The prophecy mentioned occurs in Isaiah vii, 14. In the King James version it is as follows: "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel." But the Aramaic reading is: "Behold an 'almâ shall conceive." 'Almâ means young woman. The Septuagint, in translating it, employed the term [Greek: parthenos], or maiden. In Matthew the term was retained.
Matthew, at the time, had long been dead. Even had he been living it is improbable that he could write in Greek. Unfortunately there were others who could not only write Greek but read Hebrew. In particular, there was a rabbi Aquila who retranslated Isaiah with no other purpose than the malign object of definitely re-establishing the exact expression which the old poet had used.[67]
[67] Renan: Les Evangiles.
It was presumably in these circumstances that the Evangel of Mary was advanced. Among other elucidations, the work contained professional testimony of the immaculacy that was claimed. Additionally, in reparation of the earlier oversight, the Virgin was genealogically descended from the royal line.
That, however, is apocryphal, and if, regarding the other genealogy, exegesis has since obscured the luminousness of the method adapted by the Church, the latter's intention was none the less irreproachable, and that alone imports. Before it, before the miracle of the nativity and the divine episodes of the transfiguration, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, reverently the Occident has knelt. They are indeed divine. If they did not occur in Judea, they have occurred ever since. Continuously, in the hearts of the devout, they are repeated.
Unhappily there were heretics then as now. To the Gnostics, Jesus was an æon that had never been. To the Docetists, he was a phantasm. There are always brutes that can believe but in the reality of things. There are others to whom the symbolic is dumb. In the Gospels there is much that is figurative, there is more that is ineffable, there are suggestions sheerly ideal.
"In my Father's house are many mansions," the Saviour declared. In his own ministry there are as many lights. He was a vagrant and he created pure sentiment. He was a nihilist and he inspired a new conception of life. He said he had not come to destroy and he changed the face of the earth. He remitted the sins of a harlot and condemned both marriage and love. There are other antitheses, deeper contradictions. These perhaps are more apparent than real. Behind them there may have been the co-ordination of a central thought. Of many gospels but few remain. Among the lost evangels was one that Valentinian said was imparted only to the more spiritual of the disciples. It may be that in it a main idea was elucidated and, perhaps, as a consequence, the meaning of the esoteric proclamation: "Before Abraham was I am."
Yet though now the authoritative explanation be lacking, its significance seems to run beneath the texts. At the first apparition of Jesus, the chief preoccupation of those that stood about was what prophet of the old days had returned in the new. Some thought him Elijah. Others Jeremiah. Antipas feared that he was the Baptist revived. Jesus himself asked the disciples whom he was said to be. Later he assured them that the awaited return of Elijah had been accomplished in John. That assurance, together with the perplexities regarding him and the esoteric announcement which he made concerning himself, can hardly indicate anything else than a belief in reincarnation.
The belief, common to all antiquity, though not necessarily valid on that account, is not discernible in Hebrew thought, perhaps for the reason that it is not perceptible in Babylonian. Yet the myth of Eden barely conceals it. It is almost obvious in the allegory of Beth-el. Solomon said: "I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning or ever earth was." If the idea contained in that statement was not a part of the philosophy attributed to the Christ, it might have been. The amount of beauty stored in it is more enormous than in any other.
To the materialist the beauty is meaningless. To the mathematician it has the value of a zero from which the periphery has gone. But at the Pillars of Hercules early geographers put on their maps: Hic deficit orbis—Here ends the world. They had no suspicion that beyond that world there stretched another twice as great. Materialists may be equally naïf. On the other hand, they may not be. The theory of reincarnation is one that transcends the limits of experience.