holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.'1 Neither with the Virgin-birth, nor with the heavenly voice at the baptism, does he seem acquainted. It is difficult to suppose (with Usener) that the story was unknown to the Fourth Evangelist'; it appears more likely, as Prof. Gardner interprets the signs, that he wished to convey a protest against it. When he ascribes to Jesus such sayings as 'It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing,' or 'that which is born of the flesh is flesh,' he strives to lift the question of origins on to another plane, where a miracle of physical generation is altogether out of place.

On the other hand, we can no longer ignore the fact that the idea of a wondrous birth without human fatherhood appears in a multitude of tales which can be traced literally round the world 'from China to Peru.' 5 The incidents of folk-lore are doubtless unsuitable for comparison with narratives like those in our Gospels; they are part of a common stock of imaginative material reproduced without purpose or authority from age to age and land to land, destitute of historic significance. But they are the founda

1 Romans 134. The words of Psalm 27 are apparently applied in Acts 133 to the resurrection.

2 Encl. Bibl. iii. 3347.

3 It is commonly admitted that he used both Matthew and Luke, see ante, Lect. VII. p. 398.

5 Miraculous conception of the founder of the house of Chow, Sacred Books of the East, vol. iii. p. 397: cp. another story of the wondrous birth of the founder of the house of Shang, ibid. p. 307. Peru, cp. Hartland, Legend of Perseus, i. p. 118-9.

tion of other cases which cannot be dismissed so
lightly; the wide-spread acceptance of the folk-
tale supplies a form for more serious doctrine. The
idea appears already under the Middle Empire of
ancient Egypt'; and earlier still the kings of the
Fifth and Sixth Dynasties called themselves sons of
the sun-god. In the case of Amon-hotep III. (of
the Eighteenth Dynasty) it was wrought out with
amazing realism on a wall of the temple of Luxor.
Amon himself descended from heaven and stood
beside the virgin who should become a mother3:

'Amon-hotep,' he is made to say, 'is the name of the son
who is in thy womb. He shall grow up according to the words
that proceed out of thy mouth. He shall exercise sovereignty
and righteousness in this land unto its very end. My soul is in
him, (and) he shall wear the twofold crown of royalty, ruling the
two worlds like the sun for ever.'

This is only the natural sequel of the language
in which again and again the Egyptian kings are
described as filially related to a paternal god.
Tahutmes IV. paid great honour to the sun-god
Ra in the form of Harmachis. To this deity the
Sphinx at Gizeh was dedicated, and Tahutmes
cleared its vast form of the accumulations of the

1 Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, p. 491.

To Amon are dedicated some of the noblest of the Egyptian hymns. He'
is 'lord of eternity, Maker everlasting'; from his eyes proceed mankind, of
his mouth are the gods; he is maker of grass for the cattle, and of fruitful
trees for men, 'lying awake when all men sleep to seek out the good of his
creatures'; see C. W. Goodwin, Records of the Past, ii. 129.

3 Sayce, ibid. p. 249.

4 1423-1414 B.C., Petrie, History of Egypt, vol ii. (1896), p. 166.

5 A hymn to Ra-Harmachis is translated by Dr. E. L. Lushington in
Records of the Past, viii. p. 131.

desert sand in memory of a noon-day dream beneath its shadow, when he had rested there once during the chase in his youth:

'A rest he made in the shadow of this god, sleep fell upon him, dreaming in slumber in the moment when the sun was overhead. Found he the majesty of this noble god, talking to him by his mouth, speaking like the talk of a father to his son, saying, Look thou at me! Behold thou me! My son Tahutmes, I am thy father, Hor-em-akht, Khepra, Ra, and Tum, giving to thee the kingdom. On thee shall be placed its white crown ar.d its red crown, on the throne of Seb the heir. There is given to thee the land in its length and in its breadth, which is lightened by the bright eye of the universal lord... Draw near, and behold I am with thee.' 1

A little later, Rameses the Great is engaged in his campaign against the Hittites of Syria; and the court-scribe Pentaüra describes his appeal to the great Theban deity Amun-ra in the crisis of battle:

'Shouldst thou be my father, O Amun? And, behold, should a father forget his son? Have I then put my trust in my own thoughts? Have I not walked according to the word of thy mouth? Has not thy mouth directed my marches, and have not thy counsels guided me? Amun will bring low them that know not God.'

The religious motive in such passages as these is transparent. Of course it may be dismissed as insincere or conventional. But the analogy to modes of thought in the line of Israel's development is strongly marked. And the transition from

1 Jacob dreams at night, Gen. 2811-16, and receives a similar promise of land for himself and his seed, with a similar declaration of divine protection 15, 'and behold I am with thee.' But no paternal care is here implied, as in the case of David, 2 Sam. 714 'I will be his father, and he shall be my son.'

2 Tiele, History of the Egyptian Religion (1882), p. 152.

the conception of a divine Fatherhood endowing the royal son with dominion to that of positive paternity takes place with a bold literalness before our eyes on the walls of Luxor in a manner which shows how easily symbols might be converted into facts. May we not believe that a similar conversion was effected in a nobler form by early Christian imagination ?1

In truth, however, it is frankly recognised that this doctrine does not really rest upon historic evidence. It enters the believer's mind by an act of faith. If it be enquired on what this faith is founded, some may answer, 'the Scripture record.'

With

1 If it be replied (as, for example by Prof. Sanday, Hastings' Dict. of the Bible, vol. ii. p. 647) that there was not time for such a transition in view of the newer dates assigned to the Gospels, it may be observed that the report that Plato was the son of Apollo was circulated in Athens during his life-time, and was sufficiently important for his nephew Speusippus expressly to deny it at his uncle's funeral, cp. First Three Gospels, 2nd ed. p. 160, and Origen, Against Celsus, i. 37. For the similar case of Augustus, cp. First Three Gospels, p. 160, and Gardner, Exploratio Evangelica, p. 241-2. When Dellius, the friend of Antony came into Judea, he was so much struck with the beauty of Herod's wife Mariamne and her brother Aristobulus, grandchildren of the high priest Hyrcanus, that he began to 'talk portents' and complimented their mother by the suggestion that they were not of human birth, but from some god, Josephus, Antiquities, xv. 2, 6. A remarkable story is related by the historian Justin, xv. 4, of the birth of Seleucus (afterwards the founder of Antioch) whose mother Laodice, though married to Antiochus, received a visit from Apollo. The god left his pledge in the shape of a ring (afterwards found in the bed), on which was engraved an anchor! The thigh of Seleucus, and the same limb of his sons and grandsons, all bore the image of an anchor. Such were the tales of Syria. As the term 'Spirit' is feminine in Hebrew, it is not likely that the Christian story arose on Jewish soil; its use in Luke 135 is not Palestinian any more than 'virgin' in Matt. 123, which is derived from the Greek version of the Old Testament Scriptures made at Alexandria. In the Gospel according to the Hebrews, ed. E. B. Nicholson, the Spirit addresses Jesus as My son' and he in turn speaks of My mother the holy Spirit,' pp. 43, 74.

The candid testimony of Prof. Ramsay has already been cited.

that plea we have already dealt. The student who realises that the Scripture record is inconsistent with itself can no longer accept it as a whole. He may select what he finds most congruous with his general scheme of thought, but he cannot refuse the same right to others. Those who believe that Joseph was the father of Jesus have the authority of the Gospels as fully as those who ascribe his birth to the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit. There is, however, another alternative. The same judgment which pronounces the narratives of Matthew and Luke 'incompatible in certain details as they stand,' falls back for the justification of faith on the authority of the Church1:

'Considering the position which the Virgin-birth holds in the creeds, it cannot be denied that the authority of the Church is committed to it as a fact beyond recall. To admit that its historic position is really doubtful would be to strike a mortal blow at the authority of the Christian Church as a guide to religious truth in any real sense. Such a result is in itself an argument against the truth of any position which would tend to produce it.'

But criticism, if it is once admitted into the Scriptures, cannot be restrained from investigating tradition. It will ask what is the authority of the Church? In whom is it vested? How is its scope defined? By what marks may it be recognised? What proofs can it offer of its claims? And to these and other questions of like character it will get various answers, from Jerusalem to Nicea, to Rome, to Geneva, to Canterbury. Moreover, it will point out that the New Testament presents various 1 Dr. Gore, Dissertations, p. 67.