Either, then, we must assume that the language of Jesus has been misreported, or we must admit that he never for a moment pretended to be co-equal, co-eternal or consubstantial with God.
It also follows of necessity from both the genealogies,[133:1] that their compilers entertained no doubt that Joseph was the father of Jesus. Otherwise the descent of Joseph would not have been in the least to the point. All attempts to reconcile this inconsistency with the doctrine of the Angel-Messiah has been without avail, although the most learned Christian divines, for many generations past, have endeavored to do so.
So, too, of the stories of the Presentation in the Temple,[133:2] and of the child Jesus at Jerusalem,[133:3] Joseph is called his father. Jesus is repeatedly described as the son of the carpenter,[133:4] or the son of Joseph, without the least indication that the expression is not strictly in accordance with the fact.[133:5]
If his parents fail to understand him when he says, at twelve years old, that he must be about his Father's business;[133:6] if he afterwards declares that he finds no faith among his nearest relations;[133:7] if he exalts his faithful disciples above his unbelieving mother and brothers;[133:8] above all, if Mary and her other sons put down his prophetic enthusiasm to insanity;[133:9]—then the untrustworthy nature of these stories of his birth is absolutely certain. If even a little of what they tell us had been true, then Mary at least would have believed in Jesus, and would not have failed so utterly to understand him.[133:10]
The Gospel of Mark—which, in this respect, at least, abides most faithfully by the old apostolic tradition—says not a word about Bethlehem or the miraculous birth. The congregation of Jerusalem to which Mary and the brothers of Jesus belonged,[133:11] and over which the eldest of them, James, presided,[133:12] can have known nothing of it; for the later Jewish-Christian communities, the so-called Ebionites, who were descended from the congregation at Jerusalem, called Jesus the son of Joseph. Nay, the story that the Holy Spirit was the father of Jesus, must have risen among the Greeks, or elsewhere, and not among the first believers, who were Jews, for the Hebrew word for spirit is of the feminine gender.[134:1]
The immediate successors of the "congregation at Jerusalem"—to which Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brothers belonged—were, as we have seen, the Ebionites. Eusebius, the first ecclesiastical historian (born A. D. 264), speaking of the Ebionites (i. e. "poor men"), tell us that they believed Jesus to be "a simple and common man," born as other men, "of Mary and her husband."[134:2]
The views held by the Ebionites of Jesus were, it is said, derived from the Gospel of Matthew, and what they learned direct from the Apostles. Matthew had been a hearer of Jesus, a companion of the Apostles, and had seen and no doubt conversed with Mary. When he wrote his Gospel everything was fresh in his mind, and there could be no object, on his part, in writing the life of Jesus, to state falsehoods or omit important truths in order to deceive his countrymen. If what is stated in the interpolated first two chapters, concerning the miraculous birth of Jesus, were true, Matthew would have known of it; and, knowing it, why should he omit it in giving an account of the life of Jesus?[134:3]
The Ebionites, or Nazarenes, as they were previously called were rejected by the Jews as apostates, and by the Egyptian and Roman Christians as heretics, therefore, until they completely disappear, their history is one of tyrannical persecution. Although some traces of that obsolete sect may be discovered as late as the fourth century, they insensibly melted away, either into the Roman Christian Church, or into the Jewish Synagogue,[134:4] and with them perished the original Gospel of Matthew, the only Gospel written by an apostle.
"Who, where masses of men are burning to burst the bonds of time and sense, to deify and to adore, wants what seems earth-born, prosaic fact? Woe to the man that dares to interpose it! Woe to the sect of faithful Ebionites even, and on the very soil of Palestine, that dare to maintain the earlier, humbler tradition! Swiftly do they become heretics, revilers, blasphemers, though sanctioned by a James, brother of the Lord."