meaning plainly is that although God and God alone performed the act of begetting, yet the children were born in the house of Abraham and of Jacob and belonged to them as would be the case with other children. Equally impossible is Badham’s interpretation of Matthew and Luke. It is true that the New Testament narratives lay stress upon the Davidic descent of Jesus through Joseph; but, as we observed in an earlier chapter,** the Davidic descent of Jesus through Joseph does not at all require us to suppose that Jesus was in a physical sense Joseph’s son. And the actual wording of Mt. i.18-25 and Lk. i.34,35 makes Badham’s interpretation very improbable. The meaning seems clearly to be not that the agency of Joseph was mediated in some unusual and miraculous fashion, but that that agency was altogether excluded.
To return, then, to Philo, we must plainly insist against Badham that what Philo is speaking of is an actual exclusion of the human paternity in the case of Isaac and of the other children of whom he speaks. But it is also perfectly clear that the exclusion of the human paternity belongs altogether to the allegorical sphere and is not intended at all to refer to the actual historical personages whose names are used. When Philo uses details of the Old Testament narrative to support his interpretation, that is quite in accord with the allegorical method. An isolated phrase, such as the phrase referring to the opening of Leah’s womb, is seized upon quite apart from its context, and quite apart from the literal or historical sense of the passage, in order to afford a starting-point for the treatment of spiritual mysteries concerning the soul of man and the things of the unseen world. A sympathetic perusal of the passage in the “De Cherubim” and of other similar passages will show that when Philo speaks of virginity and of the divine begetting he is not really thinking at all of Sarah or Isaac or Leah or Zipporah, but of the facts concerning the soul of man and its relations to God. The whole representation goes back to certain spiritual, or, as modern men might put it, psychological, facts. The soul clogged with representations coming from the senses is sterile; it must be freed from these things and thus become truly virgin before it can receive the true seed; and it can receive the true seed not from man, but from God. But when the virgin soul has thus received by inspiration the seed that comes from God it can bring forth virtue. Such are the things with which Philo is really dealing in these passages. There is indeed a bewildering variety in detail.“* At times it is the soul that is represented as the mother; at times it seems rather to be virtue—virtue that brings forth true
“ Part of this variety is exhibited by Leisegang (op. cit., 1922, p. 52) by means of a table listing in three columns the designations (1) of the male principle, (2) of the female principle, and (3) of the offspring. - blessedness. It is useless to seek in Philo any one scheme in which all of his representations will fit; the exuberance of his language defies any attempt at complete systematization of his teaching. But at any rate it is perfectly clear that when he speaks about children begotten of God he is not for one moment thinking of beings of flesh and blood.
So much is admitted; it is generally admitted that Philo did not mean to say that Isaac or any of these other Old Testament personages was born of a virgin mother by a divine act of begetting. We do not find in Philo’s own thinking, therefore, any notion that would form a parallel for the story of the virgin birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke.
How then, if at all, may the Philonic passages be used in the search for such a parallel? A very definite answer to this question was given by F. C. Conybeare in the course of the correspondence to which reference has already repeatedly been made.*® Although Philo may not himself be referring to a physical as distinguished from a spiritual pregnancy,*® yet these passages “certainly imply among Philo’s contemporaries a belief in actual parthenogenesis—i.e., in the possibility of virgins bearing children ¢o earthly fathers, yet not by them conceived, but by the Divine Spirit.” *7 “Granted the existence among the Jews of the first century of such a belief,” Conybeare goes on to say, “the rise and development in regard to Jesus of the entire story which we have in the first chapter of Matthew is seen to be a natural and almost a necessary outcome of his age.” Thus, according to Conybeare, there were in the time of Philo Jews who actually believed in the virgin birth of certain patriarchs; however sublimated Philo’s own view may have been, he is making use, in the passages to which we have referred, of a Jewish tradition as to actual virgin births. This Jewish tradition, Badham surmises,*® may well have been found in Palestine as well as elsewhere. If so, we find attested in the Philonic passages a pre-Christian Palestinian belief in the virgin birth of Isaac and other Old Testament characters, which may well have been the basis for the belief in the virgin birth of the Messiah that appears in Matthew and Luke.
This hypothesis as to a Jewish tradition of parthenogenesis underlying the Philonic passages received the support of Carl Clemen in the first edition of his work on “Primitive Christianity and Its Non-Jewish Sources.” *® But it
46 Conybeare leaves the question open whether Badham’s interpretation of Philo, which we have mentioned above, is to be accepted or not.
47 Conybeare, op. cit., p. 150. We have already seen how unwarranted is Conybeare’s introduction of “the Divine Spirit” in this connection.
seems to be dropped by Clemen in the second edition of his work.5° At any rate, it must surely be pronounced very improbable. It is perfectly clear that when Philo speaks of virgin births and divine begettings he is thinking of facts concerning the soul, not of events in Old Testament history. His Scriptural attestation of his doctrine is found by an ingenious allegorical method of using certain Old Testament passages, for which it is quite idle to seek any support in Jewish tradition. Indeed, to seek such support is to show misunderstanding of Philo’s whole attitude of mind.
There is, then, no evidence in the Philonic passages to show that there ever were Jews in the pre-Christian period who believed in the virgin birth of any being of flesh and blood. But may not those passages at least afford a hint as to the way in which such a belief might conceivably have originated? We have seen that Philo’s references to the birth of Abel and Isaac and the others, when isolated from their context and taken literally, look very much as though they meant that those men were actually virgin-born. May there not then have been sone persons, either in pre-Christian Judaism or in the Jewish Christian Church, who, misunderstanding such allegorical exegesis in that literal way, derived from these passages or from passages like them in other allegorical writers the notion that there had been, or at least might be, men born without human father by a creative act of God? May not, in other words, allegorical exegesis like the exegesis which is preserved for us in Philo have given to literally-minded men of Jewish race the idea of a virgin birth, which could then easily be applied to the Messiah?
This suggestion is opposed by the very great difference of atmosphere which separates Philo, on the one hand, from the New Testament infancy narratives, on the other. It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast. That contrast is no doubt rooted in the difference which prevailed in general between Alexandria and Palestine—a difference which was well insisted upon by R. H. Charles in his controversy with Conybeare.” But it appears in a particularly acute form when we compare with Philo’s writings and indeed with the other products of Alexandrian Judaism the Palestinian narratives that are contained in the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke. Are we to suppose that those narratives, with their simplicity and directness, have derived their most distinctive feature trom a misunderstanding of an allegorical exegesis like that of Philo? The hypothesis certainly seems to be very unlikely.
&1R. H. Charles, “The New Syriac Codex of the Gospels,” in Academy, xlvi, 1894, pp. 556 f. Charles well speaks of “the gulf that divides Palestinian and Egyptian Judaism.”
To avoid this difficulty we might try to find the basis for the New Testament story, not in a misunderstood allegorical exegesis of the passages concerning Abel and Isaac, but in the general notion, attested by Philo, that a man’s soul is derived from God, while his body comes by the ordinary intercourse of the sexes. Such apparently was Conybeare’s first suggestion about the matter? ‘The original purport of the story underlying the New Testament documents was, Conybeare supposed, “to represent Mary as owing the soul of the Messiah to the Holy Spirit, and His flesh to the natural human intercourse.” Then there was foisted upon this original version of the story—so the hypothesis runs—the notion attested by Mt. i.1g f., that the activity of the Holy Spirit excludes the human fatherhood altogether.**
But surely this hypothesis hardly represents any improvement over that which we have just discussed. In the first place, it does not do justice to the New Testament narratives; for not merely the single passage, Mt. 1.19 f., but the whole account of the annunciation and conception in Matthew and Luke really involves the exclusion of the human fatherhood. A reflection like that in Philo’s “De Opificio Mundi,” that the soul of every man comes from God really leads away from, and not toward, the New Testament narratives; for the point of the New Testament narratives is that there was something different in the birth of Jesus from that which is found in the birth of other men. In the second place, the hypothesis does not do away with the argument drawn from the difference of atmosphere that prevails between Philo and the New Testament. Even the underlying notion about the source of the soul of man as distinguished from the body is not—at least in the form in which it could become fruitful for the hypothesis, as distinguished from the form in which it had a true Old Testament basis—such that we should naturally attribute it to Palestinian Jews. Conybeare himself says that according to his hypothesis Mt. i.18-25 “must be explained by help of the Jewish theosophy current at the time.” ™* Is it natural to find the basis of such a Palestinian narrative in “Jewish theosophy”? The question must certainly be answered~in the negative. If, on the other hand, we reduce the supposed underlying notion about the source of the soul of man to such general terms that it could be found in the Old Testament and so on Palestinian soil, then the specific idea of the virgin birth is left altogether hanging in the air. We are therefore
52 cit “The Newly Found Sinaitic Codex of the Gospels,” in Academy, xlvi, 1894, impaled upon the horns of a dilemma: either make the supposed underlying notion such that it could be derived from the Old Testament, in which case the origin of the idea of the virgin birth is left without explanation; or else put into the supposed underlying notion elements found in Philo’s peculiar philosophic doctrines, in which case the presence of that underlying notion in Palestine and the influence of it in Matthew and Luke become improbable in the extreme.
Thus it cannot be said that Philo’s treatment of the divine begetting of the human soul affords any plausible explanation of the New Testament doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ. Before we turn away from Philo, however, it is necessary to consider for a moment another suggestion which Conybeare made. This suggestion concerned not the divine begetting of human souls, but the divine begetting of the Logos. According to Philo, says Conybeare, the Logos was begotten by God and born of Sophia, “Wisdom,” who was an “ever-virgin, gifted with an incontaminate and unstainable nature.” ™5 This birth of the Logos is spoken of, for example, in one passage as follows: ©
Accordingly we shall immediately say with justice that the One who has wrought this universe is both Fashioner and Father of that which has come into being; and we shall say that the mother is the Knowledge 5? of Him who has created it, with whom God having intercourse not after the manner of man sowed His creation. But she having received the seed of God brought forth with final birth-pangs the only and beloved visible son, this world.
In the light of such ideas, what could be more natural, says Conybeare, than that when Jesus was thought to be the Logos incarnate He, like the Logos, should be thought of as being born of a virgin mother?
One obvious objection to this hypothesis is that there is no trace of a Logos doctrine in the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. Whether the Alexandrian Logos doctrine influenced any part of the New Testament is another question, with which we shall not now attempt to deal; but surely at any rate it did not influence the Palestinian narratives which mention the virgin birth of our Lord. Thus to derive the story of the virgin birth of Christ from speculations about the Logos is to relinquish all the advantages which belong to theories of Jewish origin as over against theories of pagan origin. We should at once have on our hands the question how such an obviously non-Palestinian notion came to be attested just in the most strikingly Pales-
87 txvorhun, to be identified according to the context with Sophia, Wisdom.
tinian narratives in the whole New Testament. Conybeare says in commendatio. of his hypothesis:
In the year of Rome 743 was born Jesus of Nazareth, a man in whom, because of his moral and thaumaturgic pre-eminence, his followers, so far as they were Aramaicspeaking Jews, quickly recognised their promised Messiah; while such of them as were Greek Jews and proselytes acclaimed in him the Divine Word, which, many times before in their history, had come down from heaven and assumed human form.5§
The trouble is that the story of the virgin birth appears in the New Testament, despite the final Greek form of the story as we have it, in an underlying Aramaic-speaking, not Greek-speaking, environment. But it is by no means merely a question of language. The whole spirit of Mt. i-ii, Lk. iti is as far as possible removed from the spirit of Philo. To find any influence of an Alexandrian Logos doctrine in these narratives is to do violence to any sound canons of literary and historical criticism.
This conclusion is amply confirmed when we examine the Philonic teaching in detail. Charles points out, in answer to Conybeare, that there are two representations of the Logos in Philo. According to one representation, which Charles calls Logos I, the Logos is the immanent reason of God; according to the other (Logos II), it is the material world. But it is only the Logos in the former sense that by any chance could be identified with the person, Jesus Christ; while it is only the Logos in the latter sense that is spoken of as having been begotten by God and born of the divine Wisdom. Conybeare’s answer apparently is that it is by a comparison of Logos I with Logos II on the part of the Christian teachers that the Christian Logos doctrine could come into being.** But surely that answer does not altogether remove the objection. The fact remains that when Philo speaks of the Logos or the “beloved son” of God as having been born of the virgin Wisdom, he is thinking not of a person, but of the material universe. It would be difficult to imagine any complex of ideas more utterly remote from what we find in the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke.
In much of what has just been said about Philo and the virgin birth we have really been anticipating the discussion in our next chapter, where we shall deal with the hypothesis of pagan, as distinguished from Jewish, origin of the virgin birth idea. Conybeare, for example, does not for a moment believe that
59 This point is well made by Charles (“The New Syriac Gospels,” in Academy, xlvii, 1895, pp. 13 f.) in criticism of Conybeare. Conybeare’s reply (ibid., p. 58) is hardly satisfactory.
the idea was originally Jewish: although he finds it attested in Jewish sources, he holds that ultimately it is a bit of “pagan folk-lore.” © Certainly if any use is to be made, in this connection, of what is characteristic in Philo’s teaching, the extra-Jewish origin of the idea will stand firm; for Philo’s teaching is essentially derived from pagan sources—from Greek philosophy, and, as recent scholars are inclined to believe, from the popular mystical religion of the Hellenistic world. We shall have to return to Philo, therefore, when we come to deal with the theory of pagan derivation of the virgin birth idea. We shall then have to discuss the question whether Philo does or does not help us to reconstruct a type of pagan religion from which the Christian idea of the virgin birth of Christ may ultimately have come.
Here our interest in the great Alexandrian teacher has been of a more limited kind. Philo, after all, was a Jew; and when he speaks of the virgin birth of certain patriarchs or of the Logos, the question arises whether he attests the presence in pre-Christian Judaism of an idea which might have afforded the basis for our narratives in Matthew and Luke. The ultimate source of the idea is another question, with which we shall afterwards have to deal. Here we have considered merely the question whether, whatever its ultimate origin, the virgin birth idea is shown by the Philonic passages to have actually been found in Judaism, especially in Palestinian Judaism, at a time prior to that in which the New Testament story appeared.
That question we have answered with an emphatic negative. In the first place, Philo does not speak at all of a virgin birth of the Messiah, but only of a virgin birth of certain Old Testament characters. In the second place, when he speaks of a virgin birth of those Old Testament characters, he is not dealing with them at all as historical personages, as men of flesh and blood, but only with what they represent in his allegorical exegesis. There is not the slightest likelihood that either Philo himself or any Jews of his day believed that Isaac or any of the others of whom he speaks in this connection were born without human father. In the third place, there is no evidence whatever, and it is most improbable, that any Jews ever obtained from Philo’s philosophical teaching about the human soul or about the origin of the universe the notion that the Messiah or any other man had been born or would be born of a virgin.
Thus Philo gives to those who derive the Christian story of the virgin birth of Christ from pre-Christian Jewish notions regarding the Messiah not the slightest real support. We are brought back to the main thread of our argument at exactly the point at which we left off. There is no indication in Philo, as there is no indication élsewhere, that in pre-Christian Judaism of the period subsequent to the Old Testament there was any thought of a virgin birth of the Messiah.
To do justice to those who hold that the idea of the virgin birth was derived from really Jewish elements of thought, it should be remarked that they do not, so far as we have observed, often have recourse to the supposition that we have just been discussing: they do not usually seem to hold that the idea of the virgin birth had already existed in pre-Christian Judaism with reference to the Messiah; but they maintain rather that it was evolved with specific reference to Jesus by the Jewish Christian Church.®* The existence of a pre-Christian Jewish doctrine of the virgin birth of the Messiah has been argued for the most part not by those who believe that the doctrine of the virgin birth was derived from Jewish elements of thought, but by a certain group among those who hold the doctrine to be of pagan origin—the group, namely, that regards the idea of the virgin birth as a pagan idea which entered into the Christian Church by means of a previous assimilation in Judaism. This latter theory will more conveniently be considered at a later point in our discussion. But of course if it could be shown that the idea of the virgin birth, whether its ultimate origin was Jewish or pagan, was actually found in pre-Christian Judaism, that fact would militate in favor of any theory of Jewish Christian derivation of the belief in the virgin birth of Jesus, including the theory of Keim and Lobstein and Harnack with which this chapter has to do. It is very important, therefore, to observe even at the present point in the discussion that there is not the slightest reason to suppose that there was ever in pre-Christian Judaism any expectation of the virgin birth of the Messiah. If the idea of the virgin birth emerged in the Jewish Christian Church, it did not emerge as an inheritance from Judaism, but must have been evolved by the Jewish Christian Church itself with specific reference to Jesus.
In particular, if Is. vii.r4 was interpreted by the Jewish Christian Church as referring to the virgin birth, that interpretation, too, was an innovation over against pre-Christian Jewish exegesis. Is it likely that such an exegetical innovation should arise? Of course it could readily arise if Jesus was actually born of a virgin. But could it arise if that was not the case; and if it had arisen, could it have then produced the story of the virgin birth of Christ?
Such an hypothesis is certainly faced by objections of the most serious kind. Certain general objections have already been indicated in the former
&Harnack (Neue Untersuchungen zur Apostelgeschichte, 1911, p. 103; English translation, The Date of the Acts and of the Synoptic Gospels, 1911, pp. 147 f.) constitutes an exception. He regards it as “ probable that brooding over the original text of Is. vii even in the pre-Christian period had brought many full-Jews to the opinion that the text was speaking of a virgin as mother of the Messiah.”
part of the present chapter; the discovery of a virgin birth prophecy in Is. vii.14 would be faced, in Judaism, by the same obstacles as those which opposed the idea of a virgin birth in general. But there would also be special obstacles in the way of the supposed new interpretation of this verse.
One obvious objection, for example, is found in the language presumably used by those who originated the new interpretation. That language, on the theory of a Jewish Christian derivation of the idea of the virgin birth, was no doubt Aramaic, not Greek; and on the part of Aramaic-speaking Christians a knowledge of the Hebrew Old Testament may probably be assumed. But in the Hebrew original the interpretation of Is. vii.14 as referring to the virgin birth of the Messiah is by no means so obvious as it is in the Greek translation, where the word “virgin” is used. Few would be so bold as to maintain that the verse in the original ever could have given rise among Jewish Christians to the story of the virgin birth of Jesus. Certainly most advocates of the view with which we are now dealing cannot do so, since no doubt they share the common view that the Hebrew word ‘almah does not mean “virgin” at all. The theory, therefore, cannot possess even plausibility except on the basis of the Septuagint; it is the Greek translation alone which can be supposed to have led to the evolution of the virgin birth story as a fulfilment of the prophecy in Is. vii.14. But if that be true, what becomes of the Palestinian origin of the story, which seems to be demanded by the Palestinian character of the narratives in Lk. i-ii, Mt. i-ii? The chief advantage possessed by the theory of Jewish Christian origin of the idea of the virgin birth, as compared with other theories with which we shall presently deal, is that it does justice to the Palestinian style and content of the narratives in which in the New Testament the virgin birth is attested. But now that advantage seems to be lost by the necessity of supposing that the idea could have originated only on the basis of the Greek translation, as distinguished from the Hebrew original, of Is. Vii.14.
Let it not be said that the origination of the idea of the virgin birth of Jesus might have been accomplished in Palestine and yet by Greek-speaking persons.** No doubt there were many such persons in Palestine; but the trouble is that the linguistic character of Lk. i-ii, Mt. i-ii seems to be strongly against the supposition that it was in those Greek-speaking circles that the idea of the virgin birth arose. Indeed, in Mt. i21, immediately before the introduction of the virgin-prophecy from Isaiah, we have an interpretation of the name
& This suggestion is made by Harnack (loc. cit.), in addition to his suggestion, noted above, that even the original text of Is. vii.14 may have been interpreted by pre-Christian Jews to involve a virgin birth of the Messiah,
“Jesus” which is intelligible only on the basis of Hebrew.°* But that detail only confirms the evidence of a Semitic background which is found in the whole character of the narratives. On the theory, then, that the virgin birth tradition arose out of a translation in the Septuagint at Is. vii.t4, supposed to be contrary to the Hebrew original, we have upon our hands the immense difficulty of understanding how an idea which would have arisen only among those who spoke Greek should be attested just by the most markedly Semitic parts of the New Testament.
But even aside from this linguistic consideration, the whole notion that the doctrine of the virgin birth came from the desire to show a fulfilment of one Old Testament prophecy is very improbable. At this point we have the overwhelming support of recent investigators. If there is any one critical method that has fallen into disfavor in recent years, it is this method of deriving the supposed myths of the New Testament from Old Testament prophecy. That method was in full vogue in Strauss’s first “Life of Jesus,” which appeared in - 1835. Even then, it is true, Strauss did not ignore the supposed pagan analogies for the virgin birth; but in addition to them he pointed with great insistence not only to Is. vii.r4, but even to Ps. ii.7, and apparently found in those Old Testament passages the real propulsion toward the forming of the idea.%° In his later work there is a striking change. The inadequacy of the prophetic passages in explaining the origin of the myth is now clearly recognized.” Thus even the most famous advocate of the theory by which New Testament stories are supposed to have been produced through a desire to show fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies felt compelled to modify very seriously his original attitude. Even more striking has been the change in the general trend of scholarship. It is now very generally held that the Old Testament prophecies quoted in the New Testament did not for the most part produce the New Testament stories, but on the contrary were brought in as supposed Scriptural confirmation for stories that had arisen in an entirely different way. First came the myths, it is held, and then the searching of Scriptures for all sorts of fanciful support of them. So it is thought to be in the case of the virgin birth. Is. vii.rg4 never in the world, it is said, would have been taken as a prophecy of the virgin birth of the Messiah unless the story of the virgin birth had been established already in the mind of the writer. The very fancifulness of Matthew’s interpretation of the verse in
66“ Thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins.”
Isaiah shows, it is said, that the Old Testament passage never could have been the source of the story of which it is supposed to be a prophecy.®*
Now for our part we do not think that Matthew’s interpretation of Is. vii.14 is fanciful. On the contrary, for reasons partly set forth above, we hold that it is profoundly true. But although it is true, it is certainly not obvious. Here, as in many other cases, prophecy was not intended to permit the hearers to map out the course of future events, but on the contrary became fully intelligible only after the fulfilment had come. We can agree, therefore, mutatis mutandis with the argument that has just been set forth, the argument that has led to the practically universal rejection of the view that Is. vii.14 is the principal germ out of which the myth of the virgin birth arose.
With the rejection of that view about Is. vii.14 has gone the very general rejection of the whole Jewish Christian derivation of the idea of the virgin birth. It is admitted by the overwhelming majority of modern scholars that the myth of the virgin birth never arose in the Jewish Christian Church on the basis of putely Jewish ideas. The general opinion is voiced by Merx, when he says that the idea of the virgin birth is “as un-Jewish as possible.” ©
That general opinion, we are convinced, is correct so far as later Judaism is concerned. No doubt the Old Testament teaching is profoundly congruous with the virgin birth of Christ, but later Jewish thought was moving along entirely different lines. It is significant, as B. Weiss has remarked,” that the denials of the virgin birth which are attested in the early Church came just from men of Jewish race. There are, of course, those who will tell us that those denials by the “Ebionites” were based upon genuine historical tradition, but another hypothesis is vastly more probable. When one compares the negative attitude of the non-Christian Jews toward the preéxistence and virgin birth of the Messiah, as that attitude is attested by Justin Martyr’s Dialogue, with the similar attitude of the Ebionites, one receives the irresistible impression that both the Ebionites and the non-Christian Jews are simply reflecting a profound antipathy of later Judaism to anything like the story that is found in Mt. i-ii, Lk. i-ii. No doubt, as in our first chapter we found reason to believe, many
68 The prevailing attitude toward Is. vii.14 was expressed in typical form by Usener in 1889 (Das Weihnachtsfest, p. 75). “It would be,” Usener said, “to turn the natural course of affairs around if we should regard this prophetic utterance as the occasion and point of departure for the formation of the legend: rather was it the seal which was impressed upon the finished material,”
men of Jewish race overcame that antipathy, and became not Ebionites, but in the full sense Christians. But that some should have stuck in the halfway position of the Ebionites does provide one more indication, in addition to many others, that the Judaism of the early Christian era was a soil in which a myth of a virgin birth would be as unlikely as possible to spring up.