Footnotes
[1.] Dr. Orr (The Virgin Birth of Christ, 1907, 3rd ed., 1914) says that in every Pauline reference to the origin of Christ there is “some peculiarity of expression” (pp. 117 ff., 196). He instances γενόμενος in Gal. iv. 4, Rom. i. 3, Phil. ii. 7, and speaks of γεννητός as the word properly denoting “born”. But St. Paul never uses γεννητός, and Mt. xi. 11 and Lk. vii. 28 are the only instances in the NT. Moreover, the papyri show that γίνομαι and γενόμενος were in common use in the sense of “to come into being”, “be born” (cf. Moulton and Milligan, VGT., 1915, p. 126 a). Canon Box also speaks of St. Paul's use of “the out-of-the-way γενόμενον” (The Virgin Birth of Jesus, 1916). “This would harmonise”, he says, “with the feeling that there was something extraordinary and supernatural about the birth, which led to its being spoken of in unusual terms” (p. 149 n.). Not to speak of the papyri, what would these writers make of Jn. viii. 58, “Before Abraham was (πρὶν Ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι) I am”? Was there “something extraordinary” in Abraham's birth too? For a view similar to that of Orr and Box see Sweet, The Birth and Infancy of Jesus Christ, p. 237 f. [2.] Compare verse 12, “as through one man”, with verse 15, “the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ”. Cf. also Rom. ix. 5 (and 1 Tim. ii. 5). [3.] Cf. H. R. Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ, p. 69: “... the passage [1 Cor. xv. 44-9] is throughout concerned not in the least with the pre-existent but with the exalted Christ. It was only in virtue of resurrection that He became the archetype and head of a new race.” Mackintosh says that the Virgin Birth is “not present” in Gal. iv. 4, “not even hinted at” (p. 528). [4.] “The flesh of Christ is ‘like’ ours inasmuch as it is flesh; ‘like’, and only ‘like’, because it is not sinful: ostendit nos quidem habere carnem peccati, Filium vero Dei similitudinem habuisse carnis peccati, non carnem peccati (Orig.-lat.)” (SH., ICC., Rom., p. 193). [5.] For these and other details see Moffatt, INT., pp. 194-206; also Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus, pp. 229-52. [6.] Cf. Mt. xi. 2 f. = Lk. vii. 18 f. [7.] Cf. Mackintosh, Person of Jesus Christ, p. 528. [8.] Mr. Thompson thinks that in Q “we are dealing with an age that has not yet begun to think of the Virgin Birth” (ib., p. 140). This may be true, but it is not a legitimate inference to draw from Q alone. [9.] Cf. Plummer, ICC., St. Lk., p. 125. [10.] Mt. xiii. 55: “Is not this the carpenter's son?...” Lk. iv. 22: “Is not this Joseph's son?” [11.] So Wendland and Bacon (Moffatt, INT., p. 227 f.); Stanton, GHD., ii. 142. Mt. xiii. 55 reads: “Is not this the carpenter's son?”, and Lk. iv. 22: “Is not this Joseph's son?” The argument is that it is very difficult to think that the later Evangelists can have read what is now Mk. vi. 3 in the Markan Source. [12.] “Mt. has substituted ‘the Son of the Carpenter’ for ‘the Carpenter’ from a feeling that the latter was hardly a phrase of due reverence” (Allen, op. cit., p. 155). [13.] Both Schmiedel (EB., 2954 f.) and Usener (EB., 3345) hold that the incident excludes the Virgin Birth. In reference to the words of Jesus, J. M. Thompson says: “The force of His aphorism about spiritual kinship depends on the reality of the human kinship which He at once acknowledges and rejects” (op. cit., p. 137). [14.] So Schmiedel (op. cit., col. 2955). Thompson thinks that the story of Mk. vi. 1-6 “could not possibly have been told as it has been, if the narrator had known anything about the Virgin Birth” (op. cit., p. 138). [15.] Cf. Allen, ICC., St. Mt., p. xxiv (c) (i), where fifty examples of this tendency are given. [16.] “The speeches in the earlier part may represent not untrustworthily the primitive Jewish-Christian preaching of the period” (Moffatt, INT., p. 305). Cf. Mackintosh, op. cit., p. 39. [17.] Mackintosh, ib., p. 40 f. “What absorbs the preacher is Jesus' deliverance from the grave and entry into glory”, p. 41. [18.] Mackintosh, ib., p. 41. [19.] For the opposite view see Thompson, op. cit., p. 142. [20.] It is true different verbs and tenses are used of the children and of the Son. The tense of μετέσχεν is explained by the fact that the Son assumed flesh and blood at a definite time now past. The change of verb—so far as it is not explained on stylistic grounds—is due to the fact that κεκοινώνηκεν (of the children) expresses the universal fact of human frailty which men share one with another, and μετέσχεν the individual entering upon this state. The latter word does not imply a participation of a peculiar and distinct kind. [21.] “In point of time, the Epistle to the Hebrews is the first systematic sketch of Christian theology” (Mackintosh, Person of Jesus Christ, p. 78). “It is not so much an epistle as an elaborate treatise” (Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, p. 320). [22.] “Few would say, with Westcott, that virgin-birth is implied though not explicitly asserted in Jn. i. 14....” (Mackintosh, ib., p. 528). [23.] The view that i. 13 should be read “Who was born, &c.”, is that of Resch, Blass, and Th. Zahn. The reading appears in Tertullian, Irenaeus, Justin, but the weight of textual authority is against it. Nor is the reading, as representing what the Evangelist wrote, intrinsically probable. It would rule out the maternity of Mary as well as the paternity of Joseph. The birth would not only be not “of the will of man”; it would not even be “of blood”. There would be nothing human about it; from first to last it would be “of God”. In short, the reading leads directly to that docetic view of the Person of Christ, against which the Johannine Writings so earnestly contend. The same objection may be urged against the view that, in the accepted text of Jn. i. 13, the Virgin Birth is present to the writer's mind “as a kind of pattern or model of the birth of the children of God” (W. C. Allen, Interpreter, Oct., 1905. Cf. Orr, op. cit., p. 111 f.; Box, op. cit., p. 145). Would not the Fourth Evangelist have regarded such a comparison as almost a denial that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh? Harnack has recently contended for the singular and for a reference to the Virgin Birth. He thinks that the verse was added in the margin, as a comment on i. 14, at a very early time and in the Johannine circle (Peake, Commentary on the Bible, p. 747 a). [24.] Cf. Sanday, op. cit., pp. 71, 143-55; Moffatt, INT., pp. 533 ff.; E. F. Scott, The Fourth Gospel, Its Purpose and Theology, pp. 32 ff.; Jülicher, INT., p. 396 f. [25.] iv. 44 (“For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country”), unless it is a gloss, probably refers to Judaea, not Galilee. Cf. Moffatt, INT., p. 553. Mr. Thompson argues that it refers to Galilee (op. cit., p. 158). [26.] “In order to explain his silence, we must remember his strict exclusion of all that might imply a passivity in the divine Logos. It was by His own free act that the Son of God entered the world as man. The evangelist shrank from any theory of His origin that might impair the central idea of full activity, from the beginning of His work to the end” (Scott, ib., p. 187). [27.] According to Cheyne (Bible Problems, pp. 76 ff.), the chapter contains a Jewish Messianic legend of Babylonian origin, which was the source of the Virgin Birth tradition. [28.] The passage which begins with the words: “And Mary said unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” [29.] Or was taken from Q. See Harnack's Sayings, p. 314; Oxford Studies in Synoptic Problem, p. 187. [30.] EB., col. 2955 n. Cf. Plummer, ICC., St. Lk., p. 63. [31.] In this connexion it should be observed that the same note of wonder appears in ii. 18 in the case of all those who hear the shepherds' words. But according to the terms of ii. 17, what they are told is the angelic message of ii. 10-12, in which the Virgin Birth is not mentioned. The presumption is that ii. 33 stands upon the same plane. [32.] So among others Schmiedel, Usener, Häcker, and Blass, who writes (op. cit., p. 171 n.): “ ‘The espoused wife’ of the ordinary text is a very clear corruption, due to an assimilation to i. 27 (where the case is quite different) and to dogmatic prejudices ...” “That we have here a case of real contamination is seen very plainly in the old Freising MS., in which the ancient variants τῇ γυναικὶ αὐτοῦ and τῇ ἐμνηστευμένῃ αὐτῷ still stand together in immediate juxtaposition” (Usener, EB., col. 3350). [33.] On the agreement of the Old Syriac and Old Latin against the great uncials, cf. Kirsopp Lake (The Text of the NT., p. 90 f.), “Perhaps the general result is to make it probable that W. H. (largely from lack of evidence) underestimated the possibility that a consensus of the Old Latin and Old Syriac may give us a really primitive text even when opposed to the great uncials”. To similar effect Burkitt writes, “It is, however, in the direction here indicated—viz., the preservation of the true text in a considerable number of cases by ‘Western’ documents alone—that criticism may ultimately be able to advance beyond the point reached by Hort” (EB., col. 4990 f.). “I am unable to assume that the edition of Westcott and Hort gives us a final text in either Gospel [Mt. and Mk.]. In particular, I am inclined to believe that the second century readings, attested by the ecclesiastical writers of that century, and by the Syriac and Latin versions, are often deserving of preference” (W. C. Allen, ICC., St Mt., p. lxxxvii). [34.] “And Joseph ... took unto him his wife.” [35.] While we are unable to acquiesce in Schmiedel's view that “Mary takes the words of the angel as referring to a fulfilment in the way of nature”, we may fairly say that, if the passage Lk. i. 30-8 is a unity, Mary ought to have been represented as taking the angel's words in this way, and that this would be the plain natural sense in which to take them. [36.] The claim, therefore, that the suggested translation is supported by the words “with haste” in verse 39 (Box) cannot be sustained. Moreover, these words are easily satisfied on the usual view of a promised conception. See further an article by the present writer in the Expository Times (May, 1919), Is the Lukan Narrative of the Birth of Christ a Prophecy? In l. 16 in the second column read: “It could not be anything else”. [37.] E.g. Cheyne, Conybeare, Grill, Harnack, Hillmann, Holtzmann, Loisy, Montefiore, Pfleiderer, N. Schmidt, Schmiedel, Usener, Völter, J. Weiss. On the other side are Hilgenfeld, Clemen, Gunkel, Chase, Stanton, Orr, Box, Knowling. [38.] But see W. C. Allen, ICC., St. Mt., p. 10 and p. 19. [39.] Some scholars, including Häcker, Spitta, and Montefiore, bring verses 36, 37 within the interpolation. Schmiedel's presentation of the argument stated above is as follows: “Moreover, the case of Elizabeth to which the angel points in v. 36 is no evidence of the possibility of a supernatural conception; it has evidential value only if what has happened to Elizabeth is more wonderful than what is being promised to Mary—namely that she, in the way of nature, is to become the mother of the Messiah” (EB., col. 2957). [40.] Schmiedel, op. cit., col. 2957. To the same effect J. Estlin Carpenter (op. cit., p. 487 f.). Compare Lk. i. 45 where Mary is praised for her faith, and see Moffatt, INT., p. 268 f. [41.] Cf. Lobstein, The Virgin Birth of Christ, p. 67. [42.] Cf. Moffatt (INT., p. 268 n.): “The substitution ... is too slender a basis, and may have been accidental, whilst the alleged omission of 34-5 from the Protevangelium Iacobi breaks down upon examination” (cf. Headlam's discussion with Conybeare in the Guardian for March-April 1903). [43.] The New Testament Documents, their Origin and early History (Croall Lectures, 1911-12). 1913. [44.] Cf. also Burkitt (GHT., p. 11): “... the text of the Gospels, the actual wording, and even to some extent the contents, were not treated during the second century with particular scrupulosity by the Christians who preserved and canonized them. There is nothing in the way which Christians treated the books of the New Testament during the first four centuries that corresponds with the care bestowed by the Jews upon the Hebrew Scriptures from the time of Aquiba onwards.” See also Blass, Philology of the Gospels, p. 72 f. [45.] Cf. Sanday (Inspiration, 2nd Ed., pp. 295-8): “Possessors of copies did not hesitate to add little items of tradition, often oral, and in some cases perhaps written, which reached them” (295). See also J. H. Moulton (From Egyptian Rubbish Heaps, pp. 97 ff.), and an article in the Classical Review for March 1915 on “The Primitive Text of the Gospels and Acts”; J. A. Robinson, Study of the Gospels, p. 24 f. [46.] Cf. also Hawkins (HS., 2nd Ed., pp. 152 and 197), who instances “additions of various kinds which may be regarded as probably editorial” (p. 197) in the Second and Third Gospels. See also Moffatt (INT.), under heading “Glosses in NT. text”, p. 641, where references are given to cases treated in the body of the work. [47.] It may, however, have been accidentally lost. See Moffatt, INT., pp. 238 ff, where the question is discussed. [48.] In this connexion it is important to remember that even early orthographic peculiarities have been accurately preserved. “I have been much struck by the number of cases in which the old uncials preserve spellings which can be proved current in the time of the autographs, but obsolete long before the fourth century. Faithful in minutiae, they might reasonably be expected to be faithful also in greater matters” (J. H. Moulton, in an article in the Classical Review, March, 1915, reprinted in The Christian Religion in the Study and the Street, 1919, p. 153). See also the Prolegomena, pp. 42-56. [49.] The italics are ours. [50.] Plummer, ICC., St. Lk., pp. xlviii ff.; Harnack, Luke the Physician, p. 104 f.; Moffatt, INT., p. 278 f.; Hawkins, HS., 2nd Ed., pp. 15 ff. [51.]
There is a well-known difficulty of punctuation in verse 35. Ought we to put a comma, with WH., after κληθήσεται? If we do so, the subj. is τό γεννώμενον, and ἅγιον is part of the predicate. If we omit the comma, the whole phrase τὸ γεν. ἅγιον is the subj., and the pred. is κληθ. υἱὸς θ. (cf. RV. marg.). Most critical editors of the Greek text omit the comma. It is probable, as the WH. type shows, that Dr. Hort was influenced by his belief that ἅγιον κληθ. went together as a quotation or reminiscence of the OT., and, if the passage comes from St. Luke, this is a strong argument. On the other hand, it can be argued that if the words are a Greek rendering of an Aramaic phrase it is improbable, if not impossible, that the participle should stand alone as the subj. It is not possible, of course, to settle the question by appealing to manuscript authority, as the early MSS. were practically devoid of punctuation marks. In our own case, we are unable to use either of the arguments cited, since each rests upon the assumption of the Lukan origin of Lk. i. 34 f., which is the very point we are discussing. While then we follow the WH. text we have to leave the question of punctuation an open one. If the comma should be omitted we lose the difficulty of τό γεννώμενον noted on p. 61, and we lose also the argument from its construction, sketched on p. 64.
As, in the end, we claim that Lk. i. 34 f. comes from the hand of St. Luke, we may perhaps be permitted to express a personal preference for the WH. punctuation. St. Luke's admitted fondness for OT. phraseology points strongly in this direction, while the theory of an original Aramaic document gains no increased support, but rather the contrary, as time goes by. On the one hand, Harnack has convincingly shown how much the Greek of Lk. i, ii owes to St. Luke's craftsmanship (cf. Luke the Phys., pp. 102 ff.), and, on the other hand, the argument from “Semiticisms” becomes less cogent the more we know of the papyri (cf. Moulton, Proleg., pp. 13-18. See also Gr. ii. 12-20). Aramaic oral tradition may underlie cc. i, ii, but the probability is that the Greek of these chapters owes its OT. flavour to the more or less deliberate attempt of St. Luke to create an appropriate archaic atmosphere.