If credit be allowed to the Acts of the Apostles, it would seem that St. Luke himself, as also St.
* See the remarks of Wi ill-' f tl r ,„ ?, ,',j
ffrfeiz, p. 202; Dalman, /''' n i I mh iit,mpt«
have been made to astiil . i ) : I I li ih, and
the arguments for and a„ cm i I ii i in yfii'-'
ij, P-
HamtiCk (Sitzvngsb. d. A. Berlin, xxvii. 1900), it is il lowhness of his handmaid with the words of Mary ti the Lord'(Lk 1*8), and ti
;',".: ;,\:'?;s
p 136, (le NT,
n. 504(1905). The contiast lai exieeds am comparison, as these writers show. The combination in Mary of the deepest humility with a firm consciousness of her ow n high calling and future renown is very striking. See, further, Burn, Niceta of Betnen- ana, 1205, p. oliiifl.
204
BIRTH OF CHRIST
BIRTH OF CHRIST
Paul, may well have come into personal contact A^'ith one or more members of the Holy Family. We read, for instance, in Ac 21'*, in one of the ' We ' sections of that book : ' And the day follow- in" Paul went in with us unto James ; and all the elders were present.' How much St. Luke may have learnt from St. James the Lord's brother, it is, of course, presumptuous to say ; but he may at least have learnt something during his stay in Jerusalem as to the place and the circumstances connected with our Lord's birth. We cannot for- get the Evangelist's claim to have traced the course of all things accurately from the first (Lk V), and he would scarcely have neglected the opportunities of information which were open to him in Jerusalem and afterivards in Cspsarea.
4. Bethlehem as our Lord's hirthplacc. — The in- tercourse just referred to would at least have saved St. Luke from the gross geographical blunder which he has been accused of making at the outset of his history, the blunder of confusing Bethlehem- Judah with another Bethlehem in Galilee (see, in relation to this alleged blunder, Knowlin", Our Lord's Virgin, Birth ajid the Critieism of To-day, pp. 6-13). But the recently published remarks of Sanday may well be remembered in this connexion (Sacred Sites of the Gospels, p. 25) :—
•There are two Bethlehems, the second in Galilee, ahout seven miles west of Nazareth, and it has recently been sn;^- gested in the Eneiic. Bihlica that the Galilean Bethlehem was the true scene of the Nativity. There would be real advan- ta*jes if Bethlehem could be thought of as near to Nazareth. But to obtain this result we have to go entirely behind our Gospels. Both St. JIatthew and St. Luke are express in plac- ing the birth of Christ at Bethlehem of Judtea. And as their narratives are whoUj' independent of each other, and differ in most other respects, it is clear that we have on this point a convergence of two distinct traditions.'
Professor Usener, indeed, fastens upon the i)as- sage Jn 7*"', and sees in it the hidden path by wliich Bethlehem found its way into the Gospel tradition (Ennjc. Bibl. iii. 3347). But there is no reason for supposing that tlie ^vriter of tlie Fourth Gospel was himself unaware of our Lord's liirth at Bethlehem, because he expresses the popular ex- pectation of the ignorant multitude. If tlie Gospel was WTitten at the late date demanded by advanced critics, his ignorance of such a belief would be altogether unaccountable. (Juite apart from our Gospels, Charles would refer the remarkable pas- sage in the Ascension of Isaiah \\-~ to a very early date, deriving it from the archetype which he canies back to the close of the 1st cent, {hit rod. pp. xxii-xlv) ; and from a comparison of v.- and v.'- it can scarcely be doubted that Bethlehem-Judah was meant throughout the narrative as the scene of our Lord's birth. But if the writer of the Fourth Gospel was St. John, it is a most arbitraiy procedure to see in this passage (T'"') any proof that the place of the Nativity was unknown to him. Are we to suppose that St. John was also ignorant of our Lord s descent from David ? * an inference which might equally seem to follow from the passage Ijefore us, unless we remember that the Evangelist is presupposing that his readers would Ije well aware of the true descent of Jesus and the actual place of His birth (see this point admirably put by Ramsay, 11 Vm Christ born at BctlUehe.m? p. 96).
Nor does the fact that our Lord was popularly known as Jesus of Nazareth in anj- way interfere with the truth that He was born at Bethlehem.
a town where his youth and early manhood Iiavt been passed, ratlier than after the actual place o:
• On the descent of Jesus from Darid see especially Daln iJie n'orte Jem, i. 203 : also Charles, Axcension of Isaiah \ For the meaning of Jn 7-uf- see, further, S&lmoD, Jntrodutti to the NT', p. 277.
his birth, in which his parents may have sojourned for a while (B. Weiss, Leben Jesn*, i. 227). It will, of course, be said that prophecy pointed to our Lord's birth at Bethlehem, and that St. Matthew (2") distinctly quotes ftlicah's words in this connexion. But was the prophecy fulfilled? On the one hand, we are asked to believe that St. Luke starts his narrative not only with a geographi- cal, but also with a grave historical blimder, and that he confuses an enrolment of Herod w ith the subsequent enrolment, some ten years later, of Ac 5". On the other hand, it is ur™d that St. Luke's accuracy, so well attested in other respects, would have saved him from making an initial and need- less error, and that the least consideration would have prevented him from connecting such an event as an enrolment of the people with the birth of the Messiah at Bethlehem, unless it was true. Undoubtedly both OT prediction and Rabbinic teaching pointed to Bethlehem, yet the prophecy was fulfilled according to the Gospel story by the introduction of a set of circumstances which were strangely alien to Jewish national thought and prestige : ' a counting of the people, or census, and that census taken at the bidding of a heathen emperor, and executed by one so universally hated as Herod, would represent the ne phis iiltra of all that was most repugnant to Jewish feeling' (Edersheim, Jesui the Messiah, i. 181). At any rate, we know quite enough of Jewish suscepti- bilities and of Jewish fanaticism in the 1st cent, of our era to be sure that a ruler like Herod, and in his position, wotild naturally guard against any undue exasperation of Jewish national and religious feeling. If it is urged that the story of the Nativity was bound in any case to bring Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, the city of David, it would have been easier and more significant to have adopted the theory of Strauss, to the effect that tlie parents were led to go to Bethlehem by the appearance of an angel, especially when we remember that the frequent introduction of an- gelic visitors is described as one of the special characteristics of the writings of St. Luke.