66 The Birth of Jesus Christ was on this Wise"
By WILSON HARRIS
ND how well we know on what wise it was. He was born nineteen centuries and a half ago of a pure virgin in a stable in Bethlehem ; wise men came from the East to
worship Him, and angels announced His birth to shepherds on the hills around. Such is the story, part of it woven inextricably into the fabric of the Christian creeds, so hallowed by centuries of tradition that it seems almost sacrilege to call for the examination of any part of it. It is not sacrilege. If the birth of Christ were something that mattered little, the question whether in the Gospel narrative some elements of legend had been blended with fact would matter equally little. If, on the other hand, it is one of the two supreme facts in history—the other being the Resurrection—then every word that is written about it in the New Testament must be reckoned of deep consequence.
Actually only two people have told the story of the birth of Christ—the writers of the first and the third Gospels. What they tell, very briefly, is that He was born of an unmarried Galilean girl in a small town in Judaea called Bethlehem ; that His father— real or reputed—was a direct descendant of David ; that the birth was somehow revealed to certain wise men who came from some unknown locality far to the east of Jordan ; that local shepherds mysteriously heard of it, too ; and that soon after His birth the young child was taken by His parents to Egypt, because Herod, who exercised authority over Judaea, subject to a general Roman domination, threatened to kill Him.
The accuracy of parts of this story is immaterial. It affects nothing in Christian faith whether Christ was born in Bethlehem or, as might have been expected, in Nazareth, where Joseph the carpenter and Mary lived. Renan, most irresponsible of critics, disbelieved the Bethlehem story, but there seems no good reason for rejecting it, though it is curious that Jesus, in His reported words, never once refers to His birthplace and apparently never visited it, close to Jerusalem though it was ; and that the only mention of Bethlehem in the New Testament (that in John vii 42), apart from the actual narratives of the birth, implies that Jesus was believed to have been born not there but in Galilee. The romantic story of the Magi wears all the marks of an attractive legend, for neither they nor anyone else had any reason to expect the birth of a Messiah in Palestine at that particular moment in the reign of Augustus Caesar. If the Jews had no immediate expectation of it, how should these picturesque Gentiles, of whom we know neither the number nor the names nor the place of origin ? (So good an authority as Dr. James Hope Moulton, however, thought it possible that the astrology and oneiromanoy, or divination by dreams, in which the Magians specialised, might have guided them to Jerusalem.) Of quite a different order is the question whether, as a matter of historical fact, the birth of Jesus (or, to be more accurate, the conception of Jesus) was normal or super- natural. The words "as a matter of historical fact" must be emphasised, for outside the Roman Catholic Church belief in ' the Virgin Birth has never become a dogma. Dr. Gore, in a notably judicial examination of the reasons for and against the belief (he himself definitely accepted the reasons for), stated plainly that "the Virgin Birth was certainly not part of the original apostolic mes- sage. It was not among the grounds on which original belief in Jesus was claimed." That is still the position of the Protestant Churches today. As communions—as distinct from the views of particular members of these communions—they hold that Christ was born of a virgin, and that that manner of entry into the world was peculiarly congruous with the manner of His passage through the world and His departure from it. But they do not for a moment fortify the claim that Jesus was the Christ by the belief that He was born of a virgin. It is not then a question of doctrine, but a question ot history. If it be accepted that the whole basis of Christianity is a fact in history—something that definitely happened in a particular place at a particular time—then every piece of evidence on which the record rests must be examined and tested, with all reverence, but with complete sincerity, and with search for truth as the single motive, and with the recognition that an abnormal event requires stronger evidence to authenticate it than a normal. To attain the truth in this matter with certainty is not easy. What- ever conclusion the most earnest student of the record may reach, he will inevitably remain deeply conscious of the weight of the considerations pointing the opposite way. The traditional belief needs no defenders. It is there. It is based on the stories in Matthew and Luke. The great majority of Christians throughout the world hold it unquestioningly—perhaps too unquestioningly, for if there are perplexities to which the belief gives rise it cannot be proper to ignore them.
And that there are perplexities is undeniable. It is, for example, a surprising thing that, apart from the two stories of the Virgin Birth itself, there is no mention or hint of it anywhere in the New Testa- ment. Christ Himself made no reference to it. There is no suggestion of it in any of St. Paul's epistles, no reason to think that the early Church depicted in the Acts had any cognisance of it. Nor was any special account taken of Mary, Jesus' mother. After the birth- stories there are not more than half-a-dozen mentions of her, none of them important, apart from the moving incident of her presence at the Crucifixion. Jesus (in Matthew xiii 55) is "the carpenter's Son," elsewhere He is "the Son of Joseph," and the two genealogies in Matthew and Luke, while there are many discrepancies between them, both trace the descent of Jesus from David through His father Joseph, not through Mary. There have been attempts to explain some of these facts away, but the explanations are not convincing.
Yet one thing is certain. If belief in the Virgin Birth did not so far as can be seen, exist in the earliest days of the Church, it clearly existed eighty or ninety years after the birth, at the time when Matthew and Luke were writing. And it may fairly be asked how, if there was not, in fact, a Virgin Birth, these stories of it came to be written. That in turn gives rise to another question— where did the stories - come from ? Ultimately, it is manifest, Mary's story of the appearance of an angel to her (only in St. Matthew) and Joseph's of a like appearance to him (only in St. Luke) can only have come from Mary and Joseph respectively. But how did they come ? Joseph is generally assumed to have died early. Could he, before his death, have confided the whole strange experience to the unknown writer of the first Gospel, or to St Luke, directly ? For many reasons that seems unlikely. And i he had, would not the story have gained general currency, an become matter of ardent discussion, long before the end of thsi period with which the Acts of the Apostles deals ?
But there, after all, the story is. How did it originate, if it it, not true ? It may be contended that stories grow, that poetrY, becomes blended with history till sometimes the poetry actually predominates. Some poetic element in plainly present here. Wher the incomparable poetry of the Magnificat came from who cati say ? It is not easy to suppose that Mary either wrote it dow herself or dictated it to St. Luke, and that he kept it unpublish and unproclaimed till he wrote his Gospel somewhere near the of the first century A.D. The general assumption that It, like the(' Benedictus, was an ancient hymn imported somehow into the narra:i tive is much more probable. But there is, of course, no proof this, and the appropriateness of the words on the lips of Mari is arresting.
There are other considerations. The author of the first Gospel is always so anxious to find fulfilments of Old Testament prophecy+ wherever possible that he must be suspected of adopting rather • unoritically any story that lends itself to such an interpretation. The very term "the Virgin Mary" springs direct from his citation • of a verse from Isaiah, "Behold, a virgin shall be tvith child and shall bring forth a son." But the Hebrew word, mistranslated in the Greek Septuagint and consequently in our English versions,
means simply "young woman," whether married or unmarried, and the passage raises no question of any abnormal birth at all. Some- thing that was to be an immediate sign to King Abaz could have no conceivable bearing on the birth of Christ, more than seven centuries later (as long as from Henry III's reign to the present day). But that the so-called St. Matthew went astray on one point here does not, of course, necessarily discount his testimony on others.
Was He "born of the Virgin Mary " 7 Neither those who firmly believe He was nor those who find the grounds for the belief in- sufficient can with any justification reproach those who differ from them. Examination of the Gospels may lead to either conclusion. Only those are seriously open to reproach who have never taken the trouble to study the narratives for themselves and form what judgements they can, remembering always that the essential fact is the birth of Christ ; not that the birth of Christ was on this wise or on that wise,
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