The Life Of Jesus Christ In Its Historical Connexion

The accounts of Matthew and Luke agree in stating that the birth of Christ was the result of a direct creative act of God, and not of the ordinary laws of human generation. They who deny this must make one of two assumptions; either that all the accounts are absolute fables, or that some actual fact was the ground-work of the fabulous conception.

Those who adopt the former view tell us that, after Christ had made himself conspicuous by his great acts, men, struck with his extraordinary character, formed a theory of his birth to correspond with it. But this assumption is utterly irreconcilable with the simple and prosaic style in which Matthew tells the story of Joseph's perplexity at finding Mary pregnant before her time; [31] and the supposition that this prosaic narrative was the offspring of some previous mythical description, is out of all harmony with the character of the primitive Christian times. As for the second assumption, those who adopt it can assign no possible fact to explain the origin of the account, but one of so base a nature as utterly to shock every religious feeling, and every just notion of the overruling Providence of God. Had such an occurrence ever been deemed possible, the fanatical enemies of Christ would very soon have made use of it. [32] Both these assumptions failing, nothing remains but to admit that the birth of Christ was a phenomenon out of the ordinary course of nature. [33]

Nor would such a mythus have been consistent with Jewish modes of thought. The Hindoo mind might have originated a fable of this character, though in a different form from that in which the account of the Evangelists is given; but the Jewish had totally different tendencies. Such a fable as the birth of the Messiah from a virgin could have arisen any where else easier than among the Jews; their doctrine of the Divine Unity, which placed an impassable gulf between God and the world; their high regard for the marriage relation, which led them to abhor unwedded life; and, above all, their full persuasion that the Messiah was to be an ordinary man, undistinguished by any thing supernatural, and not to be endowed with Divine power before the time of his solemn consecration to the Messiahship, all conspired to render such an invention impossible among them. The accounts of Isaac, Samson, and Samuel cannot be quoted as in point; these case[ rather illustrate the Hebrew notion of the blessing of fruitfulness; and in them all the Divine power was shown, not in excluding the male, but in rendering the long-barren female fruitful, contrary to all human expectation. The conception of Christ would have been analogous to these, had Mary, after long barrenness, borne a son, or had Joseph been too old to expect offspring at the time. [34]

It was on this very account, viz., because the miraculous conception was foreign to the prevailing Jewish modes of thought, [35] that one sect of the Ebionites, who could not free themselves from their old prejudices, refused to admit the doctrine; and the section which contains the account is excluded from the Ebionitish recension of the Gospel to the Hebrews, which arose from the same source as our Matthew. As for the single obscure passage in Isa., vii., it could hardly have given rise to such a tradition among the people of Palestine, where, unquestionably, Matthew's Gospel originated.