The Origin of Paul's Religion; What Is Faith?; The Virgin Birth of Christ

I T HAS been shown in the last chapter that the theory of Jewish derivation of the idea of the virgin birth has been rejected by the great majority of contemporary scholars and that such rejection is well grounded. If, therefore, the factual basis of the idea is still to be thought inadmissible, some other theory of origin is to be sought.

Before we examine the theory that is dominant at the present time, it will be advisable to consider briefly one possibility that has perhaps not received quite the amount of attention that it deserves. That possibility was suggested especially by Kattenbusch in 1900," after some anticipation by Pfleiderer in 1887.2 The idea of the virgin birth, Kattenbusch suggested, may have been developed within the early Church on the basis of Pauline teaching. Thus the idea would not be strictly Jewish Christian, and yet to account for it we should not have to have recourse to the pagan world. In the development of the account of Jesus’ birth which we have in the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke, two stages, according to Kattenbusch, are to be distinguished. In the former stage came the idea of conception by the Holy Spirit; in the second stage the idea of the virgin birth. The former idea, which is the dominant one in the Lucan narrative,® might well have been suggested, Kattenbusch thinks, by the Pauline intimation that the Spirit was active in the entrance of Jesus into the flesh; the latter idea, the idea of the virgin birth, was fostered by Paul’s doctrine of Christ as the second Adam, had its final form imparted to it by the prophecy in Is. vii14, and then was important in making acceptable the Pauline doctrine of the preéxistence of Christ.

This theory is interesting in various ways. In the attention which it gives to the positive side of the New Testament representation of the birth of Jesus, as over against the negative side—that is, the activity of the Holy Spirit in the

2 Indeed, Kattenbusch’s treatment suggested, though it did not quite expressly propose, the theory that the other idea, the idea of the virgin birth, came into the Lucan narrative only by the interpolation of the four words, éret &vbpa ob ywoonw, in Lk. 1.34. See above, pp. viii f., 156 f.

supernatural conception as over against the exclusion of the human father— it is anticipatory of the most recent elaborate theory as to the origin of the virgin birth tradition.* In its insistence upon the connection that exists between Pauline teaching and the doctrine of the virgin birth it displays a genuine insight that contrasts very favorably with some modern treatments of the subject. Particularly refreshing is its rediscovery of the close connection between the doctrine of the virgin birth and the doctrine of the preéxistence of Christ. That connection unquestionably exists; and we have never been able to understand how the two doctrines ever could have come to be regarded, as they certainly are in much modern discussion, as standing in any relation of antinomy or contradiction. It is certainly true that if a man is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth existed before He came to this earth, he is facing a serious difficulty if he holds Jesus to have been by ordinary generation the child of Joseph and Mary. It is difficult to believe that a voluntary entrance of a heavenly being into this world could have been accomplished without a. break in the ordinary process of the propagation of the human race. There is a profound connection also, as Kattenbusch observes, between the Pauline doctrine of the second Adam and the story of the virgin birth. The doctrine of the second Adam represents Jesus as a new beginning in humanity, just as He is represented when He is said in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke to have been conceived by the Holy Ghost.

But here again it is one thing to recognize the connection between two ideas when both are given, and quite a different thing to evolve one of them from the other. Could the story of the virgin birth ever have been evolved from the elements of Pauline teaching to which reference has just been made? That story is a very concrete thing; its details hardly look as though they were arrived at merely by reflection upon the activity of the Spirit in connection with the human life of Jesus or upon Christ as the second Adam. Indeed, it would be more plausible, if the choice had to be made, to suppose that the designation of Christ as the second Adam grew out of the fact of the virgin birth than that the story of the virgin birth grew out of that designation. Even to one who held the Pauline view of Christ, the evolution of so concrete a representation as that which appears in Matthew and Luke would be anything but a matter of course.

To support the theory at this point, therefore, Kattenbusch is obliged to call in the assistance of Is. vii.r4. That verse, he supposes, provided for the

5 It appears clearly at such an early time as the middle of the second century, when, in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, the virgin birth and the preéxistence of Christ are linked together as the things that are attacked by Trypho and defended by Justin.

early Church the solution of the problem which was presented by the Pauline teaching about Christ. Thus although Kattenbusch begins by saying that Is. vii.14 was not the source of the virgin birth story, he is obliged in the end to have recourse to that verse. Such recourse is forbidden by the considerations which we have already adduced.

The suggestion of Kattenbusch, interesting and suggestive though it is, has not, so far as we have observed, obtained any considerable support. It is time, therefore, to consider what has become the dominant theory as to the origin of the idea of the virgin birth. That theory is the theory of pagan derivation. The doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ, according to the overwhelming majority of those who today deny the factual basis of it, did not come from Jewish or purely Christian elements of thought, but it came from pagan ideas.

This theory of pagan derivation has appeared in many forms. But before the individual forms are considered in detail, it should be observed that two objections would seem to face all of them alike.

The first objection is found in the separation between the early Christian Church and the paganism that surrounded it in the Greco-Roman world. That separation was maintained by Gentile Christianity as well as by Jewish Christianity. The converts from paganism, as Paul says in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, “turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God.” Would those converts so readily have turned back again just to the most degrading features of that polytheism which their conversion caused them to detest? We say “the most degrading features” advisedly, since exactly so are to be characterized those elements in pagan mythology which modern scholars have brought into parallel with the virgin birth. Would the pagan converts have returned so readily to the pit from which they had been digged?

We are well aware of the fact that in the apostolic age a great battle had to be fought against the paganism which in subtle ways sought to merge the life of the first Gentile Christian churches with the life of the world. The First Epistle to the Corinthians, in particular, attests the seriousness of that battle, The Corinthian converts were tempted to fall back not merely into pagan habits of life, but also into pagan ways of thinking; they were tempted, for example, to sublimate the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body into the pagan doctrine of the immortality of the soul. At many points, the apostle Paul had a battle on his hands against the paganism which was secking to obtain a foothold within the Church.

Yet there are evidences that that battle was fought through to victory and that paganism was actually prevented from obtaining any firm foothold in the Church. Moreover, even when the battle was sorest, even when paganism threatened to engulf the little groups of converts that had recently turned to Christ, it does not seem to have been the polytheistic forms of paganism that exerted the really dangerous appeal. In Corinth, for example, the dangerous thing was the Greek pride of intellect and the subtle attraction of a philosophy falsely so called. So far as we can see, there was no tendency at all for the converts to return to the worship of many gods; polytheism did not at all constitute the serious menace against which the apostle Paul had to contend. There may have been differences of opinion as to what was demanded, in the complex life of that day, by the new allegiance to the one Lord and the one God: could the converts conscientiously buy in the markets meat that had been technically offered to idols; could they accept meat when they were guests at the house of a friend; could they accept invitations. to dinner when those invitations were technically in the house of some heathen god? No doubt serious dangers lurked beneath such questions; compromise of principle, or even of what is falsely regarded as principle, is always dangerous to the Christian life. But the dangers did not spring from any theoretical friendliness to polytheism. There might be differences of opinion as to the practical consequences of the opposition to polytheism; even Paul himself, it must be remembered, advised that when a Christian was a guest in an unbeliever’s house he should eat the meat that was offered to him without asking whether it had been offered to idols or not. Certainly such problems were very perplexing indeed. But whatever differences of opinion there may have been about the practical consequences of opposition to polytheism, about the necessity of that opposition itself there was no doubt. Indeed, what was most obviously distinctive, perhaps, in the Gentile Christian Churches was the monotheism of the converts, which contrasted in the most striking way with the boundless syncretism and tolerance of the surrounding world.’

Could such churches have fallen so readily a prey to influences from just the most degrading features in polytheistic mythology, as we are required to believe by the theory of pagan origin of the idea of the virgin birth of Christ? And could this influence not merely have made itself felt here and there among the rank and file, but even have celebrated its triumph

7On the interesting but mistaken attempt of McGiffert (The God of the Early Christians, 1924) to represent the early Gentile converts as being devoted to Jesus as Saviour without being expressly devoted to monotheism or concerned to deny the existence of other gods, see the dis cussion by the present writer in What Is Faith, 1925, pp. 54-66, and the more extended discussion in Princeton Theological Review, xxii, 1924, pp. 544-588.

by inclusion in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and in the fourfold Gospel canon? Could it, at the time and in the manner which we know must have been the case, have attained universal acceptance in the early Catholic Church and inclusion in the Apostles’ Creed? These questions are deserving of much more careful attention than they have usually received from advocates of the theory of pagan origin of the idea of the virgin birth of Christ. In a later period, when the Church had obtained possession of the throne of the Czsars, no doubt pagan influences came in like a flood; no doubt the saints became in many places the successors of the heathen gods. But against such influences in the early period, the opinion which Harnack, for example, enunciated in 1889 ® is still worthy of the most careful consideration.

Such considerations are, indeed, quite contrary to what has come to be the dominant trend in the treatment of the early history of the Christian Church by those who deny the historicity of miracles. That dominant trend is represented by the school of comparative religion, which regards Christianity as being from the beginning a syncretistic religion and finds pagan influences even at the very centre of the teaching of Paul. But because a contention is fashionable, it does not follow that it is true; and the contention of the school of comparative religion is faced by objections of the most serious kind. These objections cannot, of course, be set forth here.® All that we can do now is to remark that the theory of pagan origin of the virgin birth story involves the entrance of just that particular kind of pagan influence which would be least likely to make itself felt; it involves the influence of pagan mythology in its most degrading features. Are we to suppose that despite the horror of polytheism, which was undoubtedly felt by the Church in the first century, the Church yet opened its doors, not merely to other pagan beliefs, but also to just the most crassly polytheistic elements in the myths of the heathen gods? We do not think that this question can be waved lightly aside.

Thus one barrier which would be interposed against reception of pagan influences in the story of the birth of Jesus is found in the separation of the early Christian Church in general from the pagan world. Another barrier is found in the clearly Palestinian character of the New Testament narratives in which the story of the virgin birth is told. Whatever may be thought of the hospitality of the Gentile Church to pagan ideas, are we really to suppose that pagan ideas found a place just in the most clearly Jewish and

® Some of the objections have been set forth by the present writer in The Origin of Paul's Religion, 1921, pp. 211-317.

Palestinian narratives in the whole New Testament? Are we to suppose that the authors of the narratives in Mt. i-ii, Lk. i-ii, with their high monotheism and their Old Testament piety, actually gave a place to an idea derived from the most degrading parts of pagan mythology? Surely there is an immense incongruity between the whole atmosphere of these narratives and the pagan ideas which are supposed by the theory now under discussion to have formed the basis for the doctrine of the virgin birth. How can this incongruity be explained?

One effort to explain it is found, as we observed, in the interpolation theory with regard to Lk. i.34, 35. The Lucan infancy narrative, it is said, is indeed Palestinian; but the pagan idea of the virgin birth got into it by interpolation. It is no wonder, according to this theory, that there is an incongruity between the pagan influence with regard to the virgin birth and the Jewish character of the rest of the narrative; for the verses in which the virgin birth is recorded were no part of the narrative as it was originally composed.

But this interpolation theory, as was set forth in Chapter VI, can be refuted in the most overwhelmingly decisive way; it can be shown clearly that the verses attesting the virgin birth in Lk. i-ii are no later addition, but belong to the fundamental structure of the narrative. The initial problem, then, remains, not only with regard to Matthew but also with regard to Luke. How did a crassly pagan and polytheistic idea ever find a place, not merely in Gentile Christian documents but in the most strikingly Jewish and Palestinian narratives in the whole New Testament?

A new solution of this problem has been coming increasingly into vogue within recent years. The interpolation theory, it is usually admitted by the advocates of this new solution, must be abandoned; *° the verses attesting the virgin birth are an integral part of the Lucan narrative, to say nothing of the narrative in Matthew. How, then, could the pagan idea of the virgin birth have found a place in these distinctly Jewish narratives? The answer which these recent scholars propose is that the idea was already naturalized in pre-Christian Judaism and so could appear in Mt. i-ii and Lk. i-ii as a Jewish idea, although ultimately it was of pagan origin; back of the Jewish Christian belief in the virgin birth of Jesus lies a pre-Christian Jewish expectation of a virgin birth of the Messiah.

1 This hypothesis was brought into prominence especially by Gunkel (Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verstandnis des Neuen Testaments, 1903, pp. 65-70) and Cheyne (0. cit., 1904, pp. 65-100) who, however, were anticipated by F. C. Conybeare (see especially Academy, xlvii, 1895, p. 508). The hypothesis has subsequently been favored by Gressmann, Petersen, and others.

But what evidence is there of the existence of such a Jewish expectation? What evidence is there that pre-Christian Jews ever supposed that the Messiah would be born without human father? The Rabbinical passages sometimes supposed to attest such an expectation are, it is generally admitted, without value. If any pre-Christian attestation is to be found at all, it can only be found in the Septuagint translation of Is. vii.14. In translating ‘almah by “virgin,” does not the Septuagint attest a Jewish belief that the “Immanuel” of the Isaiah passage was to be identified with the Messiah and that the mother of the Messiah was to be a virgin? We have already observed in the last chapter how extremely precarious such a view is, and how precarious also is the view that certain passages in Philo attest a Palestinian belief in the virgin birth of Old Testament characters such as Isaac. Certainly all that we know of pre-Christian Judaism is distinctly unfavorable to the view that it cherished an expectation of the virgin birth of the Messiah.

If, therefore, the existence of such an expectation is still to be established, that must be done not on the basis of positive evidence, but simply in the interests of a theory as to the pagan derivation of the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth. It is impossible to see how a pagan idea could have crept into Jewish Christian narratives unless it had already had a place in pre-Christian Judaism; therefore we must assume, despite the absence of direct evidence, that it had such a place—such is the reasoning. No doubt it may seem convincing to those who are already convinced that the idea of the virgin birth is a pagan idea; but by those who do not share that conviction the reasoning will be regarded as dubious in the extreme. Certainly the necessity of supposing without any positive evidence, and even in sharp contradiction to all the indications that we possess, that a belief in the virgin birth of the Messiah was present in pre-Christian Judaism hangs as a dead weight upon the most recent theories of pagan origin of the virgin birth doctrine as it appears in the New Testament books.

Yet that weight can be shaken off only by a return to the interpolation theory; and such a return is precluded by considerations of the most decisive kind. Thus the advocates of a pagan origin of the virgin birth idea are shut up to two equally unsatisfactory alternatives. In order to explain the presence, in the most strikingly Jewish Christian narrative in the New Testament, of what on their hypothesis is a pagan idea, they must suppose either (1) that the words attesting the pagan idea have crept into the Jewish Christian narrative by interpolation, or else (2) that the pagan idea was already so completely naturalized in pre-Christian Judaism that in the first century it could form an integral part even of a Palestinian narrative. The former of these two alternatives has been adopted particularly by those who look to Greek mythology for the source of the virgin birth doctrine; the latter, by those who look rather to the East. But both alternatives are faced by objections of the most serious kind. It would perhaps be fruitless to debate the question which of them is the least unlikely.

When, therefore, we consider the supposed pagan parallels, we do so only for the sake of the argument. Those parallels might be vastly closer than they actually are without at all justifying the view that in them the origin of the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth is to be found. There would still remain the powerful objection that, whatever may be said of the early Church in general, Jewish Christian narratives like Lk. i-ii could hardly have given a place to a crassly pagan idea. Unless this objection is overcome, an immense burden of proof rests upon the theory of pagan derivation. Are the pagan parallels really so close that this burden of proof can be overcome? That is the question with which we must now undertake to deal.

The simplest form in which the theory of pagan derivation has been held is that the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ was evolved on Gentile Christian ground under the influence of Greek stories of heroes who were begotten by the gods.’? In the earliest years of the Christian Church—so the theory runs—Jesus was called “Son of God.” This title in the Jewish Christian Church was of course as far as possible from excluding a human father or involving a special physical derivation from God; the Jewish Christians used the term, no doubt, in a sense analogous to its Old Testament usage by which it could be a title of the Messiah, or they used it to designate that warm filial relationship of a moral kind in which Jesus felt Himself to stand toward God. But when the Gentile Christians, as distinguished from the Jewish Christians, heard this title applied to Jesus in the instruction that they received in their new faith, they would naurally interpret it in accordance with their previous habits of thought. Those previous habits of thought of the Gentile Christians attributed a very different sense to the title, “Son of God,” from that which was attributed to it in Judaism; the Gentile Christians found implied in the title an actual physical sonship analogous to the relation of a man to his human father. Zeus, according to the previous beliefs of these Gentile converts, was father of gods and men; and both he and other gods are represented as begetting children by human mothers. Similar stories were current with regard to the birth of great men of historic times; Alexander, Plato, Augustus, and

12 This theory was presented in classic form by Usener (whose Weihnachtsfest appeared, in its first edition, in 1889), though of course the theory is far from having been originated by him. It has subsequently been supported, in varying forms, by a large number of recent scholars, particularly by Eduard Meyer (Ursprung und Anfange des Christentums, i, 1921, pp. 54-57).

others were regarded as having been begotten by gods. These great men were “sons of gods.” Could Jesus, in the mind of the Gentile converts, be less than they? And if they were sons of pagan gods, must not Jesus, in somewhat similar fashion, be the Son of the one true God in whom these converts had at their conversion come to believe?

In considering this hypothesis, it will hardly be necessary to examine the individual stories in any great detail; for they have often been collected and are well known. Some of the collections must indeed be sifted before they can be of use for the present purpose. Thus when Petersen ** includes in his list of sons of gods in Greek mythology heroes who were born of divine mothers as well as begotten by divine fathers, he is obviously going far afield. Obviously the only stories which by any chance can be brought into comparison with the virgin birth of Christ are the stories that tell of the union of a divine father with a human mother. But even such stories are not wanting. We may think, for example, of Perseus, whose mother Danaé was beloved of Zeus and conceived by means of a rain of gold which descended upon her in her seclusion; or of Hercules, who also was the child of Zeus and of a mortal woman.

Much more stress is usually laid, however, upon the stories that relate not to demigods of mythical antiquity, but to historical personages. Most interesting of these, perhaps, is the one regarding Plato. This story is reported by Diogenes Laertius, who flourished probably in the third century after Christ,

Speusippus, Plato’s nephew, in his work called Plato’s Funeral Feast, and Clearchus in the Encomium on Plato, and Anaxilaides in the second book of his work On Philosophy, say that there was a report at Athens to the effect that Ariston [Plato’s father] sought to have union with Perictione [Plato’s mother], who was then of marriageable age, and did not attain his end; and that when he ceased from his violence he saw the appearance of Apollo; wherefore he kept her pure from marriage until she brought forth her child.**

The same story is mentioned by Origen *® and by certain other writers.® A somewhat similar story is reported by Plutarch regarding Alexander the

It seemed to the bride [Olympias, Alexander’s mother], before the night when her marriage with Philip was consummated, that there was a clap of thunder, that a

18 Die wunderbare Geburt des Heilandes, 1909, pp- 34-36. Bre ee: oo 14 Diogenes Laertius, iii.2. Compare the translation by R. D. Hicks in “ Diogenes Laertius,

bolt fell upon her womb, and that from the stroke a great fire was kindled, and then, breaking out in all directions into sparks, was quenched; then later, after the marriage, Philip saw himself in a dream placing a seal over his wife’s womb; and the carving of the seal, as he thought, had the figure of a lion; and when the other seers viewed the vision with suspicion, as meaning that Philip should keep careful watch over things concerning his marriage, Aristander of Telmessus said that the woman was with child (since nothing that was empty required a seal) and that she would bring forth a son who would be high-spirited and like a lion in his nature. And on one occasion there appeared also a serpent stretched out beside Olympias’ body as she slept, and they say this especially dulled the love of Philip and his ardor so that he did not thereafter often approach her—either because he feared certain sorceries that might be practised upon him, or because he avoided her on the ground that she belonged to one greater than he.18

There was also a report, Plutarch says, which attributed Philip’s loss of one of his eyes to his having applied it to the crack of the door when the god was with his wife. Olympias, according to Eratosthenes (reported by Plutarch) told Alexander the secret of his birth when he was going forth to his campaign, and bade him show a spirit worthy of such an origin. But according to another report, Olympias rejected the story and said, “Will not Alexander cease slandering me to Hera?”??

The prevalence of such stories of the love of gods for mortal women is attested sometimes in indirect ways. Thus, after the adultery of Alcibiades with the wife of Agis king of Sparta, the king is said to have given credence to the report, because, having been frightened by an earthquake, he had rushed out of his wife’s chamber and had avoided her for ten months, after which he declared that the child Leotychides was not his son.”° After citation of this story Usener ** calls attention to the poetic phrases in which a lover speaks of his beloved as worthy of the love of Jupiter, and also to the report of Seneca that in the days of Nero women sat in the Capitol at Rome, hoping to be loved by Jupiter, and were not even deterred by the fear of Juno’s wrath.” More specific is the scandalous story * of Paulina, reported by Josephus.” In the time of Tiberius, says Josephus, a noble Roman lady, Paulina, wife of Saturninus, was beloved by Decius Mundus. Being unable to secure his end by

18 Some use has been made, here and in the following quotations, of the translation by Bernadotte Perrin, “ Plutarch’s Lives,” vii, 1919, in the Loeb Classical Library. The Greek text also is found in that edition.

33 Also referred to by Usener, loc. cit.

the ordinary processes of corruption, Mundus had recourse to the priests of Isis. They, induced by bribery, told Paulina that she was beloved by the god Anubis, who invited her to come to him. The credulous Paulina reported the story to her husband, who consented that she should share the god's “bed and board.” > The husband, in other words, knowing his wife’s reputation for chastity, readily consented that she should spend a night in the temple. This she did; and there she was deceived by the lover, Mundus, who pretended to be the god. After the event, Paulina boasted openly of the favor which the god had shown her, until she was undeceived by Mundus, who divulged to her the true fact.

Such a story, it is said, when taken with other indications, shows the wide credence which was given, even in the upper classes of society, to the stories of the union of mortal women with gods. May we not, then, have in such stories the origin of the Christian story of the virgin birth of Christ?

A favorable presumption in behalf of this hypothesis may at first sight seem to be created by the fact that the pagan stories are brought into connection with the New Testament stories by certain early Christian writers. Thus Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century, commends the Christian story of the virgin birth of Christ to his pagan readers by pointing out the analogy in which it stands to the story of the birth of Perseus. “And if also we hold,” Justin says, “that He was born through a virgin, let this also be something that He has in common with Perseus.” 7° In Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, the pagan stories are introduced in a somewhat different way. Trypho, the Jew, is represented as making their similarity to the Christian story of the virgin birth of Christ a ground of objection to the latter:

And in the myths of those who are called Greeks it is said that Perseus was born of Danaé, who was a virgin, the one who is called among them Zeus having come upon her in a golden flood; ** and you, when you say the same things as they, ought to be ashamed, and ought rather to say that this Jesus was born as a man from men; and if you show from the Scriptures that he is the Christ, you ought to say that he was counted worthy of being chosen to be Christ because of his lawful and perfect life, instead of daring to tell stories of portents, in order that you may not be convicted of folly like that of the Greeks.?8

To this attack Justin Martyr replies by developing the theory that the similarities which the heathen myths exhibit as over against the Old Testament prophecies about Christ are due to imitation of the prophecies induced in the 25 Selrvov... Kal ebvhv. 26 Justin Martyr, apol., i. 22 (ed. Goodspeed, Die altesten Apologeten, 1914, p. 41).

authors of the myths by Satan and the evil spirits. In a list of such imitations,” Justin includes the birth of Dionysus from Zeus and Semele, and the birth of Hercules from Zeus and Alcmene; and finally, at the end of the passage, he refers to the birth of Perseus:

And whenever I hear, O Trypho, I said, that Perseus was born of a virgin, this also I understand to have been due to imitation on the vart of the deceiving Serpent.

A similar treatment of the heathen myths appears in Origen’s treatise against Celsus. There is no reason, Origen says, why the Greeks should regard the virgin birth of Christ as unbelievable; for something analogous appears even among the lower animals; and by the Greeks themselves not all men were regarded as having been born of both man and woman. The basic passage may well be quoted in full:

Furthermore, it should be said to the Greeks who disbelieve in the birth of Jesus from a virgin that the Creator, in the origin of the various kinds of animals, — showed that it was possible for Him, if He desired, to do what He did in the case of one animal also in the case of the others and even in the case of men. For there are found certain female animals that do not have union with males, as writers on natural history say is the case with vultures; this animal preserves the continuity of its kind without the union of the sexes. What, then, is there strange, if when God wished to send a divine teacher to the race of men He caused Him to come into the world in another manner than that in which other men come, who are born by the union of men with women? °° And according to the Greeks themselves not all men are born of man and woman. For if the world had a beginning, as many of the Greeks have supposed, it follows of necessity that the first men were produced not by the union of the sexes but from the earth, their spermatic elements being found there *!—which I think is harder to believe * than the birth of Jesus which was half like that of other men. And there is nothing unreasonable about using Greek stories in arguing with Greeks, in order that we may not be thought to be the only ones who narrate this strange story. For some have chosen, not in connection with stories of remote antiquity about the heroes, but in connection with things that have happened in our own times, to write (for example) that even Plato was born of Amphictione, Ariston being prevented from approaching her until she should bring forth the one who was begotten by Apollo. But these things are really myths; the authors of them were moved to invent some such thing concerning a man whom they supposed to have greater wisdom and power than the generality of mankind and so supposed to have received from greater

and more divine seed the beginning of the formation of his body—this being thought fitting for those who surpassed human standards. But since Celsus has introduced his Jew arguing with Jesus, and bringing forth in the course of his attack upon what he regards as Jesus’ merely pretended virgin birth the Greek myths concerning Danaé and Melanippe and Auge and Antiope, it should be said that a words are worthy of a buffoon and not of one who is writing in a serious tone.®

The last part of this passage is regarded by Usener as particularly instructive. The authors of the stories about Plato and others reasoned, according to Origen, that a man who stood above the generality of men must have had something more than a purely human birth. Quite so, says Usener in effect; and so it was also in the case of Jesus. Of course, Origen says that the Greek stories are merely myths whereas the story about Jesus is true. But those who believed the Greek stories and disbelieved the story about Jesus would, it is argued, reverse this judgment; and in reality the origin of the stories is in both cases, we are told, the same. Superhuman achievement or character demands as its explanation superhuman birth—there we have, according to the advocates of the theory now under discussion, the hidden impulse for the formation of the virgin birth story as it appears in Matthew and Luke. A flood of light is thought to be cast upon that hidden impulse by the naive words of Origen in his effort to defend the Christian doctrine against pagan attack.

But are not all the passages that we have cited from Justin Martyr as well as from Origen similarly instructive in the present connection? Is it not highly significant that these early Christian writers, instead of pointing out dissimilarity between the virgin birth story and these pagan myths, insist upon the similarity and make use of it in their argument against pagan opponents? Is it not significant that when the argument is turned against them by Jewish, as distinguished from pagan, opponents—when the similarity to pagan myths is made the basis of Jewish attack—the Christian writers meet the attack by the desperate expedient of attributing the pagan myths to demoniac imitation of the Old Testament prophecies concerning the virgin birth of the Messiah? Can modern writers be blamed for detecting an analogy which was also detected by early Christian writers who stood in close contact with both sides of the comparison, Christian writers who on the one hand lived at a time not so very remote from the time when the story of the virgin birth of Christ first appeared and on the other hand were familiar with circles where the stories about Plato and other heroes were still narrated and where the current of thought that produced the stories was still alive?

This argument may seem plausible at first sight. But it will not stand the test of a closer examination. We should never forget that the appeal of Justin Martyr and Origen to the pagan stories of divine begetting is an argumentum ad hominem. “You hold,” Justin and Origen say in effect to their pagan opponents, “that the virgin birth of Christ is unbelievable; well, is it any more unbelievable than the stories that you yourselves believe?”

Now we are perfectly ready to admit that the argumentum ad hominem is at times a very dangerous thing; we are perfectly ready in the present case, with regard to Origen’s appeal to Plato—and to the vultures—to quote, as van Oosterzee °* does in a similar connection, the line:

nec tali auxilio, nec defensoribus istis.

But however dangerous it may be, the argumentum ad hominem of Justin and Origen was very natural under the circumstances, and is far from justifying the consequences that have been deduced from it by modern writers.

In the first place, the closeness of Justin and Origen to the time when, at — the latest, the story of the virgin birth of Christ must have arisen, should not be exaggerated. We have seen that that story was certainly, to say the least, in existence before the end of the first century, and by any sound process of literary criticism must be dated many decades before that time. Justin Martyr, on the other hand, lived in the middle of the second century, and Origen in the early half of the third.

But what is far more important than this merely temporal remoteness is the spiritual remoteness of these writers from the authors of the New Testament birth narrative. Between that narrative, indeed between the New Testament in general, on the one hand, and Justin Martyr on the other, a very important change has taken place. The period of origination has passed, and the period of conscious and systematic defence has set in.

At this point, indeed, we desire not to be misunderstood. There is certainly defence of Christianity in the New Testament; the New Testament gives no color of support to the feeble modern notion that preaching should be positive but never negative, or that the Christian preacher can dispense with an answer to the intellectual objections that arise against the Christian faith. The Epistles of Paul are certainly full of argument; and argument is also found in the teaching, and even the admittedly authentic teaching, of our Lord. “If God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” These familiar passages, and others like them in the teaching of Jesus, consist of argument. Nor is there lacking argument of a distinctly polemic kind. “If Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?” Here we have a truly argumentative way of meeting attack. Let not that fact seem to the simple Christian to be derogatory to the dignity of our Lord. It involves, no doubt, a marvellous condescension; He who was endued with all authority in heaven and on earth consents actually to reason with the children of men. But such condescension is no mark of weakness, but rather a supreme manifestation of glory. There can be without argument no clear, and no reasonable, presentation of a message. And the presentation of the Christian message in the whole New Testament is profoundly reasonable. We do not mean that the content of the message can be deduced by human reasoning from the observed facts in nature; at the centre the message is sheer revelation from God. But though the content of the revelation cannot be deduced by human reasoning, the credentials of the revelation become clear to a human reason that has been freed from the blinding effect of sin. And even the content of the revelation, though it cannot be deduced by reason, can be shown, and should be shown, not to be contrary to reason. So it is in the New Testament. From the very beginning, acceptance of the gospel was commended as a truly reasonable thing.

Thus the difference between the New Testament and Justin Martyr cannot be expressed by any such simple formula as that whereas Justin Martyr engages in argumentative defence of Christianity the New Testament does not. The New Testament as well as Justin defends the gospel against argumentative attack. But we must go further still. Not only does the New Testament engage in argument, but in the argument it seeks, here and there at least, a meetingground in the previous beliefs of those with whom the argument is being carried on. Thus in Paul’s speech on Mars Hill, as reported in the seventeenth chapter of Acts, the Apostle appeals to the element of truth that was to be found in Stoic pantheism, and at the beginning of the speech he even uses, in a captatio benevolentiae, the unsatisfied longing attested by a polytheistic altar “to an unknown god.” In the Epistles, as is to be expected in writings addressed not to the unconverted, but to Christians, such arguments do not, to any great extent at least, appear. But even in the Epistles there are not altogether wanting references of an argumentative kind to the pagan world.

Thus, in contrasting Justin and Origen, on the one hand, with the New Testament, on the other, certain cautions need to be borne in mind. But even when such cautions receive their full due, the contrast is still striking enough.

The New Testament does contain argument; it does set the true religion over against the false beliefs of the surrounding world. But in the New Testament this element is merely subordinate; it is completely overshadowed by a triumphant, positive presentation of the redeeming work of God through the Lord Jesus Christ. The New Testament writers present the truth over against the dark background of pagan error, but they do not pause to analyze that pagan darkness into its component parts. No New Testament writer, and no one of the apostles whose teaching is reported in the New Testament, would have thought of engaging in detailed and conscious study of pagan beliefs as a preparation for missionary work. But it is just such detailed and conscious study that underlies the works of Justin Martyr and of Origen. Here we have Christian scholars, who studied not merely the Old Testament, and not merely the words of our Lord and of the apostles, but also the religion and the philosophy of the pagan world. That is true to some extent of Justin Martyr; and it is true to a much greater extent of Origen. The great Alexandrian teacher was the foremost scholar of his time; he was as much, or almost as much, at home in Greek philosophy and in the history of pagan religion as he was in the teachings of the Old and New Testaments. And he seeks to comrnend Christianity by a detailed comparison with, and refutation of, the beliefs of the pagan world.

In other words, in coming from the New Testament to Justin Martyr and Origen, we leave the joyous outdoor air and enter into the study-chamber. In formulating the transition in that way we must not be understood as passing any unfavorable judgment upon the study-chamber. Manifold is the work of the Christian Church, and without the patient labors of the Christian scholar, whether in the third century or in the twentieth century, the Christian cause is sure to suffer. There is a diversity of gifts, but the same Spirit. Sad would it be for the Church if she had only scholars and no evangelists; but sad would it also be if she had only evangelists and no scholars. For the work of the Christian scholar, moreover, there is ample justification even in the New Testament. Very foolish is the modern notion that Paul, for example, was a “practical Christian worker” in the shallow modern sense—a man who preached without previous meditation, or who presented a religion that was not based upon theology. Still, after all has been said, there remains a profound difference of emphasis and of atmosphere between all the New Testament writings, on the one hand, and those of an apologist like Justin Martyr or an Alexandrian scholar like Origen on the other. It does not follow, therefore, that because Justin or Origen, in their diligent and conscious search for analogies that would commend the new faith to the pagan world, can detect an analogy between the birth of Jesus and that of Perseus or of Plato, such an analogy must have produced the New Testament story of the birth of Jesus in the first place.

If anyone is tempted to draw such an inference, let him simply read the passages in Justin and in Origen in their wider context. He will then see that these writers were determined to find analogies whether they did or did not really exist. The theory of demoniac imitation of Old Testament prophecies had a baleful attraction for these Christian writers. It served to exhibit the venerable antiquity of the Old Testameat books as over against the great names of pagan philosophy; it served to make all that was good in pagan thinking conducive to an acceptance of the Christian faith. So that theory is certainly overworked by these writers. Very fanciful, it will be admitted by anyone who will really look into the matter, are some of the analogies that are discovered in the interests of the theory. So it may well be in the case of the virgin birth. It is one thing to say that when the story of the virgin birth of Christ had once come to be believed, and when Christian apologists were once engaged in a learned search for elements in pagan religion that could show analogies to elements in the Christian faith, such an analogy could be found between the New Testament story and the story of the birth of Perseus or Alexander or Plato; and it is quite a different thing to say that those analogies could have given rise in the first place to the naive and beautiful narrative in Matthew and Luke. Have we not here, in other words, in this theory of the pagan origin of the virgin birth story, merely another example of the same error as that which appeared in the theory of Jewish derivation? The meaning of the Old Testament prophecy about the birth of the Messiah, we observed when we considered the latter theory, could well be detected after the story of the virgin birth was already known and believed; but it never could have produced that story; and indeed the pre- Christian interpretation of prophecy was moving in an entirely different direction. So it is also in the case of the pagan analogies to the virgin birth—with the difference that those pagan analogies were supposed analogies only, whereas the Old Testament prophecy was, according to our view, a real prophecy. Those pagan analogies might well be detected by men like Justin and Origen, who were on the search for analogies of all sorts; but could they, in the minds of first-century Christians who, as the hypothesis demands, knew only the tradition that Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary, ever have produced in the first place the strange belief that Jesus was not in a physical sense the son of Joseph, but was born without human father? Could simple Christians of the first century—not apologists, not Alexandrian scholars, not students of pagan antiquity, but men who had a wholesome horror of the degraded mythology of the pagan world—ever have derived from the story that Perseus owed his birth to the lust of Zeus for Danaé, or Plato owed his birth to the lust of Apollo for Perictione, the belief that Jesus was conceived in the womb of the virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Ghost? That it is which seems to us unlikely. The passages in Justin and Origen do not really justify any inference at all regarding the origination of the story of the virgin birth.

Finally, it should be observed that these early Christian writers are not really unaware of the profound difference between the pagan stories of the births of gods and demigods and the Christian story of the birth of Jesus. They regard the pagan stories with horror not merely because they are demoniac imitations of prophecy, but also because of their content. Thus in a passage just before the one which we first cited above, Justin Martyr displays a true moral indignation against the view that the gods, who supposedly are worthy of imitation, should have become slaves of pleasure and should have entered; into adulterous unions.*® Here Justin seizes upon the really important point: the analogies between the pagan stories on the one hand and the Christian story on the other, however useful they may be in an argumentum ad hominem, are superficial merely; and at bottom the two representations are different in kind. Still more significant is the following passage:

But lest certain men, not understanding the aforementioned prophecy,®¢ should bring the same objection against us that we brought against the poets when we said that Zeus approached women for the sake of carnal pleasure, we shall try to make the words clear. The words, “Behold the virgin shall conceive,” signify that the virgin conceived without intercourse; for if she had had intercourse with anyone whatever, she would no longer be a virgin. But the power of God coming upon the virgin overshadowed her and caused her to conceive though she was a virgin.... Accordingly the Spirit and the power which was from God must be understood as nothing else than the Logos, who also is the firstborn of God, as Moses the aforementioned prophet declared; and this, coming upon the virgin and overshadowing her, caused her to be with child not by intercourse but by power,37

Here we find stated with all requisite clearness the real difference between the pagan myths of the births of demigods on the one hand and the New Testament story of the virgin birth of Christ on the other. Justin sees clearly

*” Justin Martyr, apol., 33 (ed. Goodspeed, p. 49). For the translation some use has been made of M. Dods, in the Ante-Nicene Christian Library. T. Allan Hoben (“The Virgin Birth,” in American Journal of Theology, vi, 1902, pp. 489 f.) cites the passage and makes some very judicious remarks regarding it.

that the pagan stories are not stories of virgin births at all, but have at the very heart of them the notion of the carnal lust of the gods for mortal women, and that the New Testament narrative is different in kind. It is perfectly evident, therefore, that the argument from analogy with the pagan stories, which he uses elsewhere, is an argumentum ad hominem merely and does not touch the real centre of his conviction.** Surely men like the one who wrote the passage just quoted would have been the last in the world to derive the Christian story of the virgin birth from the pagan stories Which they regarded with such horror. When we examine this theory of derivation, therefore, we do so without any favorable presumption from the passages in Justin Martyr, but on the contrary with the feeling that the second-century apologist may prove to have refuted the theory in advance. With that understanding, we turn now to an examination of the pagan stories themselves.

At the very beginning of the examination, it can be noted, as we have just seen that Justin Martyr noted, that the pagan narratives do not contain any account of a virgin birth at all.*° That appears even in the form of the narratives; for in the pagan sources the word “virgin” does not seem to occur. It could not well occur in the story of Alexander; for according to that story the mother was already married when the conception occurred, and no stress, to say the least, seems to be laid upon the absence of previous intercourse between the mother and the human father before the divine begetting took place. In the case of Plato, the divine begetting does seem to be represented by Plutarch as taking place before any union of the human husband with his wife; and in the case of the mythical Danaé, it is an integral part of the story that Danaé was carefully guarded from male society until Zeus found access to her chamber by means of the rain of gold. But even in those stories the word “virgin” does not appear.

That word does appear, indeed, in references of the Christian writer, Justin, to the pagan sources. It appears in the passages cited above, where Justin says that the extraordinary birth of Jesus is something that He has in common with Perseus,*® and where he alludes to the report that “Perseus was born of a virgin.” “? It appears also in the passage where Justin represents the Jew Trypho as alluding to the myth that “Perseus was born of Danaé who was a virgin.” ** But the reason why it appears in a Christian writer like Justin

Martyr is not far to seek.*® The reason simply is that Justin is insisting upon the analogy of the pagan stories to the Christian story of the virgin birth, and in order the better to exhibit the analogy expresses the pagan representation in Christian terms. Let us not be too severe upon the second-century Apologist for such a procedure; he was doing only what is frequently being done by scientific students of comparative religion today. Even in the enlightened twentieth century, advocates of the theory of syncretistic origin of the Christian religion sometimes commend their theory by describing in Christian terms the pagan beliefs or practices that they are bringing into comparison. We are far from impugning the good faith of scholars either ancient or modern who err in that way. It is so very hard to distinguish sharply one’s own interpretation of the sources from what the sources themselves actually say. But however the error may arise, an error it certainly is. There is every reason to believe that Justin Martyr has fallen into such an error; there is every reason to suppose that when Justin, or the Jew whom he is making the spokesman of Jewish polemic against Christianity, refers to the birth of Perseus as a birth from (or through) a virgin, he is going beyond what the pagan sources contained. There seems to be no clear evidence that pagan sources used the word “virgin” as referring to the mothers of heroes, mythical or historical, who were represented as being begotten by the gods.

It is not, however, upon this observation that we are inclined to lay the chief stress. Far more important than the terminology of the pagan stories is their content; and far more important than the question whether the mothers of the pagan heroes were represented as virgins before their union with the gods is the question whether, even if they were virgins before, they ceased to be virgins because of that event.

This latter question must be answered by an emphatic affirmative. The clear representation of the pagan stories is that the union of the gods with the women who bore children to them was closely analogous to the union between the sexes in human life. The stories of the amours of Zeus and other gods were certainly of a crassly anthropomorphic kind. It was because the Olympic gods were regarded as exercising human functions and possessing human passions that they could be regarded as begetting children like Perseus or like Hercules. Nothing could be farther from the whole spirit of the stories than to represent the births of such children of the gods as being “virgin births.” Exactly the same observation is to be made, moreover, regarding the stories pp. 88 f.), cited in full above. Is that fact due to the greater accuracy of the learned Alexandrian scholar?

that relate, not to demigods of mythical antiquity, but to historical personages such as Plato and Alexander. These latter stories are clearly formed on the basis of the mythological and anthropomorphic representations in the works of poets and dramatists. When the admirers of Alexander desired to represent him as a demigod like Hercules, they conceived of his mother as being beloved, as Hercules’ mother was, by Zeus. Thus the entire background of these stories is anthropomorphic polytheism of the crassest possible kind.

It is true that the manner of the divine begetting may sometimes be represented as being different from that which prevails among men. Ordinarily, indeed, that difference does not appear. It certainly does not appear when the embraces of Ares and Aphrodite are represented as provoking the laughter of the Homeric gods. It certainly does not appear when Paulina, in the passage cited above from Josephus,** after receiving the very human embraces of her lover Mundus, could suppose that those were the embraces of a god. But Zeus, it will be said, entered into Danaé’s chamber not in human form, but in the form of a shower of gold; and a serpent, not a lover, was seen by Olympias’ side. There is, moreover, an interesting passage in Plutarch where the part of the gods in such cases of divine begetting seems to be sublimated into the production of “certain beginnings of generation” in the mortal women from whom the hero-children were to be born.*® And with regard to the story of Paulina it may perhaps be said that although Paulina herself held a crassly anthropomorphic view of her divine lover, yet her husband must have held a different view, else he would not have been so willing that his wife should share the god’s “bed and board.”

In some such cases, it may perhaps be doubted how much is merely symbol or prophecy of the god’s presence and how much is the god’s presence itself. Thus when a serpent appeared by Olympias’ side, does that mean that the act of begetting was actually accomplished by the serpent in her bosom, or does it mean that the vision of the serpent merely showed that the god had already been there, as the vision of the sealed womb which Philip saw indicated that the divine-human child had already veen conceived in the womb? The answer to such questions is not always quite clear.

Nevertheless, it does seem probable that in some cases of divine begetting in the Greek stories the act of begetting is regarded as having taken place in some way other than that which ordinarily prevails among men. These cases would then be brought into connection with the mass of instances which Hartland has gathered from the most diverse ages and the most diverse peoples, where the act of conception is represented as taking place in strange and unusual ways.‘ There is conception by eating or drinking, conception by the touch, conception by a ray of light, conception by the breath, conception by bathing in water where the fructifying seed has long ago been placed, and so on in bewildering variety. But for our present purpose it will not be necessary to examine or to sift that mass of material; for certainly in the Greek stories with which we now have to deal the essential anthropomorphism of the stori:s is not affected by anything unusual or abnormal that there may be in the manner by which the act of begetting takes place. Zeus may have union with Danaé not in human form, but in a shower of gold, but all the same the union is a satisfaction of his lust for the human maid. Everywhere it is the love of the god for the mortal woman, and not merely the exclusion of a human father of the child, which stands in the forefront of interest.

But what a gulf that places between these pagan stories and the New Testament story of the virgin birth of our Lord! Could anything be more utterly remote from the representation in Matthew and Luke than these stories of the amours of Zeus? The true spirit of those stories is found, even when they deal with historical personages, in the words attributed to Olympias in one of the accounts reported by Plutarch. “Will not Alexander cease slandering me to Hera?,” the mother of Alexander is represented as saying when her son boasted of being a child of Zeus. There we have the true atmosphere in which those stories arose and from which they never really became free—the polytheistic and anthropomorphic atmosphere of an Olympus where the gods are naught but more powerful men, with human lusts, human jealousies, and human hates. Was it from such an atmosphere that the early disciples derived the story of the virgin birth of our Lord? Christian feeling answers, No. And Christian feeling is confirmed and not invalidated by patient research.

In the pagan stories of divine begetting, polytheism is not merely incidental; it is the centre and core of the whole complex of ideas. But in the New Testament story of the virgin birth of Christ, the lofty Old Testament monotheism is abated not a whit; the awful transcendence of God, the awful separateness of God from the world, is never lost from view. Where in the New Testament story is there found any hint of a love of God for the maid of Nazareth, which could be analogous to the love of a husband for his wife? The question can scarcely even be asked, by any man of literary taste—to say nothing of any devout Christian—without a shudder. Yet it would have not only to be asked, but also to be answered in the affirmative, if the theory with which we are now dealing were correct. The love of the gods for mortal women is the very point of the pagan stories—the thing without which they could not possibly exist. To mention any such thing in connection with the narratives in Matthew and Luke is to do violence to the whole spirit of those narratives. The truth is that when we read these narratives we are in a totally different world from that which produced the pagan stories of the loves and hates of the gods.

Thus the most obvious form that has been taken by the theory of pagan derivation breaks down when the evidence is examined with a little care. The New Testament story of the virgin birth of Christ certainly cannot be explained as a simple reflex, in Gentile Christian circles, of the Greek and Greco-Roman stories of the birth of heroes from human mothers and from gods. If we are to find the origin of the virgin birth story on the hypothesis that the story is untrue, we must at least go somewhat farther afield.

In recent years, a number of scholars have turned, in this connection as in other connections, to the religions of the East. In some of the Eastern religions parallels have been discovered which, it has been thought, may explain the origin of the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth.

Some of these parallels may be dismissed very quickly. That is the case, for example, with the parallel which was detected by Seydel *” and others in the Buddhist story of the birth of Gautama, the founder of the Buddhist religion. Gautama *® lived about five hundred years before Christ. Our earliest source of information about his life and teaching is found in the writings of the Pali canon, which, it is thought, was formed at the time of Asoka in the third century before Christ, though it did not attain its present written form until a later time. In the Pali canon, nothing is said about the birth of Gautama which could by any possibility be brought into comparison with our story of the virgin birth. But in the introduction to the Jataka book, which dates from the fifth century after Christ, we have the well-known story of the white elephant that entered into the body of Maya, Buddha’s mother, at the time when her child was conceived; and the white-elephant story seems to be shown by inscriptional evidence to have been current as early as the reign of Asoka in the third century before Christ. In its earliest form, the story appears as the narration of a dream; Maya dreamed that a marvellous white elephant entered into her side. In this form of the story, obviously, there is no parallel to the virgin birth of Christ; for the white elephant represented merely the

48 In our brief presentation of the facts about the Buddhist tradition and literature we are of course entirely dependent upon the experts in this field. See especially Winternitz, Geschichte der Indischen Litteratur, II. i, 1913, and E. Windisch, “Buddha’s Geburt und die Lehre von der Seelenwanderung,” in Abhandlungen der phil.-hist. Klasse der konigl. sachsischen Gesellschaft der

Wissenschaften, xxvi, 1908.

“gandhabba” whose presence was necessary for the birth of the child. According to Buddhist belief, three factors are regularly involved in the birth of a child— the father, the mother, and the gandhabba—the last-named being that which came from the previous existences, whether animal or human, through which the child had passed.*® Edmunds, indeed, did attempt to bring this Buddhist doctrine of the gandhabba into connection with the “Holy Spirit” appearing in the narrative of Luke; but his attempt was half-hearted at best, and apparently has won not the slightest acceptance among subsequent scholars.°° As Oldenberg pertinently asks, what has the gandhabba, which is concerned in the birth of every child, to do with the Holy Spirit,"* whose activity in the case of Jesus marked Him as quite unique? It is of course needless to say that the Buddhist doctrine of the gandhabba, even in the form in which it appears in Maya’s dream, does not at all exclude the part of the human father, Suddhodana, in the birth of Gautama.

In later Buddhist sources, what had originally been regarded as a dream of Maya came to be regarded as an actual happening."? A white elephant, it came to be narrated, actually entered the body of the mother of Gautama. But even this form of the story does not of itself involve any exclusion of the human father; the coming of the gandhabba in the form of a white elephant could simply be regarded as waiting for the moment of a union between husband and wife. The way in which the exclusion of the human father seems to have grown up in Buddhist legend is rather through the development of the idea of Maya’s purity and sanctity. At first the vow of chastity which she took is represented as taking place after the conception of her child, Gautama; but in the later story apparently it is represented as taking place before the conception. But, in the first place, this development appears only in late sources; so that if there were any relationship of dependence between the New Testament story and this Buddhist story, the dependence might well be dependence of the Buddhist story upon the New Testament rather than vice versa.5® And, in the second place, the Buddhist story is so totally unlike the New Testament story that it is quite unnecessary to posit any relationship between the two. As Louis de la Vallée Poussin remarks, Maya in Buddhist legend comes to be a

__ “See A. S. Geden, “Buddha, Life of the,” in Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ii, I910, p. 881, footnote: “The story of the virginity of Maya, the mother of the Buddha, is late, and owes its inspiration, it can hardly be doubted, to Christian sources.”

virgin only when she ceases really to be the mother of the Buddha.™ In the riot of the miraculous which is found in the late Sanskrit tradition, it was thought to be derogatory to Gautama for him to have had anything like a human birth at all. The heavenly being is represented as entering into Maya’s womb in the form of the white elephant, then as seated there visibly as in a sort of transparent receptacle, then as emerging with the utmost pomp and circumstance. Anything like a human birth has really been lost from view; what we have is merely the appearance of a divine being upon earth with the profusion of marvels so characteristic of later Buddhist legend. It would be difficult to imagine anything more unlike the New Testament story of the virgin birth of Christ.

No weight, therefore, is to be attached to the words of Jerome at the end of the fourth century, when he says that “among the Gymnosophists of India, as it were on the basis of this view [namely, the superiority of virginity to the marriage relationship],°> the authority of this tradition is handed down, that a virgin brought forth from her side Buddha, the originator of their teaching.” 5° We have seen how little place the “virginity” of Maya really occupies in Buddhist tradition. Evidently the fourth-century advocate of Christian monasticism, in his search for justification of the monastic ideal, has let his zeal run away with him and has, in referring to Buddha, used a terminology which the Buddhist sources themselves did not justify.

In view of the facts as they have just been outlined, it is not surprising that few recent scholars have been inclined to press the supposed Buddhist parallel as an explanation of the way in which the Christian story of the virgin birth arose. Even van den Bergh van Eysinga, despite his radical denial of the historicity of the Gospel picture of Jesus, was not inclined to lay stress upon the comparison with Buddhism at this particular point;°’ and Edmunds also adopted a somewhat similar attitude. A comprehensive refutation of the theory of Buddhist influence was accomplished by E. Windisch in his monograph on Buddha’s birth. Windisch’s conclusion is that if we are going to speak of Buddhist parallels to the Gospel narrative, we must use the word “parallel” in its original sense, according to which “parallels are lines which do not touch or intersect each other.”

“sleichsam an der Hand dieser Anschauung (von dem Vorzug der Jungfraulichkeit vor dem

At this point, however, a word of caution needs to be uttered. Is Windisch correct when he goes on to explain the “parallels” (in the above sense) between the Buddhist and the Christian traditions by the observation that the thoughts of mankind are everywhere the same? © Is it true that a similarity of development can be discovered in the Buddhist and in the Christian stories regarding the births, respectively, of Gautama and of Jesus? We think that in this connection a striking difference can be discovered, which is far more instructive than all the similarities which, rightly or wrongly, have been found.

The difference does not concern merely the content of the stories that finally appeared, though even in that respect the difference, as we have seen, is great enough. Just as striking is the difference in the time at which the stories appeared, The earliest information that we have about the life of Gautama is found in the Pali canon, which is thought to have been compiled in the time of Asoka, over two centuries after Buddha’s death. A corresponding period in Christian history would be, roughly speaking, the time of Origen in the third _ century after Christ. But in the Pali canon no story of any strictly supernatural birth of Gautama seems to have appeared. The story of the supernatural birth —at least in anything like the form in which it could be appealed to in the connection in which we are now interested—cannot be traced back to a point earlier than (let us say) five to ten centuries after the time when Gautama lived. Many centuries seem to have been necessary in Buddhism for the story of supernatural birth to be formed.

In the Christian tradition, on the other hand, we are confronted by a totally different state of affairs. Even if we should accept the most unfavorable conclusions at which recent scholars have arrived with regard to the New Testament documents attesting the virgin birth of Christ, still those documents would have to be assigned to a time only seventy years or so after the death of Jesus. And as a matter of fact such a late dating of the documents is improbable in the extreme. The tradition of the virgin birth can easily be shown to have been in existence only a few decades from the time when Jesus lived upon earth. In the case of Jesus, therefore, we find a story of supernatural birth appearing at a time when information concerning Jesus’ life may be supposed still to have been abundant. Very striking is the difference as over against the late emergence of the Buddhist stories.

But this difference is only one particular illustration of a difference which concerns the entire representation in Buddhism and in Christianity of Gautama and of Christ. In the Buddhist tradition, the deification of the founder of the religion appears many centuries after the time when he lived upon earth; in the Christian tradition, the deification of the Founder (if deification indeed it be, and not recognition as divine of One who really was divine) appears with the utmost clearness in the very first generation in the Epistles of Paul, which, furthermore, presuppose the prevalence of essentially the same view among the intimate friends of Jesus Himself. That is a stupendous difference indeed. The deification of Gautama—quite aside from the fact, which for the moment we are leaving out of account, that it was quite different in kind from the Christian doctrine of the deity of Jesus—appears as a development which it took centuries to produce; the Christian view of Jesus as a divine Redeemer, who had come into the world for the salvation of men, pervades the primitive records from beginning to end, and all efforts to represent it as a development from an original account of a purely human Jesus have signally failed. Can we speak of a “parallel” between Buddhism and Christianity when the difference is so striking as that?

Apologists for Christianity have, indeed, never denied all significance to the deification of Gautama and perhaps of certain other founders of religions. On the contrary, that deification shows no doubt a deep-seated longing in the human heart for contact, in human form, with a person who was more than man. But a comparison of the tardy and fantastic way in which the ascription of deity appears in the case of Gautama with the primitive and assured way in which it appears in the case of Jesus raises the question whether what men had vainly longed for in many countries and in many religions has not in Jesus become sober fact. We do not think that that time-honored argument for the truth of Christianity has suffered at all from the modern study of religion. No doubt the form of the argument may have to be modified in detail; but at the basis of the argument there lies a profound truth. And that truth is illustrated in particular by a comparison of the Buddhist story of the birth of the Buddha with the Christian story of the birth of Christ.

Thus it is quite clear that wherever the origin of the virgin birth may be found, it cannot be found in Buddhist tradition. Equally negative is the result when the examination turns to the religion of Persia. Boklen, indeed, has pointed in this connection to the wonderful birth of the coming deliverer, Saoshyant; ®® but the parallel, if parallel it can be called, is exceedingly remote. Saoshyant is to be born by means of the seed of Zoroaster. The seed is preserved in a wonderful manner; but the fatherhood of Zoroaster is plainly taught, and of a virgin birth there is not the slightest trace. So it is also with what is said about the birth of Zoroaster himself; there is no real thought in either case of

© Boklen, Die Verwandtschaft der jidisch-christlichen mit der parsischen Eschatologie, 1902, anything like a virgin birth. As for the birth of Mithras from the rock, it is difficult to see how any parallel with the Christian story could possibly be found there.™

Babylonia does not really afford any better support than does Persia or India to the hypothesis with which we are now concerned. It is not surprising, indeed, that the enthusiastic pan-Babylonianism of a certain group of modern scholars should have been extended into the New Testament field and particularly into the discussion of the virgin birth; but the plain fact is that no real evidence of any belief in virgin births has been discovered in Babylonian sources. The ground has been well covered by Franckh™ and by Steinmetzer,®* and upon these writers we are mainly dependent in the brief sketch that follows.

Little stress, surely, can be laid upon the fact that the constellation of the “virgin” is said to rise on December 25th at midnight. A host of questions arise before any conclusions for our subject can be drawn from this fact. Was the constellation of the “virgin” ever connected by anyone in ancient times with the notion of a true virgin who brought forth a son? Was the birth of Jesus connected with the twenty-fifth of December at an early time or only (as is usually supposed) centuries after the New Testament story of the virgin birth arose? Evidently we are moving here in a sphere of the most uncertain combinations and inferences. And, as Franckh insists, Marduk, the Babylonian redeemer-king, is most emphatically not represented as virgin-born. The astrological theory is that events in the starry heavens correspond with events upon the earth. Hence it might be supposed that the constellation of the virgin would correspond with an earthly virgin who should bear a son. But Marduk, the god whose astral character ought to be clear, turns out not to be born of a virgin at all. The sources desert the seeker for parallels with the New Testament narrative just at the decisive point.

It is true that great personages in Babylon are represented as standing in a filial relation to various female deities, who are more or less identified with, or go back to, Ishtar, the female deity par excellence. But is Ishtar represented as a virgin? That is emphatically not the case. She has no continuing male consort; but if the term “virgin” is applied to her, it is only in a vague sense

2 «6 Die Geburtsgeschichte Jesu Christi im Lichte der altorientalischen Weltanschauung,” in Philotesia Paul Kleinert zum LXX. Geburtstag dargebracht, 1907, pp. 201-221.

% Die Geschichte der Geburt und Kindheit Christi und thr Verhaltnis zur babylonischen Mythe, 1910; Jesus der Jungfrauensohn und die altorientalische Mythe, 1917, pp. 24-31.

which is as far as possible from what the New Testament means by the word. There is, indeed, in Babylonian sources the notion that certain great personages were children of unknown fathers; but that notion is compatible with illegitimate birth just as much as with virgin birth, and there is at any rate not the slightest evidence that it was ever connected with the latter.

Stress, indeed, is laid upon a passage in which Sargon, the founder of Babylon, is represented as saying: “My mother was enitu, my father unknown.” © But what is meant by enitu? It has sometimes been thought to mean “vestal-virgin,” and so “virgin”; but opinions of the experts differ widely, and there is really no certainty about the matter. It would be a very unwarranted procedure to base far-reaching conclusions on a word the meaning of which is so obscure. And even if the word did turn out to mean vestal-virgin, it might be used in such a broad sense as not at all to connote real virginity.

Equally without importance for our subject is the passage in which Gudea is represented as saying to the goddess Gatumdug: “I have no mother, thou art my mother; I have no father, thou art my father... in a holy [or “secret”] place thou hast brought me forth.” *° The father of Gudea is mentioned immediately after these words; *° and no idea of a fatherless birth is really to be found in the passage. We have here merely a drastic expression of the peculiarly intimate relation in which these Babylonian personages stand to the mother-goddess.

The real result of the examination is that no idea of a virgin birth is to be found in Babylonian sources and that the origin of the New Testament doctrine certainly cannot be found there. Thus the great religions of India, Persia, and Babylonia, with regard to which we have abundant sources of information, have signally failed to provide the desired parallels to the Christian story of the virgin birth of Christ.

It is not surprising, therefore, that at least one noteworthy modern scholar should have had recourse in this connection to a much more obscure cult. We refer to the use which has been made by Bousset of the cult of the Arabian god, Dusares.®® Bousset intimates, indeed, that the parallels to the Christian virgin birth tradition are really too numerous to mention; °° but we have already seen how little weight is to be attributed to such general intimations, and thus we are interested rather in the parallel with which Bousset specifically deals. Despite the wealth of parallels from which we might choose, says Bousset in effect, it is not impossible that we ought to find the immediate occasion for the development of the Christian virgin birth dogma in the legend of the virgin birth of Dionysus-Dusares.

That legend is attested by the fourth-century Christian writer, Epiphanius. In the course of his refutation of heresies, Epiphanius writes as follows:

For also, being compelled to confess a part of the truth, those who are ringleaders in idol-worship and deceivers, in order that they may lead astray the idolaters who obey them, practise in many places a great feast in the very night of Epiphany, to the end that they may put their hope in error and thus may not seek the truth. This is done, in the first place, in Alexandria in the so-called Coreium, which is a very great temple—that is, the sacred precinct of Core. For having passed all the night singing to the idol with certain songs accompanied by the flute, and having thus finished night-vigil, they come together after cockcrowing with torches into a certain underground shrine and carry up a certain wooden image lying naked on a litter, which image has a certain gilded seal or - a cross upon its forehead and other two similar seals upon its two hands and other two on its two knees—in all five seals stamped with gold—and they carry the image about seven times, making the circuit of the innermost temple with flutes and drums and hymns, and after the festival they carry it down again into the underground place. And when asked what this mystery is, they answer and say that at this hour Core (that is the virgin) brought forth Aeon. And this takes place also in the city of Petra (the metropolis of Arabia, which is called Edom in the Scriptures) in the idol-temple which is there; and in the Arabian tongue they sing hymns to the virgin, calling her in the Arabian language Chaamou 7 (that is, “maiden” ™ or “virgin” 7?) and to “Dusares” (that is, “only-begotten of the master”) who was born of her. And this takes place also in the city of Elusa on that night, as it does there in Petra and in Alexandria.78

The same cult is also referred to in somewhat similar terms by the eighthcentury writer, Cosmas of Jerusalem, who says that the worshippers, when they came forth, cried: “The virgin has brought forth; the light increases.” ™

These passages are no doubt interesting, and the discussion of them might be instructive in many ways. But here we are concerned only with the question whether they really attest anything like a pre-Christian belief in the virgin birth of Dusares, the Arabian god, or his Hellenized adaptations, And surely that question should be answered by an emphatic negative.

The plain fact is that the only sources™® calling the mother of Dusares a “virgin” are two Christian sources, of which the earlier dates from the fourth century after Christ, and the later from the eighth century. What possible right have we to suppose that the title attested only in these late sources was applied to this goddess in pre-Christian times? We have already seen that the application of the term “virgin” to pagan mothers by Christian writers. is in general to be viewed with suspicion, since there was a tendency on the part of these writers to seek parallels for Christian beliefs in pagan religion.”® This suspicion attaches in fullest measure to the use of the term by Epiphanius in the passage with which we are now concerned. Wellhausen may well be right in thinking that Epiphanius has been influenced in his choice of language by his desire to show a connection with Mary and Jesus.”

Indeed it has been suggested, with some show of reason, that the word “virgin” was introduced simply by a misunderstanding of an Arabic word which appears in Epiphanius as Chaamou, or as some scholars prefer to read Chaabou. So Wellhausen 7° says that: the assertion (of Epiphanius) that Chaabou means “maiden” is of no more value than the assertion (by the same writer) that “Dusares” means “the only-begotten of the Lord”; and suggests that the parthenogenesis from the Chaabou may simply go back to the fact that the inhabitants of Petra, perhaps under the influence of Mithraism, thought of Dusares as a god who was born of the sacred stone. Similarly, Dalman suggests that what we have is a word-play between Arabic ka‘b, “dice-shaped stone,” and ka@ibe, “mature virgin,” though it is not clear whether he means to derive the whole tradition of the virgin birth of Dusares from this word-play.” At any rate, this latter step was apparently taken by Clemen in the first edition of his “Primitive Christianity and Its Non-Jewish Sources”; ®° and although Clemen has now abandoned it ®! in deference to Bousset’s objection,” there is still perhaps something to be said in its favor.

What is really important to observe, however, is that even if this particular way of dealing with the Epiphanius testimony be rejected, it is still quite

¥5 See the collection of passages referring to Dusares which was made by Mordtmann (“Du. sares bei Epiphanius,” in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, xxix, 1876, pp 103-106).

8 Compare W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, new edition, 1894, unjustifiable to use that testimony as establishing any pre-Christian belief in a real virgin birth of the Arabian god. The use of the term “virgin” by Christian writers, and particularly by Christian writers of such a late date, still remains open to the gravest suspicion; it is all too likely to be due simply to the well-established desire of such writers to find perverse imitations of Christian beliefs in pagan religion. We really have no valid evidence whatever to show that the term was actually used in the pagan worship of Dusares three centuries before the time when Epiphanius lived. Furthermore, even if the term was used in the pre-Christian worship of Dusares, that would not show at all that it was used in the sense in which we use it and in which it was used by Matthew and Luke. On the contrary, it would merely designate a mother-goddess like Ishtar, “unmarried, or rather choosing her temporary partners at will,” °° or like Tanith-Artemis, “the heavenly virgin, 7.¢., the unmarried goddess,” ** whose obscene rites Augustine mentions with such disgust,°® or like “the great mythic mother-goddess” who “was independent of the _ marriage-tie.” °° In other words, the term “virgin,” if it really was applied in pre-Christian times to the mother of Dusares, meant, no doubt, almost the exact opposite of what that term means in the New Testament account of the birth of our Lord.*"

We may therefore venture to maintain that Bousset’s appeal to Dusares- Dionysus is valuable chiefly as indicating the weakness of the more usual hypotheses. If so learned and able a scholar, in seeking pagan parallels to the virgin birth of Christ as narrated in the New Testament, is obliged to have recourse to a virgin birth story attested only in Christian writers many centuries later than the time when the New Testament story was produced, surely we have here an eloquent testimony to the absence of real parallels. If modern research had really discovered any circle of ideas from which the virgin birth tradition, supposing it not to be true, could conceivably have come, we doubt whether it would have been necessary for Bousset to appeal to Dusares-Dionysus and to the exceedingly dubious testimony of a fourth-century Christian writer.

At least two notable attempts have been made in recent years to find the source of the New Testament virgin birth story in Egypt; and it will perhaps be instructive to examine these two attempts in some detail, They have been made by Hugo Gressmann, the well-known student of the Old Testament, and by Eduard Norden, who is one of the most distinguished philologians of the present day.

The book of Gressmann,®* in which the theory concerning the virgin birth appears, is devoted primarily, not to the annunciation (as it is narrated in the first chapters of Matthew and Luke), but to the birth narrative in Lk. ii.t-20. That narrative, says Gressmann, must be treated by itself, in complete isolation from all the other stories about Jesus. The earliest units of legendary tradition, he insists, are detached legends, not legendary cycles; and for that reason, as well as in view of certain special evidences of original independence between Lk. ii.1-20 and its present context, we must treat this narrative as though it were the only story that we possessed concerning Jesus.

At this point, the reader may perhaps be permitted a slight pause to get his breath. Is it not making a considerable demand upon our docility to ask us to interpret this narrative as though it contained all that we knew about Jesus? Does not the word “Jesus” appear in the narrative as the name of a person who is assumed to be known to the hearers or readers, certainly as the name of a person known to the narrator? Is it right, therefore, to treat that name as though it were simply an x or a y? But if that name is the name of a person otherwise known both to the narrator and to his hearers, then surely we should interpret the narrative in the light of the further information about that person which we may suppose the first narrator and the first hearers to have possessed. We find it difficult, therefore, to fulfil at the start the requirement of complete detachment of this narrative from other narratives dealing with the same person. The reason why that demand is important in Gressmann’s book becomes, indeed, plain in the sequel; it is because he is going to show, or attempt to show, that originally the narrative had nothing to do with Jesus and that the references to Jesus have been imported into it at some later time. But surely it seems unwarranted to ask us to assume at the beginning what can be established, if at all, only by the whole course of the following argument. Surely it is quite conceivable that the first man to tell this story should have been a person who already had a fund of information about Jesus and presupposed such a fund of information in his readers or hearers, That possibility may turn out in the course of the investigation not to be actuality; but until it turns out not to be actuality, it should surely not be ignored. We do not think, therefore, that it is at all a matter of course that this narrative should be interpreted as though it were the only narrative that we possessed about Jesus, and certainly we do not think that the positive indications which Gressmann adduces for an original independence between this narrative and the narrative in the first chapter of Luke are at all decisive.

Our dissent at this point is closely connected with another dissent. When we get back to the original form of the narrative, says Gressmann, we must assume that the narrative is a perfect work of art. “Every interpretation proceeds as a matter of course upon the assumption that the narrative with which it happens to be concerned is a perfect work of art, on which it is justified in making the highest demands.” But why should any such assumption be made? Is every legend, in its original, pre-literary form, a perfect work of art, whose elements hang together with complete artistic and logical necessity? If that is so, surely it is a most extraordinary fact, that runs directly counter to all considerations of antecedent probability. Yet apparently our author, far from proving his remarkable assertion, gives not the slightest hint as to the way in which proof of it could be found. Until such proof is forthcoming, we may surely be doubtful about assuming the artistic perfection of. every narrative with which we have to do. Such an assumption, of course, almost excludes the possibility that the narrative possesses historical trustworthiness; for history seldom proceeds in perfect accord with considerations of artistic propriety. But even if the narrative be assumed to be purely legendary, so that the narrator would not have been hampered by any dependence upon the facts, still we do not see how it follows that the canons of artistic construction must have been followed with perfect consistency. Why must every popular story have been a perfect story? We suspect that real life may not always be found to follow the strict canons that modern literary critics seek to impose upon it. It is only with caution, therefore, that we proceed to examine Gressmann’s analysis of the narrative in detail.

That analysis eliminates at the start any large share of the final author of the Gospel in giving the narrative its present form. Where this author’s sources are known, says Gressmann, it is found that he merely retouches them here and there; and the Jewish Christian character of this particular narrative as it appears in the Gospel of Luke is so clear as to make it evident that the Gentile author has left the underlying Jewish Christian narrative for the most part unchanged. The author, therefore, Gressmann concludes, is here following closely a written or oral source; and in that source there stood not merely the narrative in Lk, ii.1-20, but the whole cycle in which that narrative now stands, the final author of the Gospel not even having taken the trouble to smooth out the contradictions among the (originally independent) legends composing the cycle.

With regard to the Jewish Christian character of these narratives in Lk. i-ii, and the part which the final author of the Gospel had in giving them their present form, the measure of our agreement has already been indicated in Chapters II-VI. More dubious is the further analysis by which Gressmann seeks to penetrate to the original form of the narrative in Lk. ii.1-20.

Evidently, he says, the census of Quirinius is a later addition; for the prose tone of this part of the story contrasts sharply with the poetic tone of the rest; and with the census the whole incident of a journey of the child’s parents becomes open to suspicion. Even in the rest of the narrative, he continues, there are rough edges. When the shepherds go to see the child, why do they not bring him gifts, as, for example, the magi do in the second chapter of Matthew? As it is, their visit seems to be without purpose or meaning. Indeed, one does not see exactly why the shepherds should be brought in at all: they do not seem to perform any particular function with reference to the child. Yet in the narrative as it stands they, and not the parents of the child, are really the chief personages. Moreover, why should the mere fact that the child was lying in a manger be regarded as a “sign”? A “sign” obviously is a strange, if not necessarily a miraculous, occurrence; but for a child to lie in a manger hardly seems to be so very strange. What, moreover, became of the parents after they laid the child in the manger? Did they themselves remain in the inn, or did they change altogether the place of their abode? The narrative, Gressmann thinks, is curiously vague at this point. Why, moreover, is the manger so much emphasized in the narrative? We think of a manger as being in a stall for cattle; but the narrative says nothing about a stall. Finally we should naturally expect the manger to have something to do with the shepherds to whom announcement of the birth of the child is made; yet in the narrative as it stands the shepherds and the manger are far apart.

All of these defects in clearness, all of these loose ends, in the present narrative, lead, Gressmann supposes, to one conclusion—namely, that in the original form of the legend no parents of the child appeared. Without the parents, everything becomes perfectly clear. The child was a foundling child; hence the shepherds had the very necessary function of bringing it up: the manger was the particular manger that belonged to these particular shepherds. The whole trouble in the narrative as it stands is that the parents are dragged in so as to usurp the place belonging originally to the shepherds. But why were the parents dragged in? The answer, Gressmann thinks, is obvious. They were dragged in only because the historical personage, Jesus, with whom the child of the original legend was now to be identified, had well-known parents who could not be ignored. But originally this was a foundling child, whose legend was connected with Bethlehem; and the contradictions in the present narrative are due to the fact that a pre-Christian Jewish legend, which originally had nothing to do with Jesus, was seized upon by Jewish Christians to do honor to Him who had become the object of their reverence.

In seeking, therefore, the ultimate origin of the story, we must seek, according to Gressmann, not the origin of a story specifically about Jesus, but the origin of a pre-Christian Jewish story about a foundling child. An interesting detail in this pre-Christian story, Gressmann thinks, is contributed by the extracanonical mention of a cave as the place of Jesus’ birth.*° It is impossible to suppose that the cave was derived either from the New Testament canonical narratives or from Old Testament prophecy: evidently, therefore, we have in the mention of the cave a remnant of the pre-Christian story; that story was connected not merely with Bethlehem, but with one particular cave near Bethlehem.

The child in the pre-Christian birth story was, according to Gressmann, clearly a royal child: in the first place, because foundling legends are for the most part stories about kings, a favorite point being the contrast between the destiny of the child and his lowly upbringing by humble folk; in the second place, because the story was connected with Bethlehem, the ancestral seat of the Davidic line from which the Messiah was to come; and, in the third place, because the terms “saviour,” “gospel,” and “peace,” which occur in the narrative as it stands, are well-known elements in the “court style” used to do honor to the Roman Emperor, while the term “Christ” (“anointed”), which also occurs in the narrative, is the regular designation of the Messianic king. Plainly, therefore, Gressmann concludes, we have in the pre-Christian story a Jewish story regarding the king who was to come of David’s line and be the deliverer of His people.

Ultimately, however, according to Gressmann, this story was not of Jewish origin. It did not appear on Jewish ground before the Hellenistic age, Gressmann argues, since it is not found in the Old Testament; and in the Hellenistic age a Jewish origin of such a story is unnatural, while importation from outside of Judaism, with adaptation to Jewish conditions, becomes in that period easy to understand. What is decisive, however, for an extra-Jewish origin is, according to Gressmann, not merely such general considerations, but the presence at the very heart of the narrative of the technical terms, “saviour” and “gospel,” which never could have originated on Jewish ground.”

90 Gressmann admits (pp. 20 f., footnote 2) that these terms appear in the Old Testament but insists that their technical use does not appear there. The distinction, we think, can hardly be maintained; and the terms as used in Lk. ii.1-20 are, we think, quite comprehensible on the basis of Old Testament ideas.

From what source, then, was this originally non-Jewish narrative ultimately derived? Gressmann has a very definite answer to this question; the story was derived ultimately, he holds, from the Egyptian story of the exposure and lowly upbringing of Osiris, the well-known Egyptian god. That story appears in Plutarch’s treatise “Concerning Isis and Osiris” in two variants as follows:

On the first day [that is, the first of the intercalary days at the close of the year] Osiris is said to have been born, and a voice is said to have fallen from on high ® to the effect that the Lord of all was coming forth into the light. Some, however, say that a certain Pamyles in Thebes, while he was drawing water, heard a voice from the temple of Zeus, commanding him to proclaim with a shout that a great king, the benefactor, Osiris, is born; and that for this cause Pamyles brought up Osiris, who had been entrusted to him by Cronus,®* and therefore the festival of the Pamylia was celebrated in his honor—a festival similar to phallic festivals.