than against religion as a whole. No one can deny that in our Lord's case, the teaching which He gave about spirits is guarded from superstition by His teaching about God and human responsibility. Now, granted the existence of devils and angels 1, there is no reason for doubting that they have from time to time made their presence perceptible to men-in the case of angels, as messengers of God and instruments of His redemptive purpose2-and to return to St. Luke's narrative of the nativity, there is no reason for doubting that angelic ministrations were actually employed to announce the birth of the Forerunner and the incarnation and birth of the Christ.

No other considerable objections than these two, which have now been examined and set aside, have been urged against the historical character of the first two chapters of St. Luke's Gospel: we are justified therefore in falling back upon the positive considerations which indicate that the account in these chapters is derived from no other person than the Virgin Mother herself.

1 The belief in the existence and appearance of 'spirits' is quite consistent with the recognition that we know hardly anything about them. The amount of pretended knowledge on the subject in Jewish and Christian writers is appalling. But in the Bible they are, we may say, never the subjects of divine revelation for their own sake. Their 'persons' are merged in their offices of adoration and service. Where angels appear in the Bible they appear in the form of men.

The objection made against the early chapters of St. Luke on the score of the similarity of their contents to the birth-legends of heroes is met later on; § 6, p. 55.

§ 3.

The narrative of St. Matthew.

Now we approach St. Matthew's account of the nativity. The narrative of St. Luke, if it is authentic, must, as was said above, have come from Mary. The narrative of St. Matthew, on the other hand, bears upon it undesigned but evident traces of coming from the information of Joseph. It is Joseph's perplexities that are in question'. Divine intimations are recorded as given to Joseph on three occasions, leading him to act for the protection of the Mother and Child from external perils2. Now supposing the conception of Jesus really to have taken place without the intervention of Joseph, and supposing Joseph to have been, as the evangelist says, a 'just man' and to have died, as appears to have been the case, before the public ministry of our Lord began-it is only natural to suppose that he would have left behind him some document clearing up, by his own testimony, the circumstances of the birth of Jesus. If the miraculous birth was ever to have been made public, his testimony would have been imperatively needed. This document he must, we should suppose, have given to Mary to vindicate by means of it, when occasion demanded, her own virginity. Why should she not, after the establishment of the 9 i. 20, ii. 13, 19, 22.

i. 19.

3

S Joseph, like Zacharias (Luke i. 63), would have been able to write.

Church at Pentecost, have given it to the family of Joseph, the now believing 'brethren of the Lord'? Why should it not have passed from their hands to the evangelist of the first Gospel, and have been worked over by him in view of his predominant interest—that of calling attention to fulfilments of prophecies? This theory of the origin of the first two chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel at once accounts for the phenomena they present and vindicates, in substance, their historical character. That the narrative did pass through the hands of our Lord's family is more than likely, for Julius Africanus, a Christian writer of the beginning of the third century, who lived at Emmaus, informs us, and probably rightly, that it is to the relations of our Lord (oi deonóovvol Kaλоúμevo) that we owe the attempts to construct καλούμενοι) genealogies of Christ 1.

Is there then anything internal to the narrative prohibiting such a view? It is a certain historical fact that Herod was, from circumstances and disposition, acutely jealous of any royal claim which might imperil his own position and that of his family. It is certain that his

1 In Euseb. H. E. i. 7. Cf. Renan, Évang. pp. 60, 61, 186 ‘Le tour de la généalogie de Matthieu est hébraïque; les transcriptions des noms propres ne sont pas celles des Septante (Boés, et non Boós). Nous avons vu d'ailleurs que les généalogies furent probablement l'œuvre des parents de Jésus, retirés en Batanée et parlant hébreu.'

* See Joseph. Bell. Jud. i. 30. 4 ἐπτόητο τῷ φόβῳ καὶ πρὸς πᾶσαν ὑπόνοιαν ἐξερριπτέζετο. Ant. xvii. 2. η [the Pharisees] προἔλεγον ὡς Ἡρώδῃ μὲν καταπαύσεως ἀρχῆς ὑπὸ θεοῦ ἐψηφισμένης αὐτῷ τε καὶ γένει τῷ ἀπ' αὐτοῦ τῆς τε βασιλείας εἰς τε ἐκείνην [Pheroras' wife] περιηξούσης καὶ Φερώραν, παῖδάς τε οι εἶεν αὐτοῖς . . . καὶ ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν τε Φαρισαίων τοὺς αἰτιωτάτους ἀναιρεῖ καὶ Βαγώαν τὸν εὐνοῦχον, κ.τ.λ. κτείνει δὲ καὶ πᾶν ὅτι τοῦ οἰκείου συνειστήκει ois d Papioaîos éλeyev. This incident was shortly before Herod's death. 'The momentary glimpses which we gain of him in the New Testament,' says the late Dean Stanley,' through the story of his conversation with the

last days were, as Josephus records, marked by wild ferocity and brutality. Josephus' story of his shutting up in the hippodrome the élite of the nation and taking measures to cause them to be murdered directly after his own death, in order that it might not be unaccompanied with mourning1, may be a slander, but at least illustrates the impression he left of his character in his last days. Thus the history of the massacre of the few babes of Bethlehem and its district is wholly consistent with the man and the occasion. There is no one who could corroborate the evangelist except Josephus, and the silence of Josephus about all that concerns Christianity is so nearly complete that it can hardly be otherwise than intentional. Christianity was an object of hatred and suspicion to the masters of the world, when Josephus was writing, and he may well have wished to say as little about it as possible in a work expressly intended to conciliate Gentile readers.

Herod's 'massacre of innocents' is thus an exceedingly credible and natural incident. As to the visit of the Magi—which (we may notice) is introduced into the narrative chiefly as accounting for the threatened

Magi and his slaughter of the children of Bethlehem, are quite in keeping with the jealous, irritable, unscrupulous temper of the last "days of Herod the king," as we read them in the pages of Josephus' (Hist. of Jewish Church, iii. p. 380).

1 Joseph. Ant. xvii. 6. 5. He describes the king as 'rabid with guilty and innocent alike'; or (c. 8. 1) ' fierce to all alike, the slave of passion.' 2 I am assuming that the famous passage (Ant. xviii. 4. 3) about Jesus Christ is at least greatly interpolated.

3 The Antiquities was finished about A. D. 94, in Domitian's reign. On Domitian as a persecutor, see Ramsay, The Church and the Roman Empire (Hodder & Stoughton, 1893) p. 259. Josephus would be anxious to dissociate his race from the Christians.

massacre, and consequent flight of Joseph and Mary into Egypt-it has its basis at least in what is natural and well known. The diffusion of Jews in the remoter East, the wide spread of the Jewish Messianic hope1, the attraction of all sorts of men towards Jewish synagogues-all this makes it not improbable to those who believe in a divine providence that some oriental astrologers should have had their thoughts directed towards Jerusalem, and should have paid a visit there, under the attraction of some celestial phenomenon, to seek a heaven-sent king. It is not improbable because God works upon men by His inspirations through their natural tendencies and occupations 2-the supernatural, in this as in other cases, operating through the natural.

It was said above that the narrative of Joseph had been worked over by the evangelist in his predominant interest in the fulfilment of prophecy. It is of course maintained that this is less than the truth, and that the prophecies have in fact created the supposed events: so

1 Suetonius' words are well known and often quoted (Vespas. 4) ' Percrebruerat oriente toto vetus et constans opinio, esse in fatis ut eo tempore Iudaea profecti rerum potirentur. Id de imperatore Romano, quantum postea eventu patuit, praedictum Iudaei ad se trahentes rebellarunt.' But it is doubtful whether he has any source of information other than similar passages in Joseph. Bell. Jud. vi. 5. 4 and Tac. Hist. v. 13, which attribute such expectations only to the Jews. (Josephus, the Jew, originated the idea that the prophecy really referred to 'the government of Vespasian.') However, the universal diffusion of the Jews meant the universal diffusion of the Jewish expectations amongst themselves and their more or less attached proselytes.

2 See St. Chrysostom's excellent commentary on the event. God influences men through their national customs and ideas. As the whole Jewish ritual system was only an instance of national Semitic rites taken as they were and made the vehicle of divine leading, so now God led the Magi through their astrology : διὰ τῶν συνήθων αὐτοὺς καλεῖ σφόδρα συγκαταβαίνων, K.T.A. (on St. Matt. vi. 3).