suggest that it had a place in the creed of the Church of his day. The Christians,' he says, ' reckon the beginning of their religion from Jesus Christ, who is named the Son of God Most High: and it is said that God came down from heaven, and from a Hebrew virgin took and clad Himself with flesh... He was pierced by the Jews; and He died and was buried; and they say that after three days He rose and ascended to heaven.'

(5) The Church of Alexandria has distinctive characteristics and a more or less separate history. It is therefore important to notice that in respect of the emphatic belief in the Virgin Birth it did not differ from other churches. When Origen (c. A.D. 230) states in summary 'the teaching of the Church which has been handed down from the apostles in the order of succession and continues in the churches to the present time,' he specifies that Jesus Christ' was born of a virgin and of the Holy Spirit, that He was truly born, did truly suffer and truly die, did truly rise from the dead and after His resurrection was taken up': and when arguing with Celsus the Platonist, he exclaims 'Who has not heard of Jesus' virgin birth, of the crucified, of His resurrection, of which so many are convinced, and the announcement of judgement to come? 1' So the earlier Clement (c. 190-200) describes 'the whole dispensation' thus: When one says that the Son of God who made the universe took flesh and was conceived in the womb of a virgin... and suffered and rose again2.'

(6) Besides the testimonies to the place the Virgin

1 de Princip. pref. quoted below, p. 108, and con. Cels. i. 7.

2 Clem. Strom. vi. 15. 127.

Birth held in the creeds which were taking shape in the second century, we may mention that it is referred to in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs1: and that if, as Origen tells us, the Gospel of Peter affirmed that 'the brethren of the Lord' were the sons of Joseph by a former wife, that docetic production of the early part of the second century recognized not only the virginity, but the perpetual virginity, of Mary 2.

We have evidence then that the Virgin Birth held a prominent place in the second-century tradition or creed of the churches of Rome3, Greece, Africa, Asia, Syria and Palestine", Alexandria 8. Such a consensus in the second century, reaching back to its beginning,

1 Test. Joseph. 19 ἐκ τοῦ Ἰούδα ἐγεννήθη παρθένος . . . καὶ ἐξ αὐτῆς προῆλθεν ἀμνὸς ἄμωμος. These Testaments have been commonly quoted as the work of a 'Nazarene' Jewish Christian written in the earlier part of the second century, probably before Bar-cochba's revolt (A. D. 132). But Mr. Conybeare has discovered an Armenian ms. in which some of the manifestly Christian allusions disappear, See Jewish Quarterly Review, April 1893, p. 375. The particular passage cited above appears in a longer but less plainly Christian form, p. 390. This and other evidence makes for the theory that it was originally a purely Jewish work gradually interpolated with Christian passages: see Dr. Kohler, l. c. p. 401. (If we cannot however quote this work as evidence for Jewish Christian belief, we can get behind it for the documents of the birth in Matthew and Luke unmistakeably came from Jewish circles.)

Origen, in Matt. x. 17 Toùs dè ådeλpoùs 'Iŋooû paoi tives elvai, èk παραδόσεως ὁρμώμενοι τοῦ ἐπιγεγραμμένου κατὰ Πέτρον εὐαγγελίου ἢ τῆς βίβλου Ἰακώβου, υἱοὺς Ἰωσὴφ ἐκ προτέρας γυναικὸς συνῳκηκυίας αὐτῷ πρὸ τῆς Mapías. As is well known, a fragment from the end of the Gospel has recently been discovered. For the above argument cf. Ch. Quart. Rev. Jan. 1893, p. 480. Dr. Taylor finds reference to the virgin birth in the Shepherd of Hermas: see Hermas and the Four Gospels (Cambridge, 1892), pp. 29-32.

8 Irenaeus.

4 Aristides

• Irenaeus, Justin, and Ignatius.

7

5 Tertullian.

V Ignatius, Justin, documents for first and third Gospels. 8 Clement and Origen.

among very independent churches, seems to us, apart from any question of the Gospels, to prove for the belief an apostolic origin. It could not have taken such an undisputed and universal position unless it had really had the countenance of the apostolic founders of churches-of Peter and Paul and John, of James and the Lord's 'brethren.' The argument of Tertullian and Irenaeus from the identity of distinct traditions to their apostolic origin has within certain limits conclusive force.

For there is a consensus of traditions. Opponents of the Virgin Birth appear, but it must be admitted that they are innovating upon earlier tradition or retrograding from it; and that they are opponents also of the principle of the Incarnation. There are no believers in the Incarnation discoverable, who are not also believers in the Virgin Birth: while on the other hand, it must be said that the teaching of the Virgin Birth proceeded out of that thoroughly Jewish section of the early Christian Church in which the belief in the Incarnation was not clearly developed out of the belief in Jesus as the Messiah.

(1) The first Christian who is known to have denied the Virgin Birth is Cerinthus, whom a credible tradition makes a contemporary of St. John. Among much that is legendary in his story, certain facts emerge as very probably true1. He was a Jew, 'trained in the teaching of the Egyptians,' i. e. presumably in Alexandria. His teaching in some respects was characteristically Jewish, in particular in its chiliastic eschatology and, apparently, in its insistence upon the permanent obligation of the Jewish ceremonial law, at least in parts. But his 1 See Dict. of Chr. Biog., art. CErinthus.

E

Judaism was tinged with that oriental horror of the material world which he would have learnt from the great Alexandrian Jew Philo, and which was one main characteristic of the various gnostic sects. The 'gnostic' tendency led him to attribute the creation of the world to a lower power than the Supreme God, and to draw a distinction between Jesus the material man and the 'spiritual' Christ. He declared that Jesus was not born of a virgin but was the son of Joseph and Mary, after the ordinary manner; only as he was pre-eminent beyond all other men in moral excellence, so after his baptism the Christ in the form of a dove descended upon him from the supreme region to enable him to reveal the unknown Father and to work miracles: but finally left him again before the passion, so that the man Jesus suffered and rose again, but the Christ remained spiritual and impassible'. This is a doctrine which has remarkable affinity with the sort of gnostic docetism which appears also in the Gospel of Peter, though that document is intensely anti-Jewish, and appears to have accepted the Virgin Birth 2. We need not dwell long upon it. Whatever its importance for the history of the Church, it is wholly alien from

1 Iren. con. Haer. i. 26. 1 'Iesum autem subiecit non ex virgine natum (impossibile enim hoc ei visum est); fuisse autem eum Ioseph et Mariae filium similiter ut reliqui omnes homines, et plus potuisse iustitia et prudentia et sapientia prae omnibus. Et post baptismum descendisse in eum ab ea principalitate, quae est super omnia, Christum figura columbae; et tunc annuntiasse incognitum Patrem et virtutes perfecisse: in fine autem revolasse iterum Christum de Iesu et Iesum passum esse et resurrexisse; Christum autem impassibilem perseverasse, exsistentem spiritualem.'

2 See toward the beginning of the recovered fragment, as in The Gospel according to Peter, a lecture by J. A. Robinson (Camb. 1892) pp. 20 f.

the Christianity of James or Peter, Paul or John, Matthew or Luke. To them there is no antagonism, as there is none in the canonical Old Testament, between God and the material world, and no objection, therefore, arising from such an idea to belief in the incarnation and the passion of the Son of God. The separation between the higher impassible person Christ and the lower Jesus is alien to them. Of Cerinthus then it is emphatically true that he does not represent earlier tradition, and that his rejection of the Virgin Birth arises from a rejection of the principle of the Incarnation.

(2) Justin Martyr, in argument with the Jew Trypho, tells him of the existence of a considerable body of Christians (men 'belonging to our race') who denied the Incarnation and the Virgin Birth, but still believed Christ to be the Messiah. They are not the majority, for the majority prefer to be guided by the teaching of the prophets and of Christ. But they exist, and Justin is ready to urge Trypho and other Jews, if they cannot accept the idea of the Incarnation and Virgin Birth, at least to come as far as these persons and to believe that Jesus is the Messiah1.

The Christians here alluded to are no doubt the

...

1 Justin. Dial. c. Tryph. 48 οὐκ ἀπόλλυται τὸ τοῦτον εἶναι Χριστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ, ἐὰν ἀποδεῖξαι μὴ δύνωμαι ὅτι καὶ προϋπῆρχεν υἱὸς τοῦ ποιητοῦ τῶν ὅλων, θεὸς ὤν, καὶ γεγέννηται ἄνθρωπος διὰ τῆς παρθένου. . kaì yàp eioí tives, å φίλοι, ἔλεγον, ἀπὸ τοῦ ἡμετέρου γένους ὁμολογοῦντες αὐτὸν Χριστὸν εἶναι, ἄνθρωπον δὲ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων γενόμενον ἀποφαινόμενοι· οἷς οὐ συντίθεμαι, οὐδ ̓ ἂν πλεῖστοι ταὐτά μοι δοξάσαντες εἴποιεν· ἐπειδὴ οὐκ ἀνθρωπείοις διδάγμασι κεκελεύσμεθα ὑπ' αὐτοῦ τοῦ Χριστοῦ πείθεσθαι, ἀλλὰ τοῖς διὰ τῶν μακαρίων προφητῶν κηρυχθεῖσι καὶ δι' αὐτοῦ διδαχθείσι. In c. 49 he gives us to understand that these (Ebionite) Christians believed Jesus to have been 'anointed (at His baptism) in accordance with divine selection, and thus to have become Christ.'