IV

In the Roman Creed of the fourth century the Miraculous Conception occupied, as it now occupies in the Apostles’ Creed, the foremost place among the facts of the life of Christ. Qui natus est—so ran the Creeds both of Aquileia and of Rome—de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria uirgine. The words were slightly varied in some recensions; Marcellus read, “Who was born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary,” and the same variation is exhibited in the Creeds of Codex Laudianus and the Athelstan Psalter1. The later paraphrase, Qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria uirgine, appears first in a series of sermons ascribed to Augustine2, and in Gallican formularies3, whence it passed into our present Creed. But it adds nothing of importance to the teaching of the fourth century form, and the only question which concerns us now is whether the substance of the article may be safely attributed to the earliest Creed of the Roman Church. Of this there seems to be little doubt. Both Irenaeus and Tertullian give the Virgin-Birth a place in the Rule of Faith, and Tertullian in one of his expositions of the Faith connects with it a descent of the Holy Spirit1. No fact of the Evangelical history was more firmly or generally believed by the generation which gave shape to the Western Creed. This is fully admitted by Dr Harnack, who writes: “By the middle or probably soon after the beginning of the second century this belief had become an established part of the Church tradition.” Nevertheless he contends that the belief was subapostolic only, not Apostolic; “it is one of the best established results of history that the clause does not belong to the earliest Gospel preaching.”
In examining this statement we will begin with the middle of the century, about which there is no doubt, and work our way back with the view of discovering when and how this belief took its rise. Justin’s writings will be the natural starting-point. From Justin’s point of view the Miraculous Conception is inseparable from the Incarnation. The point of interest with him is the virginity of Mary2, and not the office ascribed to the Holy Spirit; when he refers to the latter, he gives us to understand that he identifies the ἅγιον πνεῦμα of the Conception with the Logos and not with the Third Person of the Trinity3. But it is a definite article in his creed that the Logos was born without the intervention of a human father. The miracle was foretold by the Hebrew prophets, and certain stories in the Greek mythology were malicious attempts on the part of the demons to caricature the event by anticipation1. These statements appear in the first Apology, and they shew that the belief was at this time disclosed to the heathen without reserve. With Trypho the Jew Justin is equally free; the Dialogue is full of the subject, which is treated as one of the commonplaces of Christianity; and we get an insight into the reasons which led Christians of that age to attach so much importance to it. The Virgin’s Son is, as such, “without sin” (δίχα ἁμαρτίας, c. 23); He is true man, but not ἄνθρωπος ἐξ ἀνθρώπου (c. 48). By her obedience to the call of God the Virgin reversed the disobedience of Eve2. Two important facts in the history of the belief are incidentally mentioned. (1) The Jews were so familiar with the Christian doctrine in this matter that they had begun to meet the argument based on Isa. 7:14 by denying that עַלְמָה is rightly represented by παρθένος and substituting νεᾶνις for the rendering of the LXX.3 (2) The Virgin-Birth was consistently rejected by those Christians—a minority, as Justin implies—who held the adoptianist or elective view of our Lord’s Sonship4.
Going backwards, we find the belief in the Virgin-Birth in Aristides, who seems to include it in his formal summary of Christian credenda. A comparison of the restored Greek apology with the Syriac and Armenian versions justifies us in attributing to Aristides himself the words ἐκ παρθένου γεννηθεὶς σάρκα ἀνέλαβε, and the preceding context in the Greek refers to the agency of the Holy Spirit1.
The next step brings us to Ignatius. His witness is clear and emphatic. The classical passage is Eph. 19: “the prince of this world was ignorant of the virginity of Mary and of her child-bearing.” It was one of the mysteries which were ‘wrought in the silence of God, but are now to be proclaimed to the world2.’ With regard to the fact Ignatius had no doubt; it was as certain in his eyes as the Crucifixion. Jesus Christ (he maintains against certain Docetic teachers) was truly born of a Virgin; truly nailed to the Cross for us in the flesh (Trall. 9, Smyrn. 1). It is important to observe that while Justin presses the Virgin-Birth against pagans and Jews, Ignatius asserts it against heresy. The heretics whom Ignatius wishes to refute appear not to have denied the fact, but they explained it away, as they explained away the Passion. The doctrine of the Miraculous Conception lent itself readily to the suggestion of unreality. Ignatius is not shaken by this circumstance; he asserts the reality of the event notwithstanding its supernatural character. It would have been comparatively easy to turn the Docetic position, if he could have replied that the Lord was born as other men are. But Ignatius knows nothing of such a doctrine, and the great Church over which he had presided and the Churches of Western Asia Minor to which he wrote were evidently involved in the same ignorance.
Before we attempt to get behind the age of Ignatius, it may be well to consider the attitude of second century heresy toward this belief. There were heretical Christians who rejected it altogether, as Justin tells us; and we have no difficulty in identifying them with the Ebionite school or its Gnostic exponents, the followers of Cerinthus and Carpocrates, and the early Ophites1. No critical grounds are stated for their repudiation of the doctrine by these heretics, whilst the exigencies of their dogmatic position supply an obvious motive. But the other and more important Gnostic schools, those whose tendency was Docetic rather than Ebionite, followed the Ignatian Docetae in accepting the Miraculous Conception, working it into their own systems in various shapes. So the Valentinians, both ‘Italic’ and ‘Anatolic’ (Hipp. vi. 35); so, too, Basilides (ib. vii. 26), and the later ‘Docetae’ described by Hippolytus (viii. 9), and the Gnostics of Irenaeus (iii. 11. 3). The fact was accepted by these heretics on the authority of the Gospels, and not as a tradition inherited from the Church; Hippolytus represents both the Valentinians and Basilides as appealing to St Luke.
A word may be said in passing as to the view which the Jews took of the Christian doctrine. They made no serious attempt to shew that our Lord was the Son of Joseph and Mary. Finding that the great majority of Christians, both Catholics and heretics, were agreed in denying the paternity of Joseph, they acquiesced in this belief, but used it as the occasion for a blasphemous libel, which was already familiar to Celsus in the eighth decade of the second century1. The true father of Jesus was, they said, a soldier named Pantheras. The story seems to have originated in a misunderstanding of the title Ben-Pandera2, which was taken for a patronymic, but was probably an intentional misreading of Ben Parthena, the Virgin’s Son. But why was the imaginary Panderas or Pantheras represented as a soldier? It has been suggested that the tale belongs to the time of Hadrian, when the Roman soldier was naturally execrated by the crushed and scattered race. If this conjecture be accepted as probable, the Jewish use of Pandera must be pushed back to a time anterior to Hadrian’s war; and the impression is confirmed which has been received from the letters of Ignatius as to the wide diffusion of this belief among Christians of the generation which immediately followed the death of St John.
What was the ultimate source of the belief? We have seen that the Gnostic sects of the middle of the century appealed to the Gospel of St Luke. Justin similarly justifies his statements by the words “as we learned from the Memoirs” (dial. 105). His references are for the most part to St Luke, but St Matthew appears to be in view more than once (dial. 78, apol. i. 33). Ignatius, on the other hand, seems to be independent of both narratives; if he leans to either, it is to St Matthew, but on the whole his words leave the impression that he either refers to some third document perhaps akin to our First Gospel, or is simply handing on a fact which had been taught him orally, probably when he first received the Faith. The latter supposition carries us back, perhaps far back, into the first century1.
We cannot, however, pursue this clew, and for further light we must turn to the two Gospels which record the Conception. Much has been made of the silence of St Mark, but the argument ex silentio was never more conspicuously misplaced; it is puerile to demand of a record which professes to begin with the ministry of the Baptist that it shall mention an event which preceded the Baptist’s birth. The plan of the Fourth Gospel equally excludes a reference to the manner of our Lord’s entrance into the world; although the prominence given by St John to the Mother of the Lord is favourable to the hypothesis that the Evangelist was not ignorant of her peculiar privilege. In St Luke, on the other hand, we might reasonably expect to find the fact recorded; had it been wanting our suspicions would have been awakened, for the author’s purpose is to construct a biography, and he gathers from all the sources at his command. Hence the Nativity and the events which led up to it are an integral part of his story. Few will now contend that Marcion’s mutilated Gospel, beginning as it did with arbitrary fusion of Luke 3:1, 4:31, was the original St Luke. Yet if the first two chapters formed part of the original Gospel, our most important record of the Conception is carried back, let us say, to a.d. 75–80, a terminus ad quem for the publication of the third Gospel accepted by one of the most cautious and far-seeing of living New Testament scholars1. But we cannot stop there. The style of Luke 1:5–2:52 clearly points to sources older than the Gospel itself. There are indeed correspondences of style and vocabulary which connect this section with the rest of the Gospel, and shew that the whole book has passed through the hands of the same compiler2; yet the section betrays unmistakably, as we think, an independent origin. It has an archaic tone; its thought and spirit are Judaeo-Christian; the hymns which characterise it are permeated by the thought and language of the Old Testament; the narrative preserves a simplicity which contrasts not only with St Luke’s formal prologue, but with his rendering of the synoptic tradition. The whole section may thus with some confidence be traced to a source earlier than the Fall of Jerusalem, and probably derived from the traditions of the Church of Jerusalem. And bearing in mind St Luke’s plan of pushing his enquiries back as far as he could go, it is scarcely too bold to suppose that he believed himself to be in possession of a narrative which came from the Mother of the Lord. The Church over which James the Lord’s brother presided and of which Mary herself had been a member during her residence at Jerusalem with the Apostle John, would have been the natural repository of such a reminiscence. There, if anywhere, the hymns of Zacharias, Mary, and Simeon, would have been treasured—perhaps liturgically used and moulded into their present form.
The narrative of the Conception in the first Gospel is absolutely independent of the narrative in the third. They are not simply distinct accounts proceeding from two independent observers, but they cover almost entirely different ground. Joseph is the centre of St Matthew’s story, as Mary of St Luke’s. The latter story deals with the Annunciation and Visitation, the former with a revelation to Joseph made subsequently to the Annunciation, and probably after Mary’s return from Judaea. The work of the harmonist is here simple and straightforward; Luke 1:26–56 is naturally followed by Matt. 1:18–25, and Luke 2:1–38 by Matt. 2:1. Yet this ready locking together of the parts of the story cannot be due to a desire on the part of either Evangelist to supplement the work of the other. St Matthew seems to write in entire ignorance of the circumstance that the scene of the events which preceded the Nativity was laid in Galilee. St Luke allows no interval for the flight into Egypt. Tatian, who arranged the two accounts nearly in the manner suggested above, was evidently perplexed when he reached Luke 2:391, and endeavoured to meet the difficulty by placing Matt. 2:1 after the return into Galilee and substituting a vague phrase for St Matthew’s note of time. It would have been better to recognise that St Luke was ignorant of the visit of the Magi and the flight. Ignorance of this kind does not affect the credibility of a writer with regard to matters which he professes to know, but it demonstrates his independence.
It is natural to conjecture that St Matthew’s story originated with Joseph, as St Luke’s with the Mother of the Lord1. Of Joseph we have no certain information later than our Lord’s twelfth year, but the committal of the Mother to St John is usually regarded as evidence that he died before the Crucifixion. Probably his death preceded the Baptism, for throughout the Ministry the Mother appears in company with the Lord’s brethren. But if Joseph died in Galilee before the Ministry, his account of the events which preceded the Nativity might have been long in gaining circulation. It might have escaped even the vigilance of St Luke, and have formed one of the latest accretions to the narrative of the Gospels.
Such a hypothesis may be thought to account for certain appearances in the text of Matt. 1:16 ff. Epiphanius relates that the first Gospel was used in a shorter form by the Ebionites, Cerinthians, and Carpocratians. The Ebionites omitted the first two chapters, the Cerinthians retained the genealogy, for “they wished to shew from the genealogy that our Lord was the son of Joseph and Mary2.” It is precarious to place faith in Epiphanius’s statements, especially when they concern the wrongdoings of heretics; but if we may trust him here, the Cerinthian Gospel must have differed from our own by the absence not only of c. 1:18–25, but of a part of c. 1:16. Now it is remarkable that this verse exists in a variety of forms which suggests some early disturbance of the text. Most of our Greek MSS. read: Ἰακὼβ δὲ ἐγέννησεν τὸν Ἰωσὴφ τὸν ἄνδρα Μαρίας, ἐξ ἧς ἐγεννήθη Ἰησοῦς ὁ λεγόμενος Χριστός. But two cursives belonging to the ‘Ferrar group’ substitute for τὸν ἄνδρα, κ.τ.λ., the words ᾧ μνηστευθεῖσα παρθένος Μαριὰμ ἐγέννησεν Ἰησοῦν τὸν λεγόμενον Χριστόν, and this alternative ending to the verse is supported in substance by seven MSS. of the prae-Hieronymian Latin1, and by the Curetonian Syriac; the Sinaitic Syriac appears to read: Ἰωσὴφ [δὲ] ᾧ ἐμνηστεύθη παρθένος Μαριὰμ ἐγέννησεν Ἰησοῦν. These facts involve the ending of verse 16 in some uncertainty, and lend plausibility to the idea that the verse did not originally contain the words which assert the virginity of the Lord’s mother. But the evidence is at present far from sufficient to justify this conclusion; and if it were stronger, the phenomena might be explained with almost equal probability on the hypothesis of early mutilation. In the mean while the matter may be regarded with comparative equanimity by those who believe in the miracle of the Virgin-Birth. Even if it should appear that in the original Matthew the Genealogy ended with the formula “Joseph begat Jesus,” the words would no more be a denial of the miracle than St Luke’s references to Joseph as “the father” (Luke 2:33) and to Joseph and Mary as “the parents” of the Lord (ib. 27, 41). If St Matthew’s account of the Angel’s message to Joseph could be shewn to have been inserted in the Gospel after its publication, the circumstance would prove nothing more than that the facts were unknown to the writer of the original draft, nor would it materially weaken their claim to be regarded as historical.
We have then, in any case, two absolutely independent narratives of events connected with the Miraculous Conception, one an integral part of the third Gospel, the other a part of the first Gospel in all existing MSS. and versions. Apart from the question of the date of the completion of our present Matthew, both these documents shew every indication of being genuine products of the first century, probably of a generation anterior to the Fall of Jerusalem. St Luke’s story has the true ring of the primitive age; St Matthew’s is shewn by its independence of St Luke’s to be earlier than the publication of the latter. There is probability in the conjecture which traces them respectively to the Mother of the Lord and His supposed father.
Nevertheless, Dr Harnack contends, the Conception “does not belong to the earliest Gospel preaching.” This may at once be conceded, if the words are restricted to their narrowest sense. The earliest Gospel preaching was limited to the witness borne by the Twelve to the things which they had seen and heard. It began, therefore, with the baptism of John, reaching from the beginning of the Galilean Ministry of the Lord to His Ascension, but finding its culminating point in the Resurrection (Acts 1:21, 22). The second Gospel, in its completed form, may be taken to correspond as nearly as possible with this original cycle of teaching; and the Gospel of St Mark, as we are often reminded, knows nothing of the miracles which attended the Lord’s Conception and Nativity. It is urged, however, that the doctrine of the Conception is equally absent from St Paul’s teaching. As a matter of fact we have little direct evidence to shew what St Paul’s presentment of the Gospel history may have been, unless we suppose it to be mirrored in the Gospel of St Luke, which gives us our fullest account of the event. But not to press this point, it is obviously unsafe to argue from St Paul’s silence, when he is equally silent on many other matters which certainly formed part of the Apostolic teaching. The purpose of his Epistles is to teach the religion and the ethics of the Faith, not to restate its historical basis; the latter was the work of the catechist, rather than of an Apostle who had received a special mission of another kind. It would have been a departure from St Paul’s plan, if he had directly referred to the fact of the Conception. But there are portions of his teaching where the event may well have been in the background of his thought, as when he speaks of our Lord as ‘the heavenly man,’ insists on His absolute sinlessness, and describes Him as ‘made of a woman,’ in a context where it would have been at least as natural to represent Him as the son of Joseph had he believed Him to be such1. On the other hand no adverse conclusion can fairly be drawn from Rom. 1:3, ‘made of the seed of David according to the flesh,’ as if the words asserted the paternity of Joseph. Ignatius more than once combines in the same sentence the Davidic descent with the Virgin-Birth1.
But the right of the Church in the second century to teach the doctrine does not turn upon the question whether it was taught by the Apostles or in their life-time. If an important fact connected with the Incarnation did not come to light until St Paul had passed away, it was none the less worthy of a place in the historical portion of the Creed so soon as it became part of the common heritage of the Christian Society. The appearance in the first and third Gospels of two independent accounts, gathered from the stores of the primitive Palestinian Church, would have been justification enough. But as far as we can judge, the belief was older than the publication of the Gospels. When it first appears in the letters of Ignatius, it was already accepted without question from Antioch to Ephesus. Yet some of the Churches by which it was confessed had received the faith from St Paul, and all were fresh from the teaching of St John.

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