“You see,” said Scaurus, “in these early divergences, traces of early differences as to the time and manner in which Jesus became the Son of God. Paul appears to me to have believed that the sonship pre-existed in heaven. ‘God,’ he says, ‘in the fulness of time, sent forth His son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those that were under the law.’ In Job, ‘born of a woman’ implies imperfection, or mortality. In Paul, ‘born of a woman’ and ‘born under the law’ imply two self-humiliations undergone by the Son of God. Paul’s view is that the Redeemer must needs make himself one with those whom he redeems. Since the Jews were not only ‘born of a woman’ but also ‘born under the law,’ the Son of God came down from heaven and placed himself under both these humiliations. Paul, therefore, seems to have regarded the divine birth as taking place in heaven from the beginning, but the human birth as a self-humbling on earth, wherein the Son of God becomes incarnate in the form of the son of Joseph, of the seed of David, after the flesh.”
This had been my inference from Paul’s epistles, as I have said above. But what followed was quite new to me: “You are aware from Paul’s epistles that Christ is regarded by him as preeminently the Seed of Promise, Isaac being merely the type. Well, listen to what Philo, a Jew, somewhat earlier than Paul, declares about the birth of Isaac. Philo says, ‘The Lord begot Isaac.’ Philo describes Sarah as ‘becoming pregnant when alone and visited by God.’ It was God also, he says, who ‘opened the womb of Leah.’ Moses, too, ‘having received Zipporah, finds her pregnant by no mortal.’ All this is, of course, quite distinct from our popular stories of the love affairs of Jupiter. You may see this from Philo’s context: ‘It is fitting that God should converse, in an opposite manner to that of men, with a nature undefiled, unpolluted, and pure, the genuine Virgin. For whereas the cohabitation of men makes virgins wives (lit. women), on the other hand when God begins to associate with a soul, what was wife before He now makes Virgin again.’ I could quote other instances, but these will suffice. Now I ask you to reflect how such language as this would be interpreted in the west, not only by slaves, but even by people of education, unaccustomed to the language of the east, but familiar with our western stories of the births of Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Bacchus and others.”
I saw at once that the language would be liable to be taken literally. But on the other hand it seemed to me that no disciple of Paul could accept anything like our western stories. Scaurus had anticipated an objection of this kind in his next words: “You must not suppose, however, that Hebrew literature contains, or that Jewish or Christian thought would tolerate, such stories as those in Ovid. Nor will you find anything of this kind in Matthew and Luke, to whose narratives we will now pass. Matthew says, rather abruptly, that Joseph, finding Mary, his betrothed but not yet his wife, to be with child, and intending to put her away secretly, received a vision of an angel and a voice bidding him not to fear to take to himself Mary his wife, for she was with child from the Holy Spirit, and ‘she will bring forth a child and thou shalt call his name Jesus.’ Luke, after a much longer introduction (about which I shall speak presently), says that a vision and a voice came to Mary—he does not mention one to Joseph—bidding her not to fear, and saying ‘Thou shalt conceive and bring forth a child, and shalt call his name Jesus.’ In theory, it is of course possible that two similar visions might come, one to Mary and another to Joseph, bidding both ‘not to fear.’ But Matthew adds something that points to an entirely different explanation: ‘Now all this hath come to pass that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, Behold the virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a son and they shall call his name Emmanuel’.”
These words I had myself read in Isaiah and had taken as referring to a promise made in the context, namely, that in a short time—two or three years, just time enough for a child to be conceived and to be born and to grow up to the age when it could say “father” and “mother”—the kings of Syria and Samaria would be destroyed. Accordingly Isaiah says that he himself married a wife immediately afterwards and that the prophecy was fulfilled. Having recently read these words more than once, I was prepared to find that Scaurus interpreted them in the same way. He added that the most learned of the Jews themselves did the same, and that the Hebrew does not mention “virgin,” but “young woman.” “This,” said he, “I heard from a learned rabbi, who added, ‘The LXX is full of blunders, but we are hoping for a more faithful rendering, from a very learned scholar named Aquila, which will probably appear soon’.” Here I may say that this translation has actually appeared—it came out about ten years ago—in quite unreadable Greek, but very faithful to the Hebrew; and it renders the word, not “virgin,” but “young woman,” as Scaurus had said.
It was this very rendering that caused a coolness between me and Justin of Samaria. It happened, I am sorry to say, shortly before he suffered for the sake of the Saviour, in this present year in which I am writing. I chanced to meet him coming out of the school of Diodorus, in his philosopher’s cloak as usual, but hot and flustered, not looking at all like a philosopher. Some people—Jews, to judge by their faces—were jeering and pointing after him in mockery. Justin—furious with them, but also (as I thought) worried and uncomfortable in himself—appealed to me: “I have been contending for the Lord,” said he, “against these dogs. They flout and mock me for demonstrating how fraudulently and profanely they have mutilated the Holy Scriptures, cancelling some parts and altering others, when translating them into Greek.” Then he instanced this very passage, in which he said the Jews had vilely corrupted the rendering of the Hebrew from “virgin” to “young woman.” I would have kept silence; but, as he pressed me to say whether I did not agree with him, I was obliged to reply that I did not; and I added that not only Aquila rendered it thus, but other good scholars, many of them Christians. Upon this, he flung away from me in disgust, without one word of salutation, and I never saw him again.
The fact was, he had committed himself in writing, about ten years before, to this false charge against the Jews, and to many other baseless accusations. There was no way out of it now, but either to retract or to face it out. He was a brave man and knew how to face death. But he was not brave enough to allow himself to be conquered by facts. Samaritan by birth, he had something of the Samaritan—but not of the Good Samaritan—in his hatred of the Jews. Had he loved the truth as much as he hated those whom he called truth’s enemies, he would perhaps have gone on to cease from his hate, and would have become no less faithful as a Christian than as a martyr.
Now I must return to Scaurus. “Luke,” said he, “was an educated man, and saw at once that this prophecy about ‘the virgin’ did not apply. So he omitted it. This he had a right to do. It was only an evangelist’s opinion, not a statement of anything that had actually occurred. But there remained the tradition of fact, namely, that an angel had appeared and had announced the future birth of a child begotten from the Holy Spirit. Luke regarded this announcement as made to the mother, like the announcements—not the same of course, but similar—made to Sarah, Rebecca, and the mothers of Samson and Samuel. Moreover in Matthew’s account—as I judge from Hermas’s marginal notes—there are many variations, some of which leave it open to believe that the utterance to Joseph (like that to Abraham before Isaac’s birth) referred merely to God’s spiritual generating, so that Jesus, though the Son of God according to the spirit, was yet, according to the flesh, the son of David by descent from Joseph. Luke expresses his disagreement from this view by giving various utterances of Mary and the angel at such length that they may be called hymns or poems. And indeed—if judged liberally and not by the pedantical rules of Atticists or over-strict grammarians—they are poems, by no means without beauty.
“Luke adds another narrative in which he makes the birth of John the Baptist serve as a foil (so to speak) to the birth of Christ. John, like Christ, was born as a child of promise, after a vision of an angel. But there the likeness ceases. The vision is to the father, not to the mother. The father disbelieves and is punished by dumbness. Elizabeth, the mother, was not a virgin. She, like the wife of Abraham, was barren up to old age. There is no vision to Elizabeth, and no mention of divine generation. If a Jew, Philo for example, were to say to Luke, ‘Your Messiah may have been a son of God and yet son of Joseph (as Isaac was son of Abraham)’ Luke might reply, ‘Read my book, and you will see that it was not so. John the Baptist might be called son of God after this fashion, but Jesus was born in quite a different manner’.”
After this, Scaurus went on to treat of Christ’s pedigrees, as given by Matthew and Luke, shewing Christ’s descent, the former from Abraham, the latter from Adam. These details I shall not give in full. Scaurus had something of the mind of a lawyer and something of the eagerness of a hound hunting by scent, and, as he said himself, when once on a trail he could not stop. “Matthew,” said he, “omits three consecutive kings of Judah in one place and a fourth in another. I pointed this out to my old rabbi above-mentioned, and he laughed and said, ‘My own people do that sort of thing. History is not our strong point. We like facts to fit nicely, and this writer of yours has made them fit. Does he not himself almost tell you that he is squaring matters, when he says that there are fourteen generations from Abraham to David, and fourteen from David to the captivity, and fourteen from the captivity to Christ? This is symmetrical, but it is not what your model Thucydides would call history.’ My rabbi went on to say, ‘A more serious blunder, from our point of view, is that this Christian has included in the ancestry of his Christ a king called Jeconiah about whom one of our prophets, Jeremiah, says, “Write ye this man childless, for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David and ruling any more in Judah”.’ Then, seeing the two papyri lying side by side on the table before me, he added, ‘I see you have another pedigree there, does that make the same blunder?’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘the author was named Luke, a physician, an educated man and a great compiler of documents. He gives quite a different pedigree.’ ‘I am not surprised,’ said my rabbi. ‘If he was a sensible man, he could hardly do otherwise’.”
So far Scaurus. He did not anticipate what I have lived to experience. Quite recently I heard some Christians use this very mention of Jeconiah in an opposite direction, namely, as a proof that Matthew believed Jesus to have descended from God, but not from Joseph after the flesh. In particular, I have heard a young but rising teacher, Irenæus by name, argue as follows, “If indeed He had been the son of Joseph, He could not, according to Jeremiah, be either king or heir, for Joseph is shewn to be the son of Joachim and Jeconiah as also Matthew sets forth in his pedigree.” Then he went on to quote Jeremiah’s prophecy that Jeconiah should be childless and have no successor on the throne of David. And his argument was to this effect, “Christ is the royal son of David. Therefore He could not have descended from Jeconiah, Joseph’s ancestor. Matthew knew this. Therefore Matthew, though giving Joseph’s pedigree, did not mean to imply that Jesus was the son of Joseph.” And this seemed to convince those who heard him! I also heard this same Irenæus, in the same lecture, say, “If He were the son of Joseph, how could He be greater than Solomon, … or greater than David, when He was generated from the same seed, and was a descendant of these men?” After we had gone out from Irenæus’s lecture, I asked the friend sitting next to me to explain this argument to me; for it seemed to me to prove that a man could not be greater than his ancestors. “Ah, but you forget,” he replied, “what ancestors. They were royal ancestors. How could the son of a mere carpenter be greater than David or Solomon?” It seemed to me that the sinless son of “a mere carpenter” might be greater in the eyes of God than a whole world of such royal sinners. But I found it hard to convince him that I was even speaking seriously!