See Holman Hunt's picture, “The Shadow of the Cross”—in which not Jesus, but only Mary, sees the shadow of the cross upon the wall. He lived a life of faith, as well as of prayer (Heb. 12:2—“Jesus the author [captain, prince] and perfecter of our faith”), dependent upon Scripture, which was much of it, as Ps. 16 and 118, and Is. 49, 50, 61, written for him, as well as about him. See Park, Discourses, 297-327; Deutsch, Remains, 131—“The boldest transcendental flight of the Talmud is its saying: ‘God prays.’ ” In Christ's humanity, united as it is to deity, we have the fact answering to this piece of Talmudic poetry.
B. Its Integrity. We here use the term “integrity” to signify, not merely completeness, but perfection. That which is perfect is, a fortiori, complete in all its parts. Christ's human nature was:
(a) Supernaturally conceived; since the denial of his supernatural conception involves either a denial of the purity of Mary, his mother, or a denial of the truthfulness of Matthew's and Luke's narratives.
Luke 1:34, 35—“And Mary said unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee.” [pg 676]The “seed of the woman” (Gen. 3:15) was one who had no earthly father. “Eve” = life, not only as being the source of physical life to the race, but also as bringing into the world him who was to be its spiritual life. Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 29—Jesus Christ “had no earthly father; his birth was a creative act of God, breaking through the chain of human generation.” Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:447 (Syst. Doct., 3:345)—“The new science recognizes manifold methods of propagation, and that too even in one and the same species.”
Professor Loeb has found that the unfertilized egg of the sea-urchin may be made by chemical treatment to produce thrifty young, and he thinks it probable that the same effect may be produced among the mammalia. Thus parthenogenesis in the highest order of life is placed among the scientific possibilities. Romanes, even while he was an agnostic, affirmed that a virgin-birth even in the human race would be by no means out of the range of possibility; see his Darwin and After Darwin, 119, footnote—“Even if a virgin has ever conceived and borne a son, and even if such a fact in the human species has been unique, it would not betoken any breach of physiological continuity.” Only a new impulse from the Creator could save the Redeemer from the long accruing fatalities of human generation. But the new creation of humanity in Christ is scientifically quite as possible as its first creation in Adam; and in both cases there may have been no violation of natural law, but only a unique revelation of its possibilities. “Birth from a virgin made it clear that a new thing was taking place in the earth, and that One was coming into the world who was not simply man.” A. B. Bruce: “Thoroughgoing naturalism excludes the virgin life as well as the virgin birth.”See Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 254-270; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 176.
Paul Lobstein, Incarnation of our Lord, 217—“That which is unknown to the teachings of St. Peter and St. Paul, St. John and St. James, and our Lord himself, and is absent from the earliest and the latest gospels, cannot be so essential as many people have supposed.” This argument from silence is sufficiently met by the considerations that Mark passes over thirty years of our Lord's life in silence; that John presupposes the narratives of Matthew and of Luke; that Paul does not deal with the story of Jesus' life. The facts were known at first only to Mary and to Joseph; their very nature involved reticence until Jesus was demonstrated to be “the Son of God with power ... by the resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4); meantime the natural development of Jesus and his refusal to set up an earthly kingdom may have made the miraculous events of thirty years ago seem to Mary like a wonderful dream; so only gradually the marvellous tale of the mother of the Lord found its way into the gospel tradition and creeds of the church, and into the inmost hearts of Christians of all countries; see F. L. Anderson, in Baptist Review and Expositor, 1904:25-44, and Machen, on the N. T. Account of the Birth of Jesus, in Princeton Theol. Rev., Oct. 1905, and Jan. 1906.
Cooke, on The Virgin Birth of our Lord, in Methodist Rev., Nov. 1904:849-857—“If there is a moral taint in the human race, if in the very blood and constitution of humanity there is an ineradicable tendency to sin, then it is utterly inconceivable that any one born in the race by natural means should escape the taint of that race. And, finally, if the virgin birth is not historical, then a difficulty greater than any that destructive criticism has yet evolved from documents, interpolations, psychological improbabilities and unconscious contradictions confronts the reason and upsets all the long results of scientific observation,—that a sinful and deliberately sinning and unmarried pair should have given life to the purest human being that ever lived or of whom the human race has ever dreamed, and that he, knowing and forgiving the sins of others, never knew the shame of his own origin.” See also Gore, Dissertations, 1-68, on the Virgin Birth of our Lord, J. Armitage Robinson, Some Thoughts on the Incarnation, 42, both of whom show that without assuming the reality of the virgin birth we cannot account for the origin of the narratives of Matthew and of Luke, nor for the acceptance of the virgin birth by the early Christians. Per contra, see Hoben, in Am. Jour. Theol., 1902:478-506, 709-752. For both sides of the controversy, see Symposium by Bacon, Zenos, Rhees and Warfield, in Am. Jour. Theol., Jan. 1906:1-30; and especially Orr, Virgin Birth of Christ.
(b) Free, both from hereditary depravity, and from actual sin; as is shown by his never offering sacrifice, never praying for forgiveness, teaching that all but he needed the new birth, challenging all to convict him of a single sin.
Jesus frequently went up to the temple, but he never offered sacrifice. He prayed: [pg 677] “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34); but he never prayed: “Father, forgive me.” He said: “Ye must be born anew” (John 3:7); but the words indicated that he had no such need. “At no moment in all that life could a single detail have been altered, except for the worse.”He not only yielded to God's will when made known to him, but he sought it: “I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me” (John 5:30). The anger which he showed was no passionate or selfish or vindictive anger, but the indignation of righteousness against hypocrisy and cruelty—an indignation accompanied with grief: “looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their heart” (Mark 3:5). F. W. H. Myers, St. Paul, 19, 53—“Thou with strong prayer and very much entreating Willest be asked, and thou wilt answer then, Show the hid heart beneath creation beating, Smile with kind eyes and be a man with men.... Yea, through life, death, through sorrow and through sinning, He shall suffice me, for he hath sufficed: Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning, Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.” Not personal experience of sin, but resistance to it, fitted him to deliver us from it.
Luke 1:35—“wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God”; John 8:46—“Which of you convicteth me of sin?” 14:30—“the prince of the world cometh: and he hath nothing in me” = not the slightest evil inclination upon which his temptations can lay hold; Rom. 8:3—“in the likeness of sinful flesh” = in flesh, but without the sin which in other men clings to the flesh; 2 Cor. 5:21—“Him who knew no sin”; Heb. 4:15—“in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin”; 7:26—“holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners”—by the fact of his immaculate conception; 9:14—“through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God”; 1 Pet. 1:19—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ”; 2:22—“who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth”; 1 John 3:5, 7—“in him is no sin ... he is righteous.”