The view we have preferred agrees with that of Zimmermann [pg 075] in positing a source or sources which described a natural birth. It differs from it in denying that the Evangelist knew of the Virgin Birth at the time when he made use of those sources. We prefer to think that it was after cc. i, ii had attained what is substantially its present form in Greek, that St. Luke came to hear of the Virgin Birth, and that it was then that he inserted i. 34 f. This supposition includes the positive advantages of Zimmermann's theory, and it agrees better with the existing literary phenomena of Lk. i, ii.[73]
II. Literary Conditions Under Which the Gospels Were Written
In holding the view we have outlined, we have no thought of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. Our theory is not intended as an eirenicon. It is not an attempt to make the best of two worlds, the critical and the dogmatic. If we appear to have introduced the Virgin Birth into the Third Gospel by the back door, after we have bowed it out at the front, this is simply because the evidence leaves us no alternative. Our theory makes room for the twofold fact, as it seems to us, (1) that the Virgin Birth is not an original element in the Third Gospel, and (2) that St. Luke wrote the one passage in the Gospel which asserts the doctrine; thus for us it is inevitable.
If, from another point of view, our hypothesis seems a bold venture, we may justly claim that the facts are such as to demand a bold treatment. Nor is it a sufficient objection to say that the theory is complex. Life is a complex thing, and there are few times when we need to remember it so much as when we are thinking of the production of an historical work.
Apart from other claims which can be made, our theory has [pg 076] one important, if general, advantage; it takes account of the elementary facts of human composition. Have we given sufficient thought to the fact that a writer like St. Luke may well have turned back to review, and even to alter, in the light of further information, what he had already written? Is not this what nearly every one does who writes or relates anything at all? Is it not indeed rather a rare than a usual proceeding to write a story from start to finish without insertion, omission, and revision?
In his “Introduction” Dr. James Moffatt has drawn attention to these things, and especially as they concern St. Luke's two works. He shows that interpolation may take place “either (a) at the hands of the author himself, or (b) by subsequent editors of the volume, after the writer's death, or (c) by scribes (or editors) of the text” (p. 36). Under (a) he refers to instances in Aeschylus, Herodotus, Virgil, Juvenal, Martial, and Lucretius. “Several passages in the De Rerum Natura (e.g. ii. 165-83) are also to be explained most naturally as additions made by Lucretius himself to the original draft, and in the case of the Third Gospel or its sequel it is not unlikely that Luke may have re-edited ... his work” (p. 37). Dr. Moffatt gives a very interesting modern example in the case of Northanger Abbey, which was first composed by Jane Austen in 1798. “In the fifth chapter, however, we have an allusion to Miss Edgeworth's Belinda—a novel which did not appear until 1801. This proves that Miss Austen's work lies before us in a revised form; the first draft was gone over by the authoress before its final publication some years later” (p. 37).[74]
It will scarcely be denied that the possibility of interpolation by an original author has often been overlooked by many critics. They are not slow to find the insertions of later readers and scribes, but often it seems tacitly to be assumed that the original writers must have written with logical and almost unerring precision. Curiously enough, something like the Verbal Inspiration of Scripture is required to justify some of the critical results reached. This is a doctrine long since discredited, but being [pg 077] dead it yet speaks. It will have to be allowed, we think, that mechanical theories of Inspiration have not yet left us free to perceive those ordinary conditions of writing under which the New Testament writers wrote. The aftermath of Verbal Inspiration still blinds us to the commonplaces of composition.
Of all New Testament authors St. Luke is perhaps the last to have issued his works without modifications. The high art which is self-evident in a modern writer like Robert Louis Stevenson was not attained without corrections, substitutions, redrafting, and rewriting. Without drawing the parallel too closely, and without impugning his real inspiration, we may well credit some of these processes to St. Luke. This, however, is an argument we cannot press too far, for, as will be seen in the following section, there is good ground for the belief that St. Luke's revision of his work was never complete. It is sufficient for our hypothesis to find room for a measure of revision and for the presence of modifications required by new information.
The nature of St. Luke's task is an added reason for expecting these processes. In his Preface (i. 1-4) St. Luke shows a desire to produce a full and accurate record, and claims to have traced the course of all things from the first. Any new information bearing upon the Birth and the hidden years of the Infancy would be especially welcome to him. Any one, moreover, who has had anything to do with collecting memoirs knows that not infrequently new facts come to hand just when the task seems well-nigh completed, facts for which a place must be found, however great the difficulties may be.