CHAPTER XXIV SCAURUS ON CHRIST’S BIRTH

On the following morning my indignation against Mark began to seem certainly hasty and possibly unjust. True, his book was apparently without beginning or end, disfigured by superfluities and omissions, and extraordinarily disproportioned. But what if he had no time to revise it? What if it was a collection of notes about Christ’s mighty works and short sayings, which he was intending to combine with a collection of Christ’s doctrine when he died—died perhaps suddenly, perhaps was put to death? I tried to find excuses for his work. Still, I could not deny that, if Scaurus was right as to the story of the fig-tree, the earliest of the evangelists shewed a deplorable inability to distinguish the things that preceded Christ’s resurrection from the things that followed it. I resolved, however, that this should not deter me from continuing my study of the other gospels. My disappointment with Mark increased my admiration—it was not then more than admiration—for Christ, whom he seemed to me to have failed to represent. “Perhaps,” said I, “Matthew and Luke will do more justice to the subject.” So I took up their gospels. The resurrection was what I most wanted to read about. But I decided to begin at the beginning.

“In style, proportion, arrangement, and subject-matter,” said Scaurus, “Matthew and Luke are much more satisfactory than Mark, although Mark often preserves the earliest and purest form of Christ’s short sayings. When I say ‘Matthew,’ you must understand that I do not know who he is. I am[221] convinced that Matthew the publican, one of Christ’s twelve apostles, is not responsible for the work called by his name. Flaccus—whom I more than suspect of Christian proclivities—knows a good deal about these matters. Well, according to Flaccus, ‘Matthew’ wrote in Hebrew. ‘Everyone agrees about it,’ he says. An early Hebrew gospel would naturally be attributed to Matthew. He, being a ‘publican,’ or tax-collector, would necessarily be able to write. Peter and John are said to have been ignorant of letters. There are more styles than one in Matthew—a fact that suggests compilation. Luke, an educated man, and perhaps identical with a ‘beloved physician’ mentioned in one of Paul’s epistles, certainly compiled his books from various sources; ‘Matthew’ almost certainly did the same. Later on, I will speak of their versions of Christ’s discourses. Now I must confine myself to their accounts of a very important subject—Christ’s supernatural birth.”

Up to this point I had been reading with little interest, doubting whether it would not be better to pass on to the accounts of the resurrection. As I have explained above, my study of Paul’s epistles had not led me to believe that there would be anything miraculous about the birth of Christ. The phrase “supernatural birth,” therefore, came on me quite unexpectedly. What followed, riveted my attention: “Mark, as you know, says nothing about Christ’s parentage. First he gives, as title, ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ’—where, by the way, old Hermas has written, in my margin, ‘some add, Son of God.’ Then there is a Voice from heaven, at the moment of Christ’s baptism, heard (apparently) only by John the Baptist and Jesus, ‘Thou art my beloved Son.’ A similar Voice occurs later on. Mark represents a blind man as calling Jesus ‘son of David,’ and his fellow-townsmen say, ‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?’ This might indicate merely that Joseph the carpenter was dead. But ‘Son of Mary’ might be used in two other ways. The enemies of Jesus might use it to suggest that he was a bastard. The worshippers of Jesus might use it (later on) to shew that he was a Son of God, not born of any human father. Matthew has, ‘Is not this the carpenter’s son?’ This, however, Matthew might[222] write not as his own belief, but as that of Christ’s fellow-townsmen. Luke, who has ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’, gives the whole of the narrative quite differently. I should add that the first Voice from heaven is differently given in some copies of Luke.” I examined this at once. My copy had a marginal note, “Some have, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.”

“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[223] 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[224] 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[225] 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[226] 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[227] 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, Iren?us 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 Iren?us, 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 Iren?us’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!

To return to Scaurus. He dealt next with the pedigree in Luke. “You might have supposed in these circumstances,” said he, “that Luke would drop the pedigree of Joseph altogether, and give only that of Mary. Well, he has not done[228] this. Another course would have been to state clearly that Jesus was not really, but only putatively, the son of Joseph (being really the son of God) and to add that he gave the pedigree of Joseph, as Matthew gives it, because Joseph was the putative father. Well, he has not quite done this either; but he has done half of it. He has written ‘being the son, as was supposed, of Joseph.’ But he has also given a pedigree of Joseph differing from that of Matthew in that portion which extends from Joseph to David. What do you think of this?”

I thought that the whole thing was a cobweb and wished Scaurus would pass to something more interesting. But he continued, “My rabbi suggested that Luke had invented a new genealogy. But when I dissented—for I am convinced that neither Luke nor Matthew invented, and that these early writers generally were very simple honest souls—he asked me whether I knew of any instance in the gospels where the name spelt in Greek Eli or Heli was misunderstood. I replied that there was one instance where Jesus used it to mean my God, but the bystanders took it to mean Elias. ‘Well then,’ said the rabbi, ‘I should not be surprised if your honest compiler Luke, a learned man perhaps in Greek, but innocent of Hebrew, had got hold of some tradition saying, Jesus was supposed to be the son of Joseph, being the son of God. Though in Hebrew there is a difference between the spelling of El, God, and the name Eli, there is not much difference in Greek. And Luke, having once started on the scent of a new pedigree supposed to connect Jesus with Heli, ransacked various Jewish genealogies till he found one containing the name, and adopted it as a substitute for Matthew’s.’ This was what my rabbi suggested. All I can say is that it seems to me more probable than that Luke invented the genealogy.”

Scaurus entered into further details to vindicate Luke’s honesty, concluding as follows, “My own belief is that the parents of John and of Jesus were good, pure, simple, noble-minded people, liable to dreams and to the seeing of visions and to the hearing of voices. As to ‘dreams,’ by the way, look at the earliest account of the Lord’s appearing to Solomon,[229] ‘In Gibeon, the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream … Solomon awoke, and behold it was a dream.’ Then look at the later account in Chronicles, ‘In that night did God appear unto Solomon.’ No ‘dream’ and no ‘awaking’! Verbum sapienti! The facts above alleged—to which I could add—when combined with the influence of prophecy—seem to me to explain everything in Matthew’s and Luke’s Introductions as being at once morally truthful and historically untrue.”

Later on, Scaurus said, “Luke himself in his story of Christ’s childhood, does not seem to me to be so consistent as an educated writer would have been if he had been dishonestly inventing. For he represents Mary as saying to her son, ‘Behold, thy father and I seek thee sorrowing.’ By ‘thy father’ she means Joseph. But could she have used this language, or felt this sorrow, if she had realised indeed that her son was not one of the many children of the Father of Gods and men, but that he was unique, God incarnate? This and many other points convince me that Luke (in his account of the birth) is not composing fiction, but only compiling, harmonizing, adapting, and moulding into a historical shape, what should have been preserved as poetic legend.”

Scaurus then gave one more detail from Mark, “who,” said he, “meagre though he is, often records actual history where later accounts disguise it. Mark says that, when Jesus was preaching the gospel, his own family (literally ‘those from him,’ that is, ‘those of his household’) ‘came to lay hands on him; for they said, He is beside himself.’ Matthew and Luke omit this. But Matthew and Luke agree with Mark when the latter goes on to describe how the mother of Jesus and his brethren come to the place where he is preaching. Not being able to reach him through the crowd, they send word that they desire to speak to him. Jesus does not go out nor stop his preaching. Those who obeyed the gospel, he said, were his mother and his brethren. I have said that Matthew and Luke omit the attempt of Christ’s family to stop him from preaching as being out of his mind. Probably variations in the text enabled them honestly to omit it, believing it to be erroneous. And indeed[230] how could they believe otherwise? How could Matthew and Luke believe that Mary would accompany the brethren of Jesus in an attempt to ‘lay hands’ on him after recording what they have previously recorded about the supernatural birth? Lay hands on her divine Son, the Son of God, engaged in proclaiming the will of his Father in heaven! The story might well seem to them incredible. But it bears the plain stamp of genuine truth.”

Scaurus then pointed out the divergence between Matthew and Luke as to the manner in which Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem. This I omit. But in the course of it he shewed me how Matthew has been influenced by prophecies applied by the Christian Jews to Christ, as being their Deliverer from Captivity, and their Comforter in time of trouble. “For example,” said he, “since ‘Egypt’ in Hebrew poetry is often synonymous with ‘bondage,’ the Christian Jews might naturally praise God in their songs and hymns for fulfilling, through Christ, the prophecy, ‘Out of Egypt have I called my son,’ i.e. Israel, meaning that God had called them, the new Israel, out of ‘bondage’ (as Paul often says) into the liberty of the children of God. But Matthew takes this as meaning that, when Christ was a little child, he was literally ‘called out of Egypt.’ Hence he is driven to infer that he must have been taken to Egypt. For such a journey he finds a reason by supposing that it was to escape from the sword of Herod. He fits in this story with another prophecy representing Rachel as weeping for her children, and as being consoled by the Lord. Hence Matthew infers a massacre of children by Herod in Bethlehem, corresponding, on a small scale, to the wholesale destruction from which the infant Moses escaped. But such a massacre is not mentioned by any evangelist, or by Josephus, or by any other historian or writer known to me.”

I was depressed by this, and eager to pass on to something more satisfactory. So was Scaurus. “I have no desire,” he said, “to dwell on these points. I am interested in the biographies of all great teachers, philosophers, and lawgivers, as well as conquerors—so far as they are true. Untruth gives me[231] no pleasure, but disappointment—unmixed except for the slight pleasure one may find in tracking an error to its hole and killing it.

“With much greater pleasure shall I turn to Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of the words and deeds of Christ. Only I will add that, were I a Christian, I should long for a new gospel that would go back to facts, rejecting these additions of Matthew and Luke. Not that I would go back to Mark. By ‘facts,’ I do not mean such facts as John the Baptist’s diet of locusts and clothing of camel’s hair. But surely a genuine worshipper of Christ—I can conceive such a thing; for after all, what is more worthy of worship on earth, next to God Himself, than ‘the man that is as righteous as possible,’ concerning whom Socrates says that there is ‘nothing more like God’?—I say a genuine Christian, if he were also a philosopher, might surely find it possible to state in a few simple words his conviction that, whereas John the son of Zachariah was sent by the Logos, and contained only a portion of the Logos, Jesus the son of Joseph was actually the Logos incarnate. I wholly reject such a notion myself, partly because I am not sure that I believe that there is any divine Logos at all—having, in fact, given up speculating on these matters. But if I were as sure on that point as your Epictetus is, and if I were a Christian to boot, I am not sure that I should have any great difficulty in believing that some one man might exist—might be ‘sent into the world,’ I suppose, a Christian would say—as different from ordinary possessors of the Logos as steam is from water—after all, steam is water—superior to Numa the Roman, superior to Lycurgus the Spartan, to Solon the Athenian, yes, superior to Moses the Hebrew.

“You will be disposed to smile at my ‘Moses,’ as an anticlimax. But let me tell you that this Moses was a very great man. He was a genuine maker of a republic. I don’t mention your friend’s ideal, Diogenes, for I don’t regard him as a maker of anything. I do not even mention my own favourite Socrates. He is not for the man in the street. He is a maker of thinkers. I am speaking of makers of men, and contemplating the possibility of a unique Maker, a Creator of an[232] altogether new social condition. Well, then, suppose I believed in the Logos in heaven and the Logos on earth. Your philosophers would tell me to regard it as a divine flame lighting many human torches without self-diminution. Granted. Then I should believe that every man had his share of the Logos; some, a great share; others, a very great one. Why should I not contemplate the possibility of a unique and complete man, not ‘sharing,’ but containing or being—a man that might be or contain the totality, or, as Paul says, the fulness, of the Logos? I see weak points in this torch-analogy except as an illustration of the belief; yet the belief itself does not appear to me against reason. But enough of this rambling! I have discerned of late many signs that I am growing old, and none more patent than this tendency to expatiate on my cast-off Christian explorations begun in the years when I was vigorous. I pass, and with great relief, to some things that are real possessions—I mean some portions of Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of Christ’s discourses.”

For my part, it was not with unmixed “relief” that I turned to the next portion of Scaurus’s letter. His conclusions about Christ’s birth had merely accorded with my inferences from Paul’s epistles; but he had shaken my faith in Matthew and Luke as trustworthy historians; and I looked forward with misgivings to his further criticism, which, I feared, might prove destructive. In this depression, I endeavoured to recall the words of Paul to the Corinthians about having a “treasure in earthen vessels.” Mark certainly was an “earthen vessel.” Matthew appeared likely to be no better, so far as I could judge from his story of Christ’s birth and childhood. Luke, trying to reduce these legends to historic shape, did not seem to me to have succeeded, in spite of all his pains and sincerity. While I was unrolling the Corinthian epistle to refresh my memory, the thought occurred to me, “Is it possible that any God should choose such writers to set forth the life and character of His Son! How could the All-wise be guilty of such foolishness?” I had hardly uttered the word “foolishness” when my eyes fell on the words, “The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.” Then I became more modest. “God’s ways,” I said,[233] “are not our ways. Perhaps He desires to force us to think and to feel for ourselves.” I felt grateful even to Mark because he alone had preserved some of Christ’s deep and difficult sayings. And in the end I recurred to the thought that had been of late growing stronger and stronger within me concerning the possible inferiority of Romans and Greeks to Jews in things of the spirit. “Thucydides,” I said, “would have surpassed Isaiah in describing exactly the campaign of Sennacherib against Hezekiah. But in describing visions and judgments of the Lord, Isaiah is, perhaps, the man, and Thucydides the babe. I will continue my exploration, with Scaurus as a guide.”