puts the matter in a quite different light. Isaiah (vii. 10—viii. 4) is promising to King Ahaz deliverance from the kings of Syria and Samaria. As the king will not ask for a sign, the prophet promises that the Lord will give him one; a virgin shall conceive and bring forth a child and shall call his name Immanuel ("God with us"): he shall "eat butter and honey" when he arrives at the age of distinction between good and evil; for before he arrives at that age, the land abhorred by Ahaz shall be "forsaken by both her kings." The meaning appears to be that, within the time necessary for the conception and birth of a child, that is to say, in less than a year, the prospects of deliverance for Judah from her present enemies (Syria and Samaria) shall so brighten that a child shall be born and called by a name implying the favour of God; afterwards, before that child shall grow up to childhood, the two aggressive countries of Syria and Samaria shall be themselves desolated, as well as Judah, by the "razor" of Assyria which shall shave the country clean from all cultivated crops. Amid the general desolation, the fruit trees will be cut down, the corn will not be sown; bread there will be none; there will be nothing to eat but "butter and honey;" it is not the new-born child alone who shall eat "butter and honey;" "butter and honey shall every one eat that is left in the land" (vii. 22).
In all this, even though we may suppose that there may have been some Messianic reference, there is no prediction at all of a conception from a virgin or of a miracle of any kind. Indeed, the prophecy appears to find some sort of fulfilment in what happens immediately afterwards (Isaiah viii. 1-4), when the prophet contracts a marriage, and calls the son who springs from it by a name implying the vengeance imminent on Samaria and Assyria: "Call his name Maher-shalal-hash-baz (i.e. booty, quick, spoil, speedy): for before the boy shall have knowledge to cry my father! my mother! the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria." No doubt it may be said that this son was not called "Immanuel," so that the prophecy was not fulfilled in him. But the same argument might be urged against the application to our Lord; for He also was not called "Immanuel," but received the old national name of "Joshua," "Jeshua," or "Jesus." Reviewing all the circumstances of the prophecy, I think we may say, without exaggeration, first, that there are no grounds for seeing in it any reference to a Miraculous Conception; secondly, that, when isolated, it might easily be misinterpreted so as to convey such a reference.[2]
Even if no such prophecy had existed, the language and preconceptions of the earliest Christians and their converts would almost necessarily have introduced a belief in the Miraculous Conception. The language of Philo—who represents not a mere individual eccentricity but the current phraseology of the Alexandrine school of thought, and whose influence may be traced in almost every page of the Fourth Gospel—consistently affirms that, whenever a child is mentioned in the Old Testament as having been born to be a deliverer in fulfilment of a divine promise, that child is "begotten of God." The words of Sarah, he says, indicate that, in reality, "The Lord begot Isaac." God is also spoken of as "the husband of Leah." Zipporah is described as being "pregnant by no mortal." Samuel, in words that contain an implied belief that only his maternal parentage was mortal, is declared to be "perhaps a man," and "born of a human mother." I have already quoted one passage about Isaac; but another asserts that he is to be considered "not the result of generation but the work of the unbegotten." Sometimes the language of Philo is so worded as to convey even to a careful reader the impression that he believed in a literally Miraculous Conception, as for example when he says that "Moses introduces Sarah as being pregnant when alone, and as being visited by God." Elsewhere, he removes the possibility of misunderstanding by saying that "the Scripture is cautious, and describes God as the husband, not of a virgin, but of virginity." None the less, you can easily see how expressions of this kind, current among Jewish philosophers a generation before the time of St. Paul, might be very easily interpreted literally by ordinary people unskilled in these metaphorical subtleties, and especially by Gentile converts asking for a plain answer to a plain question, "What was the parentage of this man whom you call the Son of God?"
In truth the preconceptions of the Gentile converts must have played no small part in preparing the way for the doctrine of the literal Miraculous Conception. The Greeks and Romans who worshipped or honoured Æsculapius son of Apollo, Romulus son of Mars, Hercules son of Jupiter, and a score of other demi-gods, would be quite familiar with the notion of a god or hero born of a human mother and of a divine father; they would not only be prepared for it in the case of Jesus, whom they were called on to adore as the Son of God, they would even demand and assume it. They would argue much as Tertullian argued: "If he was the son of a man, he was not the son of God; and if he was the son of God, he was not the son of a man." This argument ought to have been met by a flat denial, thus: "The mere physical and carnal union by which, according to your legends, the gods, assuming the forms of men, generated Æsculapius, Romulus, and Hercules, is not to be thought of here. When we speak of Jesus being the Son of God, we do not mean that His body was formed by God descending from heaven and assuming human shape or functions, but that His Spirit was spiritually begotten of God. It is therefore quite possible that Jesus may have been the Son of God according to the Spirit and yet the son of man according to the flesh." But instead of that, the whole truth, there came back this half-true answer. "The parentage was divine, but not of the materialistic nature you suppose: God did not assume human shape: the generation was spiritual." By these words there may have been meant at first, simply what Philo meant, that while the spiritual parentage was divine, the material parentage was human: but such an answer would leave many under the impression that the body as well as the spirit of Jesus resulted from a spiritual generation in which no human father participated. The Gentiles would naturally interpret the Philonian doctrine literally and say of Mary, as Philo had said of Sarah, that she was "pregnant when alone, and visited by God."
From a very different point of view, the ritual and hymnals of some of the Jews might facilitate the growth of the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin. For they might naturally speak of their Messiah as being a child of the virgin daughter of Sion, whose only husband was Jehovah. And hence in the Apocalypse, a book imbued with Jewish feeling, we find Jesus described (xii. 1—6) as the child of a woman who evidently represents Israel: "A woman arrayed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars; and she was with child.... And she was delivered of a son, a man child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron." This personification of the daughter of Israel or of Jerusalem as representing the nation, the bride of Jehovah, is very common in the prophets. You may find similar personifications in the New Testament. The Apocalypse describes the Church as the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, descending from Heaven "as a bride adorned for her husband." St. Paul speaks of the New Jerusalem, which is above (i.e. the spiritual Jerusalem, free from the law), as being "the mother of us all." Sometimes the personification of the Church is liable to be misinterpreted literally, as in St. Peter's and St. John's Epistles, where "the elect lady" "thine elect sister" and "the (lady) in Babylon" have been supposed by some to refer to individuals, but are believed by Bishop Lightfoot to represent the Churches of the places from which, and to which, the epistles were written. The whole of St. Paul's Epistles presuppose the metaphor of a Virgin Church, and toward the end of the second century (177 A.D.) we find a very curious passage (in an epistle from the Church of Lyons) in which the repentance and martyrdom of some previous apostates are described as a restoration to "the Virgin Mother" of her children, "raised from the dead." You see then how this personification runs through all Jewish and all early Christian literature, so that the Church, old or new, might be described as a woman; and I ought perhaps 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.[3] 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 the infancy of Jesus, that we find even the compiler of St. Matthew's Gospel apparently ignorant that the home of the parents of Jesus was (if St. Luke is correct on this point) not Bethlehem, but Nazareth. It is hardly possible to deny his ignorance when we find in the First Gospel these words: "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judæa.... And he arose and took the young child and his mother and came into the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judæa, he was afraid to go thither; and being warned [of God] in a dream, he withdrew into the parts of Galilee and came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth." Obviously the writer is ignorant that "a city called Nazareth" was the original home of the parents of Jesus, and that they had no reason for returning to "Judæa;" his whole narrative assumes that Bethlehem in Judæa was the home, and that the parents of Jesus were only prevented from returning thither by the fear of Archelaus, which forced them to leave their native city and to take up their abode in "a city called Nazareth." Now it is probable that St. Luke's account is here the correct one, and that the erroneous tradition found in the First Gospel was a mere inference from the prophecy that "from Bethlehem" there should "come forth a governor." But what a light does this discrepancy throw upon the uncertainty of the very earliest traditions about the infancy of Jesus when we find the only two Evangelists who say anything about it, differing as to the place where the parents of Jesus lived at the time when they were married! I have no doubt that St. Luke did his best, in the paucity, or more probably in the variety, of conflicting traditions, to select those which seemed to him most authoritative and most spiritual. Even the most careless reader of the English text must feel, without knowing a word of Greek, that St. Luke's first two chapters—which contain the stories of the infancy—are entirely different from the style of the preface (i. 1-4), and from that of the rest of the Gospel. The two chapters sound, even in English, like a bit out of the Old Testament; and any Greek scholar, accustomed to the LXX, would recognize that they were either a close translation from the Aramaic, or written by some one who wrote in Greek, modelling his style on the LXX. It is probable that they represent some traditions of Aramaic origin, the best that St. Luke could find when he began to write of the wonders that had happened more than sixty or seventy years ago. To those who can form the least conception of the extent to which Oriental tradition in the villages of Galilee might be transmuted after an interval of sixty or seventy years, it must seem quite beside the mark to assert the historical accuracy of the tradition concerning the Miraculous Conception which St. Luke has incorporated in his Gospel, on the ground that he was a physician; that he took pains to get at the truth; and that he has written a masterly and exact account of a shipwreck which he, or some friends of his, may have witnessed in person.
The very sobriety of his own preface ought to put us on our guard against attaching to St. Luke's history such weight, for example, as we attach to the history of Thucydides. He says, it is true, that he had "traced the course of all things accurately from the first, i.e. from the commencement of Christ's life:" but this amounts to much less than the statement of Thucydides, who tells us that he had personally inquired from those who knew the facts, besides having seen some of the facts himself (Thuc. i. 22). He does not say that "the eye-witnesses and ministers of the word" had given him any special information: on the contrary he mentions himself only as one of many who had received "traditions" from eye-witnesses, and he implies that a good many of the existing narratives, based upon these very traditions, were at least so far unsatisfactory that they did not dispense with an additional narrative from him. The emphasis which St. Luke lays on the fact that he has traced things "from the first," and that he writes "in order,"—combined with the mention of "many" predecessors who have "taken in hand" the work which he intends to do over again—makes it almost certain that some of these Evangelists had omitted all account of our Lord's birth; others had not regarded chronological order; others had not written "accurately." All these deficiencies indicate a great and general difficulty in obtaining exact information; and the mere honesty of a new attempt, under circumstance so disadvantageous, cannot justify us in attaching a very high authority to a tradition in this new Gospel, of a miraculous character, and in a style that appears to be not St. Luke's own, referring to an incident supposed to have occurred upwards of sixty years before. This digression about St. Luke's Gospel will not be without its use if it leads you to perceive that history, and experience, and criticism, while they tend to make us believe more, tend also to make us know less, about Christ's life and doctrine; I mean, that we find we know a little less about the historical facts of Christ's life than we supposed we knew, while we are led to believe a great deal more in the divine depth and wisdom of His ideas.
I pass to the second question which you put to me, "What sense, if any, do you yourself attach to the statement in the Creed that Christ was born of a Virgin?" Before I tell you what sense I attach to it, or rather what sense seems to me the only one compatible with the facts, I must honestly express my doubt whether any sense that is compatible with the facts, is also compatible with the words. To speak plainly, the statement appears to be so obviously literal that I shrink from interpreting it metaphorically; and yet, if taken literally, it appears to me to be false. The word "Virgin" is perhaps the only word in the service and ritual of the Church of England (if the Athanasian Creed be left out of consideration, owing to the non-natural and humane interpretations of it which have been sanctioned by high authority) which has made me doubt at times whether I ought to do official work as a minister in that Church. As regards the "resurrection of the body," asserted in one of the Creeds, I feel little or no difficulty: for St. Paul's use of the term "spiritual body" allows great latitude to those who would give a spiritual interpretation to the phrase in the Creed; and I trust that I have made it clear to you that I accept Christ's Resurrection as a reality, though a spiritual reality.[4] But the words implying the birth from the Virgin stand on a different footing. In the Resurrection of Jesus I believe that there was a unique vision of the buried Saviour, apparent to several disciples at a time; but in the conception and birth of Jesus I have no reason for thinking that there was anything unusual apparent to the senses. What can I mean then by saying that Jesus is "born of a Virgin"?
All that I can mean is this. Human generation does not by any means account for the birth of a new human spirit. So far as we are righteous, we all owe our righteousness to a spiritual seed within us; "we are not," as Philo would say, "the result of generation but the work of the Unbegotten." So far as we are righteous, we are "born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John i. 13). But of the Lord Jesus Christ we are in the habit of saying and believing that He was uniquely and entirely righteous; and therefore we say that He was uniquely and entirely born of God. In all human generation there must be some congenital divine act, if a righteous soul is to be produced; and in the generation of Christ there was a unique congenital act of the Holy Spirit. That Word of God which in various degrees inspires every righteous human soul (none can say how soon in its existence) did not inspire Jesus, but was (to speak in metaphor) totally present in Jesus from the first so as to exclude all imperfection of humanity. Human unrighteousness—such as we are in the habit of attributing to human generation—there was, in this case, none. Therefore we say that the generation of Jesus was not human but divine.
So much I can honestly say because I heartily believe it. How far one is justified in putting so strained an interpretation on the words "born of the Virgin Mary"—even in the Church of England, where simultaneous conservatism and progress have been bought at the cost of many strained interpretations—is a question on which I may perhaps hereafter say a word or two, but not now. Meantime let me merely add my conviction that there may have been a time when this illusion of the Miraculous Conception did more good than harm. In former days, that spiritual truth which we can now disentangle from the story of the Miraculous Conception may have been conveyed by means of it to hearts which would have otherwise never recognized that Jesus was the Son of God. It was surely better then, and it is better now, that men should believe the great truth that Jesus is the Son of God, at the cost of believing (provided they can honestly believe) the untruth that Jesus was not the son of Joseph, than that they should altogether fail to recognize His divine Sonship, because they were alive to the fact that He was born of human parents in accordance with the laws of humanity. But in these days the doctrine of the Miraculous Conception seems to me fraught with evil; partly because the weakness of the evidence makes the narrative a stumbling-block for many who are taught to consider this doctrine essential and who cannot bring themselves to believe it; partly because it tends to sanction a false and monastic ideal of life; to separate Jesus from common humanity and from human love and sympathy; and to encourage false notions about a material Resurrection of the body of Jesus, which naturally result in a false, bewildering, and disorderly expectation of a material Resurrection for ourselves.
- ↑ Yet I have heard it said, "So far as evidence goes, you have no more reason for rejecting the Miraculous Conception than for rejecting the story that Jesus washed the feet of the Apostles: for two witnesses attest the former; but only one, the latter. Your objection is a priori." Such arguments seem to me to fail to recognize the first principles of evidence. The omission of a stupendous marvel, an integral part (and is not the parentage an integral part?) of a biography, by biographers who have no motive for omitting it and every motive for inserting it, is a strong proof that they did not know it. For a similar instance, see above, p. 167.
- ↑ You remember that the two accounts of the Miraculous Conception differ in respect of the "annunciation"; which St. Matthew describes as being made to Joseph, St. Luke as being made to Mary. It is interesting to note how these two variations correspond to two variations in the ancient prophecy.
In the LXX the name is to be given to the child, not by the mother, but by the future husband: "The virgin shall be with child and bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Immanuel". In the Hebrew, the "virgin," or "maiden," is herself to name the child: "A virgin shall ... bring forth and shall call, &c." Adopting the former version, a narrator would infer that the announcement of the birth was to be made to Joseph, as the first Gospel does: "She shall bring forth a child and thou (Joseph) shalt call his name Jesus." Adopting the latter version, and changing the third into the second person for the purpose of an "annunciation," the narrator would infer that since the name was to be given by the mother, the announcement was made to the mother, as the third Gospel does: "Thou shalt be with child, and shalt bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus."
Note also that afterwards, when St. Matthew actually quotes the whole prophecy with the name "Immanuel" (i. 23), he alters the verb into the third person plural; "That it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a child, and they shall call his name Immanuel." The reason is obvious. It would not be true to say that Mary called her son "Immanuel;" it would only be possible to suggest that men in general ("they"), looking on the Child as the token of God's presence among them, might bestow on him some such title (not name) as "God with us." Consequently St. Matthew here alters "thou" into "they."
- ↑ Contemporary Review, Feb. 1886, p. 193.
- ↑ I must admit that a more serious difficulty is presented to Sponsors by the interrogative form of the Creed in the Baptismal service, to which they are expected to reply in the affirmative: "Dost thou believe .. in the Resurrection of the flesh?" But I can hardly think that many clergymen would wish to reject an otherwise eligible Sponsor who confided to them that he could only accept "flesh" in the sense of "body," and that too in the Pauline sense of "spiritual body."