based upon philosophical or dogmatic prepossession, much more

based upon philosophical or dogmatic prepossession, much more

apostles. Like the original apostles,156 the Nazarenes for their own part continued the observance of the Jewish law; but, again like the original apostles, they recognized the freedom of the Gentile Christians and approved the work of Paul. The stricter Ebionites, on the contrary, who sought to force the observance of the law upon the Gentile converts157 and regarded Paul as an apostate, were the spiritual successors not of the apostles, who had stood nearest to Jesus, but of the Judaizing "false brethren privily /pg. 43/ brought in."158 In general, the Nazarenes, living in seclusion in the East and using their own ancient Gospel, produce an impression of conservatism and antiquity in marked contrast to the Ebionites of Epiphanius, with their doctrinal innovations and their worthless Gospel.

One fact deserves to be borne constantly in mind in the whole discussion—the fact, namely, that Jewish Christianity was not confined to the schismatic Jewish Christians included in lists of heresies. It has been shown above that even of the heretical Jewish Christians mentioned by Origen and others some accepted the virgin birth. But this whole discussion has left out of account the great numbers of Jewish Christians who in all probability simply became merged in the Catholic Church.159 And everything points to the hypothesis that these, and not the schismatics of whatever opinion, were in possession of the most primitive historical tradition with regard to the life of Jesus.

The results of the foregoing investigation of the second-century testimony to the virgin birth may be summed up in two propositions:

1. A firm and well-formulated belief in the virgin birth extends back to the early years of the second century.

2. The denials of the virgin birth which appear in that century were based upon philosophical or dogmatic prepossession, much more probably than upon genuine historical tradition.

CHAPTER II:

THE BIRTH NARRATIVE AN ORIGINAL

PART OF THE THIRD GOSPEL

It has been shown in the preceding chapter that the doctrine of the virgin birth, so far as the extant sources permit us to judge, was as firmly established at the beginning of the second century as it was at the close. Such is the most natural conclusion to be drawn in particular from the testimony of Ignatius, and there is nothing in the other extant information to invalidate it.

Obviously a doctrine which appears as so much a matter of course in the Ignatian Epistles could not have been an innovation, but must have had its roots in the previous period. Ignatius was no neophyte, but the bishop of a great church, the mother church of Gentile Christianity. At Antioch he was in a position by no means remote from the ultimate sources of information about the life of Jesus. Obviously, what he presents, without argument, as an essential part of Christian belief must already have been commonly believed in the Church for many years.

Even, therefore, if there were not a word about the subject in the New Testament, the second-century testimony would show that the belief in the virgin birth must have arisen, to say the least, well before the first century was over. As a matter of fact, however, the New Testament does contain an account of the virgin birth, and that account must now be examined.

The New Testament account of the birth of Jesus is contained in two of the New Testament books, the Gospel according to Matthew and the Gospel according to Luke. Since the narrative in Luke is more

extended than that in Matthew and begins at an earlier point in the course of events, it may conveniently be considered first.

Of course our estimate of the Lucan account of the birth of Jesus will depend to a considerable extent upon what we think of the Third Gospel as a whole. Obviously that larger question cannot be considered here; consideration of it would require a separate treatise. It can merely be remarked in passing that there is just now an increasing tendency among scholars of widely diverse opinions to accept the traditional view that the Third Gospel and the Book of /pg. 45/ Acts were actually written by Luke the physician, a companion of the Apostle Paul.

If this view is correct, very important consequences at once become evident. If the author of Luke-Acts was, as he is held to be by those who defend the traditional view of the authorship, identical with that companion of Paul who includes himself with Paul by the use of the first person plural in the so-called "we sections" of the Book of Acts, then at every point where the "we" occurs the author must have been present. The movements and relationships of the author can thus be traced. It can be shown by this method, for example, that the author came into contact, on the second missionary journey, not only with Paul, but also with Silas, who came originally from the Jerusalem Church. And, what is even more important, the significant "we" in the narrative extends into the very presence of James, the brother of the Lord, and of the Jerusalem Church itself.1 The author was thus in Palestine at the beginning of the two years which Paul spent in prison at Cæsarea; and since at the end of that period he appears again in Palestine (where he took ship with Paul for Rome), it is natural to suppose that he spent all or part of the interval in that country. At that time, then, he could have had abundant opportunity to obtain information about the earthly life of Jesus from those who were best qualified to speak. If Luke was really the author of LukeActs, then there is a strong presumption in favor of the trustworthiness of the double work, not only where it deals with the missionary journeys of Paul, but also with regard to the life of Jesus

and the early history of the Palestinian Church; and in particular it must be treated with respect where it deals with the events concerning the birth and infancy of the Lord. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the great majority of those who deny the historicity of the infancy narrative in the Third Gospel deny also the Lucan authorship of the book. The primary reason why they must do so is perfectly plain; it is simply that the Third Gospel and the Book of Acts, not only in the infancy narrative, but elsewhere as well, present a thoroughly supernaturalistic account of the life of Jesus and of the beginnings of the Christian Church. If a man rejects the supernatural, it is very difficult for him to suppose that an author who stood so close to the events as did Luke the physician, a companion of Paul, could have given so clearly supernatural and hence mistaken an account of what occurred. But just because of this consideration, it is the more significant that scholars like A. von Harnack of Berlin,2 and the /pg. 46/ distinguished historian, Eduard Meyer,3 who themselves altogether reject the historicity of the miracles narrated in Luke-Acts, should have felt compelled to accept the traditional view of the authorship. Only very strong evidence in the sphere of literary criticism could so overcome the strong presumption against Lucan authorship which must exist in the minds of such opponents of the supernatural content of the books. And as a matter of fact that evidence is found upon independent examination to be very strong indeed. The more one examines the literary phenomena in connection with LukeActs, the more one is impressed by the evidence for the traditional view that the double work was written by Luke the physician, a companion of Paul. It is therefore, very significant that the account of the birth and infancy of Jesus in Lk. 1–2 is a part of the Third Gospel. But this account of the birth and infancy constitutes not only a part of the Third Gospel, but a very peculiar part, a part which well deserves separate consideration.

The prologue of the Gospel, embracing the first four verses, is one of the most carefully constructed sentences in the whole New Testament. It is a typical "complex" sentence, in which the sense is

held in abeyance until the end; and in the last clause, "in order that thou mayest know, concerning the things wherein thou has been instructed, the certainty," the emphatic word of the whole sentence, "the certainty," is reserved to the last in an effective way which cannot be reproduced in any smooth English translation. It would be difficult to imagine a more skilfully formed, and more typically Greek, sentence than this. Yet this typically Greek sentence is followed by what is probably the most markedly Semitic section in the whole New Testament, the section containing the account of the birth and infancy in Lk. 1:5–2:52. There could scarcely be a greater contrast in style. In passing from the complex Greek sentence of the prologue to the simple narrative style of the following section, which is like the style of the Old Testament historical books, one seems to be suddenly transplanted into a different world.

This contrast between the language of the birth narrative and the author's own style as it is found in the prologue might be expected, in a day of acuteness in the field of literary criticism, to lead to the hypothesis that Lk. 1:5–2:52 is a later addition, not found in the original form of the book. And indeed this hypothesis has not been altogether without its advocates. But the significant thing is that the advocates of it were perhaps more prominent one hundred and twenty-five years ago than they are today. /pg. 47/

During the closing years of the eighteenth century the question was rather seriously raised whether the first two chapters, not merely of Matthew, but also of Luke, were later additions to the books. This hypothesis with regard to the Gospel of Luke (if we may confine our attention for the moment to that Gospel) has been favored in more recent times by Hilgenfeld,4 Usener,5 P. Corssen,6 and F. C. Conybeare;7 but it has failed signally to establish itself, and at present can claim comparatively little support.

The truth is that, despite the obvious differences of language and style that exist between Lk. 1:5–2:52 and other parts of Luke-Acts, a closer examination reveals also similarities of a very impressive kind.

As early in the history of modern criticism as 1816, the language of this infancy section of the Gospel was carefully examined verse by verse by Gersdorf, with the result that a great number of "Lucan" words or usages—that is, words or usages found only or chiefly in the Lucan writings as compared with the other New Testament books— were discovered in it. Apparently without reference to Gersdorf, a similar process has been carried out in recent years by Zimmermann and Harnack, with entirely convincing results. An examination by the present writer, which was undertaken in order to test what proved to be an exaggeration by Harnack of the Lucan character of the section, yet resulted, so far as the present point is concerned, in a complete confirmation. It is perfectly clear that the hand of the author of the whole book has been at work in Lk. 1:5–2:52.8

Against this conclusion Hilgenfeld urged the hypothesis that the similarities between our section and the rest of the book were due to a redactor.9 But surely the explanation is quite inadequate. The facts may be explained only if the author of the whole book, supposing he did use sources in Lk. 1:5–2:52, used them with freedom, preserving their peculiar quality and yet imparting to them something of his own style. Gradually the criticism of the Lucan writings is enabling us to construct something like a clear account of the literary methods of the author. And it is a very pleasing account indeed. We have here an author who had an admirable feeling for the beauty of the Old Testament narratives and of the Semitic narratives that came to him from Palestine, but /pg. 48/ who at the same time knew how to impart to his book a certain unity amid the diversity, which prevents it from being a mere compilation and makes it a genuine literary whole.

Thus the linguistic facts are strongly against the view that Lk. 1:5– 2:52 constitutes an addition to the original Gospel. And a little examination will show that other arguments that have been adduced in favor of that view all break down.

In the first place, there is not the slightest external evidence in favor of the hypothesis. It is true that in the second century Marcion, the ultra-Pauline heretical teacher, used a form of the Gospel of Luke that did not contain the first two chapters. That fact was still used by Usener in 1889 to support his removal of Lk. 1:5–2:52 from the original form of the Gospel. Usener supposed that Marcion's Luke was derived from an earlier form of the Gospel from which our canonical Luke also comes, and that at this point the Marcionic form was more original.10 But it would probably be difficult to find advocates of such a view today; it is now generally admitted that Marcion's form of the Gospel was due to a revision of our canonical form, a revision undertaken to support Marcion's peculiar views.11 Thus it was impossible for Marcion to include in his Gospel any account of a birth of Jesus, to say nothing of a virgin birth, for the simple reason that he did not believe Jesus to have been born at all, but thought that He appeared full-grown upon the earth. As a witness to any form of the Third Gospel that did not include the first two chapters, Marcion is therefore altogether without significance. Equally without significance for our purpose is a certain note to which F. C. Conybeare called attention, attached to a manuscript, dating from the year 1195, of the Armenian translation of Ephraem's Commentary on the Diatessaron. The manuscript in question is very late, and both text and interpretation of the note are very uncertain. It is not surprising that Conybeare's estimate of this piece of evidence has not received support from other scholars.12 /pg. 49/

Thus there is complete unanimity among all the witnesses to the text in favor of including Lk. 1:5–2:52 in the original Third Gospel. The section was included in the earliest Gospel harmony, Tatian's Diatessaron, which was made in the second century; its presence in the Gospel is definitely attested by the Muratori Canon; and it is found in all the Greek manuscripts of the Gospel and in all the versions. Such unanimity among widely divergent lines of attestation makes it very adventurous, to say the least, to exclude the section from the original form of the Gospel according to Luke.

But if the attempts to find external evidence for excluding Lk. 1:5– 2:52 from the Third Gospel have resulted in failure, equally unconvincing are the arguments which have been adduced from the Lucan writings themselves.

Thus when it is argued from Acts 1:1—"The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, concerning all things which Jesus began both to do and to teach, until the day when he was taken up"—that the Gospel (which is here called "the former treatise") could not have contained an account of anything that happened prior to the time when Jesus began to teach and to act, in other words, prior to the beginning of the public ministry,13 surely that is a very pedantic way of understanding what is in reality just a reference to the main contents of the Gospel. Taken broadly, as over against the author's second book, the Book of Acts, the Gospel may surely be designated, even if it included the first two chapters, as an account of the things that Jesus began to do and to teach prior to the ascension. In a modern biography, it is considered perfectly proper for the author sometimes to go back even a number of generations in order that the reader may understand the better the life that is to be narrated in detail. So it was perfectly natural for a book concerned with what Jesus did and taught during His public ministry to include, at least by way of introduction, an account of events connected with His entrance into the world. And even though there were any objection to such a designation of the Gospel if the designation stood alone, the objection disappears when one observes the contrast that is implied with the contents of the author's second book. As over against the Book of Acts, with its account of the words and deeds of the apostles, it is not unnatural for the Gospel even including the narrative of the birth and infancy, to be designated as an account of the words and deeds of Jesus. It should be observed, moreover, that in Acts 1:1 no starting-point for the narrative of the former treatise is definitely mentioned. The author is thinking not of the starting-point of the Gospel, but of the end of it, where with the ascension of Jesus the transition was made to the subsequent /pg. 50/ progress of the

gospel under the instrumentality of the apostles, which provides the subject-matter of the second book.

It is perhaps worthy of remark that even if the first two chapters of the Gospel were not present, the book would still begin, strictly speaking, with something other than the words and deeds of Jesus; for the first twenty verses of the third chapter are concerned with John the Baptist, whose preaching is reported at much greater length than in the other Synoptic Gospels. Just much introductory material may be allowed in an account of what Jesus did and taught? Even if Lk. 1:5–2:52 be removed, there is a certain amount of such material. Who can say that the addition of that section would require a different designation of the book as a whole? Thus the argument from the prologue of Acts may be said to prove too much. Equally unconvincing is Hilgenfeld's use of the prologue of the Gospel. When he argues that Christianity began with the baptism of Jesus, so that what happened before that could not be included among the things "fulfilled among us" (that is, in Christendom),14 that is again a quite unwarranted pressing of the author's words. For refutation of it, one does not need to enter at length upon the vexed question of the interpretation of the prologue. Surely an account of the birth and infancy of Jesus could not be excluded from the things that have been fulfilled among us (that is, among Christians) even if Hilgenfeld is right in supposing that in the author's view Christianity began definitely with the baptism. Far more natural is it to say that the author desires to treat the whole complex of Christian facts, to which the birth of the Saviour and of His forerunner belonged. And it may even perhaps be argued that when this author speaks about his having followed all things from the beginning he is alluding to an earlier point of departure for his narrative than that which appeared in the works of some, at least, of his predecessors.

But is Hilgenfeld correct in designating the baptism of Jesus as being for this author the beginning of "Christianity"? That brings us to a consideration of the use to which some of the advocates of the theory which Hilgenfeld is defending have put the Lucan account of the

baptism in Lk. 3:21–23 and the references to it in Acts 1:22; 10:37f.; 13:23f. These passages, it is said, establish the baptism of Jesus by John, with the bestowal of the Spirit that accompanied it, as the true decisive "beginning" in the life of Jesus and thus as the beginning of the Christian facts with which the author of Luke and Acts was undertaking to deal. /pg. 51/

The argument is thought to be more powerful if, as has been done by a number of scholars, the reading of the "Western" text is adopted at Lk. 3:22. In that verse, the great mass of witnesses to the text, including the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, have the reading with which we are familiar: "Thou art my beloved son, in thee I am well pleased." But the Codex Bezæ, supported by certain manuscripts of the Old Latin Version and by certain patristic citations, including apparently a reference in Justin Martyr at the middle of the second century, reads: "Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee," thus making the divine utterance a quotation of the words in Ps. 2:7. This reading, it is said, if it is original (and a number of scholars think that it is), places the beginning of the divine sonship of Jesus at the baptism, and so indicates that the same Gospel could not have placed it at the birth, as is plainly done in Lk. 1:35.

In regard to this argument, it may be said in the first place that the Western text is in all probability incorrect at Lk. 3:22, as it is in so many other cases; and in the second place that even if it were correct it would not be nearly so significant as has sometimes been supposed. The passage in the Second Psalm, of which the Western text in Lk. 3:22 is a quotation, evidently designates, not the birth, but the induction into office, of the Messianic king. Accordingly it is applied by this same writer (in his report of a speech of Paul) to the resurrection.15 If it were applied by the same writer both to the resurrection of Jesus and to the baptism, there would not really be the slightest incongruity; for in one sense the baptism and in another sense the resurrection constituted the induction of Jesus into his kingly function as "Son of God." Still less difficulty could be found in

comparison with Lk. 1:35, where the divine sonship of Jesus is brought apparently into connection with the virgin birth. The mere fact that after the virgin birth had been narrated the same writer should go on to apply a passage from the Psalms, in full accord with its obvious Old Testament sense, to the induction into office of the Messianic king at the beginning of the public ministry, surely need not be regarded as surprising at all.

Thus even if the Western reading were correct at Lk. 3:22 (as in all probability it is not), there would be nothing in this verse out of harmony with the birth narrative, and so nothing to show that that narrative could not have been included by the same author in the same book. But even though the Western reading in this verse would not be sufficient, when taken alone, to show that the birth narratives were originally absent, may it not do so when taken in connection with certain other considerations? /pg. 52/ Or even if the Western reading is not correct, is there not still enough evidence to show that for the author of Luke-Acts the baptism of Jesus, and not the birth, was the great "beginning," the beginning par excellence, to which he must be referring in the prologues of both his books? These questions deserve some consideration. But here again the evidence will not at all bear the weight that is put upon it. It is indeed perfectly clear that to the author of Luke-Acts, on the basis of the information that came to him, the baptism of Jesus was an important event that did mark the beginning of something. But of what did it mark the beginning?

In the first place, it marked the beginning of that period in the life of Jesus to which the apostles could testify as eye-witnesses. That fact explains the reference in Acts 1:22; for there it is represented as an important qualification for the man who was to take the place of Judas among the Twelve that he should have been with the disciples during all the time when Jesus went out and in among them beginning with the baptism of John. No other terminus a quo could have been designated, for the simple reason that none of the apostles, not even Peter himself, was with Jesus at an earlier time.

The baptism clearly marks the beginning of the direct testimony of the apostles.

That fact really explains also the mention of the baptism in Acts 10:37–39; for in that passage again Peter says: "And we are witnesses of all things which Jesus did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem." It was at the baptism that Peter began to be an eyewitness of the life of Christ upon earth. A similar consideration, if we may anticipate what will have to be said in another connection, serves to explain admirably the omission of the birth and infancy in the Gospel of Mark. That Gospel, according to a thoroughly credible tradition, embodies the teaching of Peter; and it seems to contain the things which would make a first impression rather than instruction of a more detailed and intimate kind. It is very natural that such a book should deal almost exclusively with things that Peter had himself seen and heard. In Acts 13:24, although there also the same consideration may be urged, the case is a little different; for in this passage, in the speech of Paul at Pisidian Antioch, the baptism of Jesus by John is not mentioned, and John appears rather as the last of the pre-Christian witnesses to Christ. But in the other two passages the prime consideration is that the baptism of Jesus by John marks the beginning of the period in the life of Christ to which the apostles could testify as eye-witnesses.

We are, indeed, far from wishing to assert that in the mind of the author of Luke-Acts, the baptism of Jesus was important only because it happened /pg. 53/ to be the point at which the apostles began to be eye-witnesses. On the contrary, this author, like the author of the other Gospels, represents the baptism as marking an important new beginning, not only for the disciples, but also for Jesus Himself.

The fact is no doubt indicated by the striking use of the absolute participle "beginning" at Lk. 3:23. That verse, literally translated, reads as follows: "And Jesus Himself was, when He began [in Greek, "beginning"], about thirty years old, being the son, as was supposed,

of Joseph who was the son of Eli.…"16 The words, "when He began," naturally give rise to question. The reader may be tempted to ask, "When He began what?"

Extreme answers have sometimes been given to this question. Thus it has been suggested, especially when the Western reading, "Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee," is adopted in the preceding verse, that the "beginning" which is referred to in our verse is the beginning of the divine sonship of Jesus. Jesus has just been designated as having been begotten "this day" by God; hence His divine sonship, it is said, begins at that point. On this interpretation, the words, "as was supposed," in the phrase, "being the son, as was supposed, of Joseph," instead of being taken, in accordance with what is certainly the prevailing opinion, as a reference to the virgin birth of Jesus, have somewhere actually been taken as contrasting the physical sonship of Jesus as a child of Joseph and Mary—His sonship according to the outward appearance —with His real, or spiritual sonship, which began through the divine begetting at the time of the baptism. That divine begetting, on this interpretation, did not take place until Jesus, as a son of Joseph and Mary, had grown to full manhood. His apparent, or physical, or external, sonship had lasted for thirty years before His true, divine sonship began.

This interpretation of the words, "as was supposed," it may be remarked in passing, is rather unnatural. If the beginning of the divine, as distinguished from the human, sonship of Jesus is not regarded as having taken place before the baptism, then Jesus up to that time was not only apparently but really the son of Joseph. Therefore, to justify the interpretation of which we have been speaking, the sentence ought perhaps rather to have read: "And Jesus was, when He began, about thirty years of age, being, as was supposed, still (or only) the son of Joseph," or "being according to the flesh the son of Joseph." The words as they stand will hardly bear the meaning that is attributed to them. It would not be natural to set the divine begetting in a relation of contrast with the current opinion

about the paternity of Joseph, as is done by the words, "as was supposed," except on the assumption that Joseph was not in a /pg. 54/ physical sense—that is, not in the sense that prevailed generally among the people—the father of Jesus.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the great majority (to say the least) of those who hold that the passage Lk. 3:22, 23 is incompatible with the birth of Jesus as it is narrated in the first two chapters, and that those chapters are therefore a later addition to the Gospel, admit that the words, "as was supposed," in verse 23 do constitute a reference to the virgin birth as it appears in Lk. 1:34, 35, and hence admit that these words were interpolated by the same person who added the first two chapters to the Gospel. On that view, the words, "as was supposed," can no longer do duty as indicating that the baptism, and not the birth, of Jesus was the beginning of His divine sonship.

But even with this ordinary interpretation of these words, as they stand, as referring to the virgin birth (the interpretation which is no doubt held by nearly all scholars of all shades of opinion), and even with the ordinary, as distinguished from the Western, text in Lk. 3:22, does it not still remain true that the word "beginning" ("when He began") in verse 23 designates the event at the baptism as the decisive beginning, the beginning par excellence, which the author has in mind in the entire plan of his work, so that there could not originally have been prefixed to the account of this event an extended narrative of prior events such as that which we now have in the first two chapters?

In answer to this question it must freely be admitted, as indeed has already been done, that the baptism by John, or the event that immediately followed, is regarded by the author of Luke-Acts as an event of very great importance indeed. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that the time, or at least the general setting of this event— or rather of the public appearance of John which was preliminary to

it—should be fixed by the elaborate reference to contemporary political conditions in Lk. 3:1.

But surely the importance of the baptism of Jesus, in the mind of the Evangelist, does not carry with it any lack of importance for the birth and infancy. And as for the elaborate reference to contemporary conditions, it may be said, (1) that possibly the author did not possess equally detailed information regarding conditions at the time of the birth, (2) that such a chronological or political note would have been out of accord with the style chosen (for whatever reason) for the birth narrative, when a simple phrase, "in the days of Herod the King," alone suited the spirit of that narrative, (3) that in a reference to a time when Herod the Great ruled over all Palestine there was no need for the separate designation of the districts into which the country was later divided, so that for that earlier time an elaborate note like that in Lk. 3:1, 2 would have been impossible, (4) that the phrase, "in the days of /pg. 55/ Herod the King," in Lk. 1:5, coupled with the reference to the census and to Quirinius in Lk. 2:1f., does show a desire on the part of the author to synchronize the birth of Jesus with surrounding political conditions which is somewhat similar, after all, to the treatment of the appearance of the Baptist in Lk. 3:1f.

What, then, was the importance of the event at the baptism of Jesus, which caused that event to be designated by the somewhat surprising absolute use of the participle "beginning" (that is, in English, "when He began") in Lk. 3:23? The answer is simply that that event marked the beginning of the public ministry of Jesus. Up to that time He had been hidden; now He came forward publicly in His Messianic work. The account of the temptation, which immediately follows the account of the baptism, supports this understanding of that previous event. Jesus had just been designated by the voice from heaven as Son of God—that is (whatever deeper meaning there may be in the term), at least as Messiah. Thus the Western text, with its quotation of Ps. 2:7, secondary though it no doubt is, yet involves perhaps an essentially correct interpretation of the divine word; Jesus was, when

the Spirit descended upon Him, designated as the Messianic king. The kingship had indeed been His before; but now He was to enter into the active exercise of it. But what kind of king should He be; how should He use His kingly power? That question it was which was asked by the Tempter, with his repeated "If thou be the son of God," and which Jesus answered in such a decisive way. But, it is said, if the event at the baptism be taken in this fashion, not as making Jesus something that He had not been, but merely as designating His entrance into a work for which He had been qualified even before, what shall be thought of the descent upon Him of the Holy Spirit (Lk. 3:22)? Even if the words, "Thou art my son," could be understood not as the conferring of some new dignity or power that He had not possessed before, but merely as the announcement or confirmation of what was already His, how can the coming of the Holy Spirit upon Him be understood in this merely declarative way? Does not that event, at least, indicate that He now came to be something that He had not already been? And if so, how could it be supposed that not only had He possessed the Holy Spirit from His mother's womb, as was the case with John the Baptist,17 but had owed to the Holy Spirit, in a supernatural conception, the very constitution of His being?18 Finally, if that question is unanswerable, how could the same author have included two such incompatible representations in his book? And so must not the birth narratives, in which /pg. 56/ the other representation is found, be a later addition not due to the original author of the book?

Such questions have sometimes been asked. And yet the objection that underlies them is not really by any means so serious as it may at first sight seem. It depends upon the assumption that the coming of the Holy Spirit in connection with the life of Jesus upon earth could take place, according to our Evangelist, only at one time and in one way. But surely that assumption is exceedingly uncertain, to say the least. The actions of the Spirit of God—we will not say, in reality, for that is not the question here—but according to the mind of the author of the Third Gospel, were very much more mysterious and very much more varied than they are thought to be by many modern

scholars in their study-chambers. Who can say that because the Holy Spirit came upon the virgin mother of Jesus when He was conceived in the womb, therefore the same Spirit could not, according to the Evangelist, come upon Jesus again, and in other fashion, to fit Him for His public work as Messiah? Can the ineffable interactions between Jesus Christ and the Spirit of God be thus reduced to a set scheme? We think not; and in so thinking we are not merely voicing the conviction of Christendom throughout all the ages, but also are in full accord, no matter what the particular investigator's own convictions may be, with what a true historical exegesis must recognize as being in the mind of Luke. In order to understand a book like the Third Gospel, and like the other New Testament books, it is necessary to do something more than impose upon those books our own predilections; the true interpreter must rather seek to enter, as cannot be done by rule of thumb, into the very spirit of the writer. And when that is done, no contradiction will be found, but rather the deepest harmony, between the work of the Holy Spirit at the very beginning of Jesus' earthly life and the coming of the same Spirit upon Him when finally He went forth to begin His public ministry.

There is not the slightest reason, therefore, why we should not hold that the event at the baptism was important for Jesus, according to the author of the Third Gospel, not because it made Him something that He was not before, but because it designated His entrance upon His public work. What had been hidden before was now to become manifest to all the people. There had been a period of obscurity, but that period was preparatory to what was now at last to come.

That this interpretation is in accordance with the intention of the writer is not only probable in itself, but also is confirmed by one particular link between the birth narrative and what follows—a link which has generally escaped notice. In Lk. 1:80 it is said that John the Baptist was in the deserts /pg. 57/ until the day of his "showing" to Israel.19 Does that verse not lead the reader to look for the great "day" that is there held in prospect, the day when John should emerge from his obscurity and appear publicly as the forerunner of

the Messianic salvation? Whenever that day should come, surely it would be heralded by the writer who included Lk. 1:80 in his book, with all the solemnity that he could command. And just exactly that is done in Lk. 3:1f. The period of obscurity and waiting in which the reader was left in the former passage at last is over; the forerunner emerges from the deserts and the day of Messianic salvation has dawned. What wonder that the concomitant political conditions are marked with all the precision that the writer can command; what wonder that rulers and high priests are marshalled to do honor to the great event that signalized their reign?

Thus is explained the fact that the elaborate synchronism of rulers in Lk. 3:1f. marks not the baptism of Jesus, but the appearance or "showing forth" of His forerunner, John. In the clearest possible way the author has taken up the thread that for the moment was broken off. The forerunner was in obscurity in the deserts; He for whose coming he was to prepare was in humble subjection to earthly parents—and then the great day came, the day of the formal appearance of the herald in his great function of preparing for the Messianic king.

Far, therefore, from being an argument against regarding the first two chapters as part of the original form of the Gospel, the elaborate political note in Lk. 3:1f. is an argument to the contrary. And even the way in which the Baptist is introduced in these two verses provides an incidental indication of the fact that the birth narrative has gone before. In contrast with what is found in the other Gospels, John is here designated, at his first appearance in connection with Jesus' public ministry, not as "the Baptist" or the like but as "Zacharias' son." It is truly surprising that Hilgenfeld actually finds in this phrase an argument against the original inclusion of the first two chapters in the Gospel.20 Zacharias, the father of John, he says, is here mentioned as though for the first time, and therefore this Gospel could not have contained the account of him that now stands in Lk. 1. Could there be any more complete reversal of the natural inference? Is it not perfectly clear that the reason why Luke, as

distinguished from the other Evangelists, designates the Baptist as Zacharias' son, is that, unlike the other Evangelists, he has already given an account of /pg. 58/ Zacharias at the beginning of his Gospel? Lk. 3:2 rather plainly refers back to Lk. 1:5–25, 57–80. A number of indications in detail, therefore, have been shown to unite the main body of the Third Gospel with the first two chapters. Careful search might reveal many others. And of course the words, "as was supposed," in Lk. 3:23, which have already been discussed in a slightly different connection, provide, as they stand, an additional link with the birth narrative. If that narrative is to be regarded as absent from the Gospel as it originally appeared, then these words must be an interpolation due to the man who expanded the Gospel into its present form. But obviously the necessity of removing such supposed interpolations in the body of the Gospel, before it can be separated from the first two chapters, overloads the hypothesis, and raises anew the question why it is that the original, shorter and uninterpolated, form of the book has so completely failed to leave any trace among the extant witnesses to the text.

Usener,21 apparently, has an answer to this latter question. The Gospel, he thinks, was at first subject to repeated additions; it was not a work completed at one time and given to the world in definitive form, but was, rather, an agglomeration that was only gradually formed and was added to from time to time as the real or supposed needs of the Church might require. Thus, at first, according to Usener,22 it did not even contain an account of the baptism of Jesus by John: the account of the baptism was then added; and last of all there was added the account of the birth. Why then is there such unanimity in the transmission of the text; why have those successive earlier forms left no trace? The answer, apparently, that Usener gave, at least the only answer that he could give, to this question is that the extant text, in all its lines of transmission, goes back to a canonized form of the Gospel that was fixed at some time in the second century to put an end to the misuse of the Gospels by what was regarded as heresy. This act of canonization it must have been, therefore, according to Usener's hypothesis, that stopped the process of

agglomeration of Gospel material that had been going on before, and caused only the Gospels as we now have them to be handed down to us today.

To this entire hypothesis, however, there are the most serious objections. Where and when did this definitive canonization take place? If there was going on so free a process of addition to the Gospels as Usener supposes, if the contents of the Gospels were so completely in a state of flux, where, in the second century, was there a central ecclesiastical authority strong enough to /pg. 59/ put a stop to such a process all at once—strong enough to say to everyone who was freely adding to the agglomerations of material now called Gospels: "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther; this business of adding to the Gospels must stop; here and here only is the form of the Gospels which henceforth you must use"? And even if there was an authority strong enough to do that, would it have been efficient enough to destroy all the previous forms of the Gospels, widely used though they were in various parts of the Church, so completely that no trace of these forms should remain today in any of the many divergent lines of transmission of the text? It must be remembered that our text of the Gospels can be traced, through patristic citations and by the convergence of widely separated families of documents, to a time long prior to the production of the great uncial manuscripts. Could the supposed act of canonization have been so early and so complete as to dominate not one but all of the divergent lines of transmission?

If the thing had been attempted in the fourth or fifth century, conceivably it might have been possible. In the early fifth century, for example, the use of the Diatessaron was rooted out of the Syriacspeaking Church by ecclesiastical authority, and the use of the four separate Gospels was substituted for it. But, in the first place, that concerned only the Syriac-speaking Church, not the Church throughout the world; in the second place, it was not, as a matter of fact, completely successful, since, despite all ecclesiastical efforts, the Diatessaron, in translation at least, and through a commentary upon

it, does remain to us today; and in the third place it was done in the fifth century, when ecclesiastical authority was far stronger than it was in the second century, which is the period with which Usener's hypothesis deals. Surely it would be difficult to find in that early period an ecclesiastical authority, not local but in the very fullest sense ecumenical, which could all at once put a stop to the transmission of the shorter forms of the Gospels which were being used in various churches and could suddenly impart to the Gospels a fixity of content which originally the Gospels did not at all possess. If the content of the Gospels was at first in such a complete state of flux, the process could never in the second century have been stopped so completely, and the earlier and shorter gospels so completely destroyed, as Usener's hypothesis really requires. No, there is only one way to explain the essential unanimity of our witnesses to the text, so far as the content of the Gospels is concerned. That way is to suppose that the Gospels were not mere agglomerations of material, as Usener apparently thinks they were, but in some sort literary units. No ecclesiastical authority in the second century could have produced the unanimity of transmission; only the authors themselves could have done it. /pg. 60/

It might indeed be admitted, without the slightest danger to this conclusion, that a process of gradual agglomeration of originally separate material does, to some extent at least, underlie our Gospels. It might be admitted further that our Gospels, including the Gospel of Luke, do make use of earlier written sources, and that some, at least, if not all, of these sources were shorter than the Gospels as we now have them. These admissions would not at all involve us in the difficulties into which Usener's hypothesis falls; they would not at all cause us to be puzzled at the disappearance of some or all of the written sources that our Gospels used. The point is that the unanimity in the transmission of the contents of our Gospels, and the disappearance of some, at least, of the sources that they used, can be explained only if—contrary to Usener's view—the men to whom we owe our Gospels were not mere compilers, but in some sort (despite their use of previous materials), authors, who imparted a certain

unity to their completed works and gave them to the Church with the authority of the authors' names. The facts of the transmission, we think, are explained only if our Gospels are not merely arbitrary fixations of impersonal and gradually forming agglomerations of materials, but genuine books, given to the world at definite points of time and possessed of the fixity of content which literary productions ordinarily have.

But if this conclusion alone, and not the hypothesis of Usener, does justice both to the state of ecclesiastical authority in the second century and to the unanimity in the transmission of the text, even more signally is it in accord with the characteristics of the Gospels themselves.

Are our Synoptic Gospels, as a matter of fact, merely loose conglomerations of material which could naturally be added to (or subtracted from) as need might require? The question must be answered with an emphatic negative, and most clearly of all as concerns the Gospel according to Luke. Whatever may be said of the other two, it is quite evident that the Third Gospel, at least, possesses, amid all the variety of its parts, a genuine literary unity. The whole recent history of literary criticism since Usener's book first appeared in 1889 has tended mightily against Usener's hypothesis. Through the researches of Harnack and others, and through a more sympathetic attention to the literary form of the New Testament books, which has been only one manifestation of a more sympathetic attitude in general toward the productions of the Hellenistic period in the history of the Greek language, it has been becoming increasingly evident that the writer of Luke-Acts was far more than a compiler, that he was, in fact, a genuine author who had his own plan for his work and who knew how, despite all his use of previously existing materials, to carry out that plan /pg. 61/ in detail.23 There has not been for the most part, indeed, any return to the Tübingen over-emphasis upon the plan or "tendency" of the author; recent scholars have been less and less prone to find in the author of Luke-Acts a man who carried out his purpose for his book

with ruthless disregard of the information that came to him. But that fact does not at all affect the point that we are now making. It does remain true that the whole tendency of recent criticism has been in favor of the literary unity of the Lucan wrltings.

This conviction as to the literary unity of Luke-Acts extends in the fullest measure, as we have observed, to the first two chapters. The more carefully those chapters are examined, the clearer become the indications in them of the hand of the author of the whole book. Those indications can never be explained by Hilgenfeld's elaborate hypothesis of a Pauline redactor who revised the birth narrative and also undertook a work of interpolation in the rest of the Gospel. This hypothesis seems rather obsolete today, not only because it displays a Tübingen assurance of discrimination between what is Pauline and what is not, which has come to be out of date—especially in view of the fact that many of Hilgenfeld's "Pauline" redactorial touches in Lk. 1:5–2:52 are paralleled in the Old Testament prophets—but also because the stylistic congruity between the birth narrative and the rest of Luke-Acts is too deep and too subtle to have been produced by a redactor. It could only have been due to a genuine author. If literary criticism has established anything at all, it has established the fact that the narrative of the birth and infancy is an integral part of the Third Gospel.24

CHAPTER III:

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LUCAN

NARRATIVE

It has just been shown that the Lucan birth narrative was certainly an original part of the Third Gospel. That very important fact being established, we may now proceed to examine the narrative more in detail. Such examination will show that although this section plainly bears the marks of the Evangelist's hand, and is congruous in style and spirit with the rest of the book, yet also it possesses very marked characteristics of its own.

Those characteristics may be summed up in the fact to which attention has already been called, the fact that Lk. 1:5–2:52 is a strikingly Jewish and indeed Palestinian narrative. That fact may be observed even in a translation into English or into any other modern language. Even in a translation, it becomes evident that we have here a style very similar to the style of the Old Testament historical books, and very dissimilar to the ordinary style of the Gentile author, as it is found, for example, in the prologue to the book. But in the original Greek the thing becomes even far more abundantly clear.

What strikes the reader most forcibly at the very beginning is the thoroughgoing "parataxis" that prevails throughout this narrative. Instead of long complex sentences, like that in the prologue with its wealth of subordinate clauses, we have here for the most part a series of short independent sentences, connected with one another by the conjunction "and." "There was a priest, by name Zacharias, and his wife from among the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth"—so runs (if in order to exhibit the structure we may omit the simple qualifying phrases) the beginning of the narrative; and the beginning is typical of the whole. Equally striking in the narrative is that thoroughgoing use of parallelism which is so marked a characteristic of Hebrew style. This feature appears with special prominence, as might be expected, in the poetical portions of the section—for example, the hymns of Mary and Zacharias; but it is evident also even in the prose narrative. Such parallelism is basic in Hebrew poetry, and its presence in our narrative contributes largely to the production of that Semitic flavor which connects the section so closely with the spirit of the Old Testament. /pg. 63/

But the Semitic character of the narrative appears not only in the sentence-structure and in the style. It is equally evident in the vocabulary and in the details of the phraseology. One does not need to read very far in this narrative to discover the influence of Hebrew or Aramaic. Whatever subtractions may be made from any list of individual Hebraisms or Aramaisms,1 the frequency of usages which whether or not they occur also here and there in Greek literature or in papyri, are strikingly similar to Semitic usages, remains no doubt convincing enough. More convincing still, however, is the impression to be derived from reading the narrative through. That impression cannot adequately be expressed in any detailed analysis. The outstanding fact is that in this narrative we find ourselves in the indefinable but not the less unmistakable atmosphere of Palestine.

It is, moreover, not merely in language and style that the Semitic character of the narrative is revealed. Even more impressive are the indications to be found in the thought, as distinguished from the language, of the section. In the entire narrative there is no hint of any ideas derived from Gentile Christianity; indeed, there is no hint of any knowledge of anything that happened or that became known during or after the public ministry of Jesus. It may really be said, if the words are understood aright, that the narrative, with the hymns inserted in it, is not Christian, but pre-Christian throughout. What we really have here, in thought and spirit, as well as in language, is a bit of the Old Testament embedded in the midst of the New Testament.

Proof of this assertion may be found on the surface of the narrative from beginning to end. Thus the parents of John the Baptist are described in thoroughly Old Testament terms; the course of Abia is mentioned as though familiarity with priestly conditions were the most natural thing in the world; and the piety of Zacharias and Elisabeth is characterized in a way quite typical of the Old Testament and of Jewish feeling. The two, it is said, "walked in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless." There is certainly here no hint of any sharp Pauline distinction between

righteousness under the law and the righteousness that comes through faith.

Faith, it is true, is highly exalted in this narrative; but such exaltation of faith does not transcend the teaching of the Old Testament. The Old Testament in its deepest import presents not a religion of merit, but a religion of grace; it really offers salvation as a gift of God. "Enter not into judgment with thy servant; for in thy sight shall no man living be justified"—these are words that really lie at the heart of the religion of Israel. And in the Old Testament, /pg. 64/ as well as in the New Testament, confidence in the gracious promises of God is treated as the very basis of any true religious life.

Thus in the exaltation of faith in our narrative no Pauline or Gentile Christian influence need be detected. And the clear Pauline presentation of the contrast between the law and grace is conspicuous by its absence. The entire attitude of this narrative toward the law is just that which was found under the old dispensation; the religion of grace is there, but it is still implicit rather than explicit, or at any rate it is not yet in any sharp contrast to a righteousness to be obtained through the law.

In the verse which comes immediately after the characterization of Zacharias and Elisabeth, there is to be found, in conjunction especially with verse 25, one of the many little touches that indicate Jewish feeling. Elisabeth, it is said, was barren, and both she and Zacharias were "advanced in their days."2 This barrenness was regarded as bringing upon Elisabeth "shame" or reproach.3 Here we have the characteristic Jewish attitude toward childbearing. It is to be doubted very much whether such an attitude could be paralleled in the Gentile world of that day, where exposure of infants was quite a common practice, and where at least the passionate Jewish desire for children and the feeling of shame when they were absent would have seemed to be rather a strange and foreign thing. Certainly our narrative has caught in a very delicate way at this point the finer shades of Jewish feeling.

In the words of the angel to Zacharias in Lk. 1:13–20 there appears what is one of the most striking features of the narrative as a whole, namely, the complete absence of any specifically Christian, as distinguished from pre-Christian, features in the presentation of the Messianic hope. The angel says of the promised child that he will go before God to prepare His people; but there is no mention of a Messiah. Later on in the section the Messiah of course appears; but the promises concerning Him are couched in terms that display no knowledge of later events such as the resurrection, the beginning of the Gentile mission, or the destruction of Jerusalem. The Messianic hope appears essentially in Old Testament form. We do not mean to say that the stupendous words of the angel in Lk. 1:30–37 add nothing to the Old Testament presentation of the coming Messiah. On the contrary, they do render definite and plain the manner of the Messiah's entrance into the world, which had been prophesied indeed in Is. 7:14, but in mysterious terms that the Jews did not understand. They do, moreover, make explicit the superhuman nature of the Messiah, in a way that transcends in /pg. 65/ definiteness even the majestic descriptions of the ninth chapter of Isaiah. Such an increase in plainness and definiteness is only to be expected if the appearance of the coming one was no longer in the dim and distant future, but was immediately at hand. Yet even so there is a complete absence of any detailed descriptions such as would have been natural only after the event. Even here the limits of true prophecy are preserved.

Even here, moreover, the kingdom of the promised Messiah is described in distinctly Old Testament terms. "The Lord God," it is said, "will give to Him the throne of David His father, and He will rule over the house of Jacob forever." There is a true, high sense in which that prophecy has been, and is being, gloriously fulfilled. But is it not unnatural that a Gentile Christian writer, after the destruction of Jerusalem or even after the beginning of the war that led to the destruction, would ever have spoken of the kingdom of Christ as a kingdom over the "house of Jacob"?

The same characteristic runs through the whole section. Thus in the song of Mary, called the Magnificat,4 there is a complete absence of any definite allusions to events in the life of the coming Deliverer: indeed, the Deliverer is not mentioned at all; and the deliverance which God has brought or is to bring is described as help rendered to "Israel His servant" and as a fulfilment of His promise "to Abraham and to his seed."

Similar is the representation in the song of Zacharias, the so-called Benedictus.5 There, it is true, the immediate occasion of the song becomes a little more definite than is the case in the Magnificat; the child of Zacharias is directly addressed by the words, "and thou, child, shalt be called a prophet of the Most High." But the specific events in the life of the child are not mentioned, and his mission as a prophet is described only in the most general terms. Indeed, there is in this hymn no clear allusion to the Messiah at all; the child is to go before Jehovah to prepare His people for Him, but in what particular way Jehovah is to appear is not said. And throughout the whole hymn the connection of the coming salvation with Israel is set forth in terms which would be very unnatural in a composition written with knowledge of the later events. Could a Gentile Christian writer, especially if he wrote after A.D. 70, ever have described the Messianic salvation as consisting in such a rescue of the Jewish People from the hands of its enemies that the people might have liberty to worship God without fear? It is true that the salvation which Israel, according to this hymn, is to receive is by no means purely political; by the agency of the forerunner who has just been born, the people is to be prepared morally for /pg. 66/ the coming of Jehovah; the liberty which it is to receive is to be used for a worship of God in holiness and righteousness, and the salvation is to involve "the remission of sins." But this ethical element in the Messianic salvation does not at all transcend what is found in the Old Testament; it is presented in the most insistent fashion by the Old Testament prophets. There is, therefore, no indication whatever in the Benedictus which could stamp the hymn as a prophecy after the event; but on the contrary, there is every indication that the hymn

was written before the calamity to the Jewish state which occurred in A.D. 70.

Similar is the impression which is made in the second chapter. Could anything be more unnatural to a Gentile Christian, writing after A.D. 70, or after the rejection of the Gospel by the mass of the Jewish people, than the description of Simeon as one who was awaiting the "consolation of Israel," or of the circle of pious folk to whom Anna spoke as those who were awaiting "the redemption of Jerusalem"? Such expressions are very natural in a Palestinian writer, living at a very early time; but they are as dissimilar as possible to what would be expected in the free composition of a later Gentile Christian. Everywhere in this chapter the Messianic hope is set forth in Old Testament terms.

It is true, indeed, that Lk. 1–2 does contain expressions of a genuine universalism: the coming salvation is to be in the presence of all the peoples; it is to involve "light for a revelation to the Gentiles."6 But such universalism does not at all transcend what is found in the Old Testament prophets. There could be nothing more uncritical than to regard every reference to a Gentile mission as an indication of a date subsequent to the founding of the Gentile Church at Antioch or to the Apostolic Council of Acts 15. It should never be forgotten that Judaism in the first Christian century, and in the immediately preceding period, was an active missionary religion; even the Pharisees, Jesus said, compassed sea and land to make one proselyte, and the Jewish synagogues throughout the world were attended by large numbers of Gentiles as well as by Jews. There was nothing revolutionary in the belief that the light of the true religion was to shine out from Israel to all the nations of the earth. What was really revolutionary in the Pauline mission, from the Jewish point of view, was found not in the fact that Gentiles were received, but in the terms on which they were received. All the discussion which the Gentile mission provoked was due to the fact that the Gentiles were received without being required to keep the law, and without being

required to renounce their own nationality and become Jews. /pg. 67/

Of that revolutionary form of universalism there is no trace in Lk. 1– 2; in these chapters there is no hint that the prerogatives of Israel are to be broken down. On the contrary, just in the place where universalism appears most plainly, these prerogatives of Israel are preserved with special clearness; the light that shines upon the Gentiles is to be a glory to "thy people Israel"; the Jews are in a special sense God's people, and it is from them that light is to shine forth; Jerusalem is still conceived of as being the centre of the whole world.7

Such universalism is found, of course, in fullest measure in the great prophecies of the Old Testament. In our chapters, moreover, universalism may almost be said to be incidental; it is here the people of Israel that is everywhere primarily in view. Even in the words of the angels to the shepherds, this special reference to Israel is preserved; the "great joy" which is announced by the angels is to be not "to all people" (as the Authorized Version translates) but to "all the people,"8 and the immediate reference is to "the people" in the Israelitish sense, or the covenant people of God. It would probably be a mistake, indeed, to take the words, "peace among men of good pleasure,"9 in the angels' song, in a specifically particularistic way; it would probably be a mistake to identify the men of God's good pleasure with the people of Israel as such. But if particularism is here not explicit, neither is universalism; it is not said in any clear fashion that the men of God's good pleasure are to be found in the Gentile world as well as in Israel. Indeed, even if the reference is to men generally, to the whole human race, still the race as the recipient of God's favor might be conceived of as represented by the people whom God had chosen. God has given peace to men by the birth of the babe at Bethlehem; but it is not said which men are the recipients of that peace or of the "good pleasure" of God which is its ground.10

It is true, of course, that the salvation which is celebrated in our section is suited to all men and not merely to Jews. The good news that is connected here with the babe of Bethlehem is no doubt of such a character that ultimately it must be for the benefit of the whole human race. But this profound universalism, which inheres in the very essence of the gospel, hardly becomes any more explicit here than it does in certain passages of the Old Testament. The atmosphere of Lk. 1–2 is the atmosphere of the old covenant. The gleams of /pg. 68/ a more glorious day, which are seen even in old Testament prophecy, have become brighter; there is an expectancy in the air like the expectancy with which the earth awaits the coming of a new day; but still the sun has not yet fully above the horizon; prophecy has not yet ripened into complete risen fulfilment.

Thus the kind of universalism that appears in this narrative does not at all point to a date after the beginning of the Gentile mission in the Christian Church; there is no departure in this matter from the restraints proper to true prophecy.

But if so much be granted—if the universalism of the section be admitted not to constitute a vaticinium ex eventu—one specific point still requires consideration. It concerns the words in Lk. 2:34, 35, where the aged Simeon is represented as saying: "Behold, this child is set for the falling and rising of many in Israel; and for a sign that is spoken against—and through thine own soul shall pass a sword—in order that thoughts may be revealed out of many hearts." These words, it is said, are written in view of the conflicts in the life of Jesus and particularly in view of the Cross; they constitute, therefore, a vaticinium ex eventu.

With regard to this objection, it may be remarked, in the first place, that even if the objection were well founded it would not at all overthrow our argument for the Palestinian origin of this narrative: even if the words attributed to Simeon were not actually spoken by him, but were composed after the crucifixion of Jesus, that might conceivably have been done in Palestine in the early days of the

Jerusalem Church as well as at some subsequent time; there would be no reason why the composition of the supposed vaticinium ex eventu should be attributed to a Gentile Christian, as distinguished from a Jewish Christian, author. But, in the second place, we do not think that in point of fact the passage looks at all like a vaticinium ex eventu. It is true that the words, "And through thine own soul shall pass a sword," recall to our minds the scene of the stabat mater dolorosa iuxta crucem lachrymosa; inevitably we think of Mary as she stood at the foot of the cross. But because that scene is admirably characterized in its inner meaning by Simeon's words, it does not follow at all that it was definitely in mind when the words were first spoken or written. The whole prophecy is couched in very general terms: it declares that the child whom Simeon holds in his arms will make necessary a great decision, that the hidden thoughts of men's hearts will be revealed by their attitude toward Him, that there will be opposition, and that grief will pierce the mother's soul. The central thought in these words was not altogether unknown in preChristian times: for /pg. 69/ the prophets had spoken of the necessity of a great decision and of the suffering of God's righteous Servant; and John the Baptist, before the beginning of the public ministry of Jesus, spoke of a time of sifting, the separation of the wheat from the chaff, that was soon to come.

We do not, indeed, at all mean to deny the profound originality of Simeon's words. Without doubt, the thought of a suffering Messiah, though it is truly found in the Old Testament, had dropped out of sight in later Judaism. And although the expectation of a time of sifting might have come to a pious Israelite even without any supernatural revelation, yet the connection of such a time of sifting with a particular child whom Simeon held in his arms introduces an element that is quite fresh and new. No doubt, if these words were spoken before Jesus grew to manhood and entered upon His public ministry, they cannot be explained as due to merely natural insight, but constitute a true prophecy; and the attitude of the critic toward them will be determined by his attitude toward the possibility of supernatural revelation in general. But our point is that the words do

not exceed the restraint which we find elsewhere observed in what we think to be genuine prophecy; such restraint is exceedingly difficult to explain as being exercised by a later writer who was freely composing speeches and prophecies to put into the mouths of his characters. The poetic, mysterious form in which Simeon's prophecy is couched—the wonderful characterization of the inner significance of the later conflict, coupled with a complete absence of the details that a Christian writer would know—creates an impression of great primitiveness.11 The ultimate decision as to whether we have here genuine prophecy inspired by the Spirit of God depends upon considerations that lie beyond the sphere of merely literary, as distinguished from historical, criticism; but at least we can say that if ever a passage bore the internal marks of genuine prophecy and did not bear the marks of a vaticinium ex eventu, it is this prophecy attributed by the Third Gospel to the aged saint who had been "waiting for the consolation of Israel."

At any rate, however that may be, the passage certainly does not afford the slightest argument against the primitive Jewish and Palestinian character which we have found in the narrative as a whole.

This Palestinian character of the narrative, it may finally be observed, appears not only at the centre, but also at the circumference; it is found not only in the way in which the Messianic salvation is conceived, but also in the treatment of the details of life in Palestine. Evidently the narrator was intimately /pg. 70/ acquainted with the Temple ritual, with the arrangements for the service of the priests, and in general with the conditions of Jewish life. That does not mean that all the details are definitely confirmed by independent sources of information. Thus it seems not to be known except from our narrative that an actual ceremony of presentation in the Temple was carried out for a first-born son in addition to the payment of the redemption-money, which payment could be made at the place of residence of the parents as well as at Jerusalem. But that such a ceremony of presentation should be

carried out when circumstances permitted, and especially in view of the special hopes centring in the child Jesus, is altogether natural; there is not the slightest reason why we should not allow Lk. 2:22 to supplement at this point our other sources of information. Thus also it has been remarked that Lk. 1:59 and 2:21 constitute the best extant attestation to the fact that the naming of a child was connected with the rite of circumcision.12 But although such connection is not so well attested elsewhere, it is certainly the most natural and probable thing that could be imagined.

It must be remembered that our sources of information about Jewish life in Palestine in the first century are by no means so abundant as is often supposed. When we were at Sunday school in our youth, many of us had the impression that that mysterious company of persons known as "scholars" possessed vast stores of information about such matters—vast stores of information inaccessible to ordinary mortals. Such an impression was by no means altogether correct. We do not, indeed, desire at all to depreciate the researches of Wettstein, of Edersheim, of Schürer, and (more recently) of Strack-Billerbeck, as shedding light upon the environment of the life of Jesus; but, after all, the Rabbinical sources of information are late, and cannot be used without great caution for the earlier period; Josephus enters into little detail in describing the sacerdotal system; and in very many particulars, therefore, the New Testament is our best source of information about the Judaism of the first century. Certainly the points at which the allusions to Palestinian life in Lk. 1–2 are confirmed either by the Old Testament or by later independent sources are so numerous as to raise a very favorable presumption with regard to the points at which such confirmation has not been found. At one point, indeed, the accuracy of this section with regard to Jewish life has sometimes been impugned—namely, in the words, "their cleansing," in Lk. 2:22. The offering prescribed by the law for the conclusion of the period of ritual uncleanness or seclusion after childbirth is indeed quite correctly said /pg. 71/ in this passage to consist of a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons;13 and a distinctly favorable impression has always been produced by the fact

that the alternative offering prescribed for less well-to-do persons is here represented, entirely without explanation, as having been made in the case of the mother of Jesus. But, it is objected, the ritual uncleanness after childbirth belonged, according to the law, to the mother alone; how, then, can the plural be correct in the phrase, "their cleansing"?

It may be remarked in passing that the transmission of the text is at this point not altogether uniform. A few witnesses read "her cleansing"; while the uncial Codex Bezæ, certain manuscripts of the Old Latin translation, and the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript of the Old Syriac translation, read "his cleansing." In the former reading, of course, all difficulty disappears; the cleansing according to that reading is attributed to the mother, exactly as would be expected according to the law. If the reading, "his cleansing" (or "its cleansing," since the masculine and the neuter are the same in Greek), be correct, no doubt the pronoun refers to the child, who is the only member of the holy family that is spoken of in the preceding verse. In that case the cleansing would be connected with the child because the child is the chief personage of the narrative; in connection with the circumcision and the giving of the name in the preceding verse, He alone is mentioned; Joseph and Mary are merely alluded to by the passive voice of the verb. So the cleansing, though the occasion of it was the ritual uncleanness, not of the child, but of the mother, might be spoken of as "his cleansing" because it was one of the successive events recorded about His life.

There is, however, no reason to depart from what is by far the best attested reading—namely, the reading, "their cleansing." That reading is commended by transcriptional probability, on the wellknown principle that the more difficult reading is to be preferred to the easier; since both the other two readings may be accounted for as due to natural changes made by scribes. The reading, "her cleansing," may have been due simply to the influence of Leviticus, where in the basic passage, Lev. 12:6, the phrase runs, "When the days of her purifying are fulfilled." A scribe, in other words, may have

felt the difficulty with which we are now dealing, and may also have yielded to the natural tendency to complete the verbal similarity to the closely parallel Old Testament passage by the simple change of "their" to "her." It is perhaps a little more difficult to explain the reading, "his cleansing": but possibly a scribe may have taken offence at the inclusion of Mary in the act of cleansing which is involved in the reading, "their cleansing." Such inclusion might have seemed /pg. 72/ to be contrary to the notion of the perpetual virginity of Mary, especially to the notion that the birth of Jesus took place clauso utero, which became prevalent in the Church. Thus the introduction of the singular masculine pronoun may possibly be explained as a dogmatic correction.

If "her cleansing" were in the original text, a similar consideration might, indeed, perhaps be used to explain the introduction of the reading, "their cleansing"; a scribe may have been shocked by the direct attribution of cleansing specifically and solely to Mary, and so may have introduced the plural pronoun in order to cause the phrase to be taken in some more general sense. But the reading, "her cleansing," is very weakly attested; and on the whole there seems to be no reason to depart from the reading, "their cleansing," which has an overwhelming preponderance of attestation in its favor.

But if that reading is to be regarded as correct, to what persons does the plural pronoun refer? It might conceivably refer to Mary and the child, and so it was taken, apparently, by Origen.14 Something may perhaps be said in favor of such an interpretation. Joseph, it may be observed, is somewhat in the background throughout this whole narrative, and he is not mentioned in the preceding verse. It is true that Mary also is not mentioned in that verse; but she is alluded to by the mention of the naming of the child—"before He was conceived in the womb"—which refers, of course, to the scene described in Lk. 1:26–38. Certainly Mary and the babe are the chief figures in this narrative; and it might be regarded as not altogether impossible that they should be linked together, to the exclusion of Joseph, in the use of the pronoun "their."

Nevertheless, this interpretation, despite all that can be said in favor of it, must be pronounced unnatural in the extreme. The only reference which any unsophisticated reader could give to the pronoun "their" surely would be provided by the subject of the verb in the same sentence. In the sentence, "When the days of their cleansing were fulfilled, according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem," surely the "their" refers to the same persons as the "they."

It must be admitted, therefore, that "their cleansing" means the cleansing of Joseph and Mary. But if so, how is the difficulty to be overcome? Does not the phrase attest the erroneous notion on the part of the narrator that the ritual cleansing after childbirth belonged to the father as well as to the mother? And could so erroneous a notion ever have been held by a Palestinian narrator? /pg. 73/ Is not, therefore, the whole argument for the Palestinian provenience of the narrative very much weakened by the occurrence of this phrase? In reply, it may be said that a very great weight is here being hung upon one phrase. The narrative elsewhere affords evidence of intimate acquaintance with the Jewish law and with Palestinian conditions. Is it not, therefore, only fair to approach the question with a certain favorable presumption; must not the passage be interpreted, if it is at all possible to do so, in a way that avoids ascription of a serious blunder to a narrator who elsewhere deals with these matters in so accurate a way? These questions, we think, should be answered in the affirmative. To do so does not involve any substitution of "apologetics" for scientific history; for it is not scientific, but highly unscientific, to accord to a witness who has already been shown to be generally reliable no more credence than would be accorded to a witness who is either demonstrably unreliable or else unknown.

If, therefore, the phrase, "their cleansing," may with any reasonableness be interpreted in a way that accords with the general accuracy with which the narrative deals with Palestinian conditions, surely such an interpretation must be adopted. And as a matter of fact such an interpretation does offer itself. The point of it is that the

pronoun "their" does not refer to the impurity, but to the "purification." The impurity no doubt belonged to Mary alone: but the act of purification belonged also to Joseph; indeed, it was he who presumably bore the expense of the offering.

In other words, it is not clear that the genitive "their" in the phrase "their purification" is an objective, rather than a subjective, genitive: it is not clear that the phrase designates an "act by which they were cleansed"; for it may also designate an "act of cleansing which they carried out." And in the latter case there is no disharmony between this phrase and the terms of the Old Testament law.

On this interpretation—if we may anticipate a later phase of our discussion—there is no disharmony between this verse and the supernatural conception of Jesus, which is attested in Lk. 1:34, 35. Whether physically the father of Jesus or not, Joseph could, in the sense just indicated, have a part in the offering by which the ceremonial impurity of the mother was removed. Indeed, for that matter, there would probably be no contradiction with Lk. 1:34, 35 even if our interpretation of "their cleansing" were wrong, even if the phrase meant that the narrator did (erroneously) attribute the ceremonial impurity to Joseph as father as well as to Mary as mother. If the Mosaic law in the view of the narrator regarded the father as well as the mother as ceremonially unclean after the birth of a child, then since Joseph was publicly regarded as /pg. 74/ the father of this child it was natural that he should fulfil the legal requirements of purification, even though he was not actually the father. As Jesus later took part, according to all three Synoptic Gospels in a baptism that was regarded as a baptism for the remission of sins, although in the view of all the Evangelists he certainly was guilty of no sin and so needed no remission, so here Joseph could be represented as fulfilling the legal duties of a father despite the mystery of the supernatural conception. That would in the mind of the narrator be merely another way in which (to use the phrase reported by Matthew) "all righteousness" was fulfilled. It is very rash indeed, therefore, to argue, on either interpretation of Lk.

2:22, that this verse contradicts the account of the supernatural conception that is given in Lk. 1:34, 35.

But such considerations really belong to a later phase of our subject. What we are here interested in observing is that Lk. 2:22 need not at all be held to display such ignorance of the Mosaic law as would have been impossible in a Palestinian writer. No valid argument can be derived from this verse against the genuinely Palestinian character of the narrative, which is everywhere else so clear.

CHAPTER IV:

THE HYMNS OF THE FIRST CHAPTER

OF LUKE

The genuinely Palestinian character which has just been vindicated for Lk. 1:5–2:52 may conceivably be explained in a number of different ways; various hypotheses have been proposed to explain the production of such a narrative and the incorporation of it in our Third Gospel. But before these hypotheses are considered, it will be necessary to examine one particular part of the narrative with special care. The part to which we refer consists of the hymns that are embedded in the section: the Magnificat2 and the Benedictus.3 These hymns, because of their special characteristics, deserve something like separate consideration. The impression of most readers has been that the hymns exhibit the Jewish or Palestinian characteristics which we have found in the whole section with even greater clearness than that which elsewhere appears. The diction is very largely that of the Old Testament; the style is characterized by that parallelism which is the basis of Hebrew poetry; the thought is

marked by a striking absence of specifically Christian, as distinguished from pre-Christian, ideas. Certainly the prima facie evidence is strongly in favor of placing the origin of these hymns on Palestinian ground and at a very early time.

This obvious conclusion has, however, met a vigorous and able opponent in A. von Harnack of Berlin. In a detailed study which appeared in 1900,4 supplemented by later works, he has attempted to show that the Magnificat and the Benedictus, far from being Palestinian hymns, are free compositions of the Gentile Christian author of the Gospel. The Old Testament coloring of the hymns, he maintains, was produced not by any familiarity of the author with Hebrew poetry in the original, but by a conscious imitation of the Septuagint translation. After subtraction of the Septuagint words and phrases, he says, /pg. 76/ what remains is so characteristically Lucan as to show that the hymns are due to Luke's own hand. This argument of Harnack has not attained any general acceptance. It was opposed, for example, especially by Zimmermann,5 Hilgenfeld,6 Spitta,7 and later by Gunkel.8 In 1912 the present writer attempted some examination of it in detail, with decidedly negative results.9 The first question concerns the validity of Harnack's method. It has just been observed that Harnack tries to establish the Lucan authorship of the hymns by first subtracting from them the Septuagint words and phrases and then exhibiting the specifically Lucan character of what remains. But the trouble is that the subtraction of Septuagint words and phrases was not inclusive enough; many of the phrases which remain after Harnack's process of subtraction are found in the Septuagint, though in other passages than those which Harnack supposed the author of the hymns to have used.10

An attempt was indeed made by Harnack to overcome this objection. The occurrence of a word in the Septuagint, he said in effect, does not necessarily prevent it from being regarded as a mark of Luke's hand, if, within the New Testament, it occurs solely or chiefly in the Lucan writings; for the choice of the same word from the rich store of

Septuagint usage, as well as coincidence of usage in other particulars, might show unity of authorship.11 This answer was /pg. 77/ anticipated to some extent on behalf of Harnack by Ladeuze,12 and undoubtedly it has some weight. But it does not go the whole way toward removing the objection; and particularly does it fail to do so with regard to the hymns. If Harnack's original program could really be carried out, possibly his argument might be strong; if he could show (1) that part of the language of the Magnificat and Benedictus comes from the Septuagint, (2) that what is clearly not found in the Septuagint is distinctively Lucan, then possibly he might succeed in establishing Lucan authorship of the hymns. Even that, it is true, would be doubtful; for it would still be possible to hold to the hypothesis of Lucan revision or Lucan translation of originally Jewish Christian hymns. But as a matter of fact, Harnack's program cannot be carried out at all. When all the words and phrases commonly found in the Septuagint are subtracted from the hymns, very little remains; and it cannot be shown that that little was certainly due to the hand of Luke.

Only one really striking coincidence between the language of the hymns and that of the writer of Luke-Acts remains after the winnowing process just indicated has been carefully carried out.13 That coincidence is found in the phrase, "through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old," in Lk. 1:70, which appears in almost the same form in Acts 3:21.14 The coincidence is more striking in the Greek original than it is in an English translation. Nevertheless the argument based upon it can be shown not to be strong enough to bear anything like the full weight of Harnack's conclusion.

In the first place, it may possibly be questioned whether the text of the phrase translated "his holy prophets from of old" is correct in the passage in Acts.15 In that passage, the socalled Western text, as represented by the Codex Bezæ, supported by certain other evidence, including citations in Irenæus, Tertullian and Origen, omits the words, "from of old"; and in the other witnesses /pg. 78/ there is some variation as to the place at which the words are inserted. If the

witnesses for the omission are correct, then the distinctiveness of the language altogether disappears, and the similarity to Lk. 1:70 ceases to be at all striking. And certainly something may be said in favor of following the Western text at this point. In the first place, there is the general presumption in favor of the "shorter reading." If the short text without "from of old" is correct, it is possible to account for the competing readings; they would represent various ways of inserting the gloss. The authority of the Western text is certainly greater where it omits something that the "Neutral text" contains than where it is longer than the Neutral text. In the second place, the desire of scribes to insert the gloss might be explained as due to the presence of the words in Lk. 1:70; the insertion of the gloss would thus come under the head of "harmonistic corruptions."16

These arguments, it must be admitted, are by no means conclusive. In the first place, the phrase might have been omitted because of the unusual and somewhat difficult character of the expression which is found in the original text when the words are retained; in the second place, the documents which include the words do not insert them in exactly the place where they are found at Lk. 1:70; and in the third place, despite the arguments for the omission drawn from transcriptional probability, the text of the Codex Bezæ and its associates, we hold, is generally so corrupt that it would be dangerous to follow it here.

In view of these considerations, we should probably print the words, "from of old," in the text of Acts 3:21 if we were making an edition of the Book of Acts; but at the same time a serious doubt does remain as to whether these words are genuine.

But if they are genuine, does the coincidence of expression with Lk. 1:70 show that the Benedictus, in which the latter verse occurs, was composed by the author of Luke-Acts? We think that that is not the case.

In the first place, the phrase is not precisely the same in the two passages, since the pronoun "his" stands after the word "prophets" in Lk. 1:70 and before the word "prophets" in Acts 3:21. It would, however, be a mistake to lay much stress upon this consideration. Certainly the similarity between the two phrases is very striking.

In the second place, it should be observed that the passage in Acts is part of the report of a speech attributed to Peter. Was that speech composed by the author of the book, or does it represent a report of what Peter actually said? /pg. 79/ This question involves the general question of the speeches in the Book of Acts, and it will not be possible here to discuss it in detail. But certainly the speeches of Peter in the early part of the book do seem to possess a distinctive quality that prevents us from regarding them as free compositions of Luke. If, then, Acts 3:21 was not composed by Luke, similarity between that passage and Lk. 1:70 does not show Lucan authorship of this latter passage. The similarity would, indeed, still require explanation. But various explanations would suggest themselves. One explanation would be that in his speech reported in the third chapter of Acts Peter himself was dependent upon the Benedictus— supposing that that was a hymn current in the primitive Jerusalem Church. But Peter's speech was probably spoken in Aramaic, and the verbal similarity of Acts 3:21 to Lk. 1:70 could hardly have been produced in its present form except in the Greek language. Possibly, therefore, Peter himself, or whoever else first translated the report or summary of his speech into Greek, was influenced by the Greek form of the Benedictus, whether that hymn was originally composed in Greek or had been translated into Greek from Hebrew or Aramaic. This hypothesis is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. If the Benedictus was actually composed by the father of John the Baptist, or if it was attributed to him at an early time, it may well have circulated among the disciples of John, and may have passed from them to the disciples of Jesus. There is nothing inherently improbable in supposing that the language of such a hymn might have become so well known in the primitive Church as to color the translation of a phrase in Peter's speech.

In the third place, if the form in which Peter's speech appears in the third chapter of Acts was not received by Luke from some previous record, but was composed by him, why may not he himself have been dependent upon the Benedictus—supposing that that hymn had come to him either separately or already embedded in the Jewish Christian narrative of the birth and infancy of John the Baptist and of Jesus?17 Such dependence upon a Jewish Christian source would be altogether like what we know of this author's method. Evidently Luke had a keen appreciation of the style used in Palestinian sources; he has shown such appreciation clearly by the fact he has not used the typical /pg. 80/ Greek style of the prologue of his Gospel to narrate events that took place in Palestine, but has, both in the Gospel and in the early part of Acts, preserved the quality of narrative that was suited to the subject-matter. If such an author had become familiar with a Jewish Christian hymn attributed to the father of John the Baptist, what could be more natural than that the language of that familiar hymn should come readily to his pen, even, perhaps, without any conscious dependence, when he was introducing a similar thought in his report of a speech of Peter? It must be remembered that the coincidence of language in Lk. 1:70 and Acts 3:21 appears in the expression of a thought that recurred again and again both among the Jews and in the early Church— namely, the thought that in the person and work of Jesus Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled. Might it not be natural that the phrase, "through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old," should, through its original use in the Greek translation of a Jewish Christian hymn, have become in some sort stereotyped in the primitive Church?

In the fourth place, the problem would be solved in a particularly satisfactory manner if Luke himself could be regarded as the translator of an Aramaic report of Peter's speech. In that case his use of a phrase which had already been used in a hymn incorporated in his earlier book would be admirably explained. It is by no means impossible that the author of LukeActs, despite the fact that he was a Gentile, should have been acquainted with the Aramaic language. If

he was identical with the author of the "we-sections" of the Book of Acts, his presence in Palestine at the beginning and end of Paul's two-year imprisonment in that country can be definitely established. And whether or not he was a native of Syrian Antioch, as some modern scholars suppose, there is no decisive objection against the view—though also there may be no decisive argument in favor of it— that he lived in a partly Semitic environment in his early life. What is clear, at any rate, is that he had a warm sympathy with Jewish feeling and a delicate appreciation of Semitic style. It is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility, therefore, that he should have been able to translate a Semitic document.

But if so, why may he not have been the translator, not merely of the speech of Peter in the third chapter of Acts, but also of the Benedictus itself, or even of the whole narrative contained in Lk. 1:5– 2:52? That supposition, again, is not altogether impossible. And if it be correct, then the similarity between Acts 3:21 and Lk. 1:70 is admirably explained, without supposing that either passage is a free composition of the author of the whole double work. We are, indeed, far from giving assent to this hypothesis, or to any particular one of the hypotheses that have just been mentioned. Still other hypotheses /pg. 81/ might be suggested. But enough has been said to show that there are various possible ways of explaining the verbal coincidence between the two verses in question other than the way favored by Harnack. The Lucan characteristics which he finds in the Magnificat and Benedictus really reduce themselves, when properly sifted, to this one phrase; and this one phrase will by no means bear the whole weight of Harnack's theory regarding the composition of the hymns. Harnack does not rely, indeed, merely upon the examination of details. The whole structure of the Magnificat, he thinks, is such that only a Gentile like Luke could have produced it;18 the skilful management of the repeated pronouns,19 and in general the elaborate character of the poetic composition, are thought to indicate the hand of the artist Luke. With regard to the Benedictus, Harnack is particularly confident. "The first three strophes of the Benedictus (verses 68–75; in all, there are five strophes with four lines each) are

only superficially," he says, "put into the form of the Hebrew psalm; a closer examination reveals a single, complicated, genuinely Greek period which is altogether to the credit of the author of the prologue (Lk. 1:1) and of numerous other excellent Greek sentences. The period is merely forced into the Hebraizing covering: the hands are Esau's hands, but the voice is the voice of Jacob."20

How many of the niceties of structure discovered by Harnack were intended by the authors of the hymns may well be doubted. At any rate, in order to prove Lucan authorship, Harnack should have exhibited by example (1) the likeness of these hymns to undisputed works of Luke and (2) their unlikeness to non-Lucan hymns.

The former requirement is incapable of fulfilment. Luke has unfortunately left to posterity no certain examples of his poetry, if he ever wrote any poetry at all. The most that could possibly be done would be to show that these hymns are Greek rather than Semitic in poetical form, or rather that they are such as only a man who used Greek as his native language would have produced, without a Semitic original, merely by moulding Hebrew materials into an imitation of a Hebrew poem. Examples of such a moulding of Hebrew materials by a Gentile are rather difficult to find; at any rate they have not been adduced by Harnack. What evidence is there, therefore, for placing the Magnificat and Benedictus in such a category? /pg. 82/ The second requirement also is left unfulfilled by Harnack. If he is unable to exhibit the likeness of these hymns to undisputed Lucan works, or even to works composed by the method which he thinks Luke employed, he is also unable to exhibit their unlikeness to nonLucan, and particularly Old Testament, hymns. Such an exhibition could only have been carried out by means of examples; and until it is carried out, Harnack's proof remains, to say the least, incomplete. If some Old Testament Psalms (in the Septuagint) were to be examined by the same kind of minute scrutiny which Harnack has applied to the hymns of Lk. 1, perhaps similar peculiarities of composition might be discovered.

Harnack lays particular stress upon the former part of the Benedictus, Lk. 1:68–75, which, he points out, constitutes one long sentence. But if he means to compare this sentence with the sentence that forms the Lucan prologue, Lk. 1:1–4, the comparison is particularly disastrous for his conclusion. The two sentences are each of them long; but there the similarity ceases. In every other respect, it would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast. Lk. 1:1–4 is not a compound, but a complex, sentence; it could not grammatically be broken off until almost the very end, since the sense is held in suspense; and the cadence of the sentence is obviously incomplete until it is rounded off by the last emphatic word, "the certainty."21 Lk. 1:68–75, on the other hand, consists of a large number of coördinate phrases and clauses put together in the loosest possible way; the passage could be broken off at the end of almost any one of the nine lines of which it is composed, and still make complete sense. The sentence is not planned as though the end were in view from the beginning, but is lengthened out by adding one epexegetical phrase or clause after another, loosely and almost as an after-thought. Is that a characteristic Greek form of sentence? Does it not rather look like the simplicity of Semitic poetry, forced into the restraints of Greek grammar? A striking parallel to this sentence in the Benedictus is found in a passage in the so-called "Psalms of Solomon."22 The Psalms of Solomon are extant in Greek, but the Greek is admittedly a translation from a Semitic original. Here we have, therefore, an example of admittedly Semitic poetry appearing in a Greek form. Comparison of these Psalms with the hymns of the first chapter of Luke ought, if Harnack's hypothesis be correct, to show a contrast; but as a matter of fact it shows a rather striking similarity. The passage to which we refer may be translated into English as follows: /pg. 83/

Blessed are those who are born in those days To see the good things of the Lord, which he will do for the coming generation, Under the staff of the instruction of Christ the Lord in the fear of his God, In the wisdom of the Spirit and of righteousness and strength, To direct a

man in the works of righteousness by the fear of God, To establish them all in the fear of the Lord.

This sentence is, indeed, shorter than the sentence in the Benedictus; but the sentencestructure, if so very loose a conjunction of clauses and phrases may be called "structure" at all, is strikingly similar.

The Psalms of Solomon, from which this passage has been taken, afford material for other interesting comparisons with the hymns of the first chapter of Luke. Parallels have been cited by Ryle and James;23 and although the similarities in detail may not often be very close, a certain affinity in spirit and in ideas cannot be denied. Here we have, therefore, another indication of the Palestinian and Semitic origin of the Lucan hymns, since the Psalms of Solomon reflect the events of the Palestinian invasion of Pompey, and were written in Palestine and in the Hebrew language at about the middle of the first century before Christ. The date of the Greek translation is placed by Ryle and James between 40 B.C. and A.D. 40.24 There can be no thought of literary dependence one way or the other between these Psalms and the hymns of the first chapter of Luke; and the interesting hypothesis of Chase,25 to the effect that the parallels are to be explained by a common dependence upon the "Greek Jewish prayers of the Hellenistic Synagogues" is unnecessary.26 But the similarity of thought and feeling between the hymns of Lk. 1–2, on the one hand, and the Palestinian Psalms of Solomon and certain Palestinian Jewish prayers on the other, furnishes subsidiary evidence for a primitive Jewish Christian origin of the Magnificat and the Benedictus.

The primary, as distinguished from subsidiary, evidence is furnished simply /pg. 84/ by an examination of the two hymns themselves. It has already been observed that the Magnificat is made up almost altogether of Old Testament phrases. These phrases are derived from no one passage, but from the most various parts of the Old Testament Scriptures. The Magnificat is no mere imitation, for example, of the song of Hannah in 1 Sam. 2:1–10, though it does

contain reminiscences of that song. Yet the various elements are welded together into a song of perfect unity and great beauty, which preserves the parallelism of Hebrew poetry in its noblest form. Harnack supposes that this result was accomplished by the conscious art of a Gentile. But it is no wonder that the vast majority of scholars as well as of simple readers are opposed to him. A single passage from the Old Testament might have been imitated; but that so very many passages should have been united without disclosing the joints, without making the slightest impression of artificiality, must always remain very improbable. The author of such a hymn must have lived in the atmosphere of the Old Testament, and must have been familiar from earliest childhood with its language. Only so could elements derived from so many sources have been incorporated without artificiality in a single poem. The synthesis must have been made in life, long before it was made in literary form.27

This employment of Old Testament phrases has indeed sometimes been regarded as a mark of artificiality. David Friedrich Strauss, for example, thought that if this hymn was inspired directly by the Holy Spirit it was somewhat surprising that the result should not be something more original, instead of being a mere collection of Old Testament reminiscences.28 But surely this taunt displays an inadequate estimate of the Magnificat itself. If the Old Testament Scriptures themselves were given by inspiration of the Spirit of God, the use of them in a song of praise need not necessarily be unworthy of the same Spirit. And to regard such a use of Biblical language as a mark of artificiality is to do despite to the inmost heart of God's people in all ages. Our Lord Himself used the Scriptures in very similar fashion; the sacred words of prophets and Psalms came unbidden to His lips in moments of crisis and trial. T. D. Bernard29 has aptly compared the modern use of Biblical phrases in prayer.30 That is not artificial imitation, but the natural use of the language /pg. 85/ dearest to the Christian heart. When a true saint of God uses the words of Holy Scripture to express his deepest feelings whether in prayer or praise, only a very cold and unsympathetic observer can suppose such language of the heart to have been put together,

artificially, by the use of a concordance. It does require some sympathy, no matter how much learning the critic may possess, to enter into the soul of the devout Christian or the devout Jew. But when such sympathy is present, the hymns of the first chapter of Luke will seem to be not products of a study chamber, but spontaneous outpourings of devout and thankful hearts. Who can say that such outpourings are unworthy of having been inspired by the Spirit of God?

We have been speaking primarily of the Magnificat. But the other hymn, the Benedictus, presents essentially the same character. It may be, indeed, somewhat different in form—probably different enough to disprove Harnack's, and also Gunkel's,31 contention that the two hymns must have been composed by the same person. The parallelism is not quite so simple; there are more subordinate clauses and appositions and epexegetical phrases;32 the basic Old Testament passages are perhaps not capable of being quite so easily designated. But the Hebrew parallelism and the genuine Old Testament spirit are really just as clear as in the case of the Magnificat.33

The form of the hymns, then, is genuinely Semitic.34 The Greek translation, like some of the better parts of the Septuagint, has preserved the spirit of the original, though without doing unnecessary violence to the idiom of the Greek language. But an even stronger argument for a primitive Palestinian origin is to be derived from the content of the hymns, as distinguished from the form. The argument has already been set forth incidentally, in connection with the argument for a Palestinian origin of the infancy narrative as a whole, and so need not be treated here at any length. There is nothing in the hymns which can by any possibility be stretched into an allusion to specifically Christian doctrine, or even to the details of the later history of Jesus. In the Magnificat /pg. 86/ there is no clear allusion even to the person of the Messiah at all.35 In the Benedictus the allusion is merely to salvation in the house of David. The Messianic king has apparently come at last, or is about to come; but

nothing more is known about Him than that which was contained in Old Testament prophecy. The child John is thought of as a forerunner, not particularly of the Messiah, but of Jehovah. The coming salvation is conceived of as applying not to the world, but, primarily at least, to Israel; Israel is to be delivered from the insolent oppressors.36 That the salvation is to be not merely political, but also moral and religious, does not transcend the bounds of Old Testament prophecy.37 If the words in Lk. 1:79, "to appear to those who are sitting in darkness and the shadow of death," contain a hint of universalism, it is the universalism of Isaiah. Against this overwhelming prima facie evidence, Harnack can urge only his linguistic argument. And that has been examined in detail and found insufficient. Harnack is indeed much more confident about the hymns than about the rest of Luke 1–2. In the case of the Magnificat and the Benedictus, he would exclude altogether the possibility, which he leaves open as regards the rest of the narrative, that Luke was merely the translator of an Aramaic source; and insists that the hymns were actually composed by him. But this decision should certainly be reversed. A linguistic examination of the hymns, when compared with an examination of the rest of Lk. 1–2, will show clearly that Harnack's evidence for Lucan authorship is far less convincing in the case of the Magnificat and Benedictus than in the rest of the section.38 That the hymns were found by Luke in a Greek form is perhaps most probable; that they were translated by him from Hebrew or Aramaic is perfectly possible, but is by no means proved by the literary phenomena; that they were composed by him is practically out of the question. /pg. 87/

The hypothesis of Harnack with regard to the composition of these hymns has been rather generally rejected by recent scholars. Indeed, so strong has been the impression produced by the genuinely Semitic quality of the form of the hymns, coupled with the absence of distinctly Christian ideas in the content of them, that a number of recent investigators have held that the hymns are not even Jewish Christian, but actually Jewish—that they were not originally intended to be placed in the mouths of Mary and Zacharias, but were simply

Jewish songs composed to suit some entirely different occasions and then adapted to their present uses by the author of the infancy narrative.

This hypothesis, which has been advocated, at least for the Magnificat, in varying forms, by Hillmann,39 Hilgenfeld,40 Spitta,41 Gunkel,42 and others, would seem to be favored by the rather loose way in which the hymns are inserted in their present context and by the absence in them of any specific reference to the situation in which Mary and Zacharias stood. The Magnificat, in particular, contains no reference to the approaching birth of a son, and, at least superficially considered, might have been spoken under many different circumstances; there is nothing that points necessarily to the situation presupposed in the narrative. Indeed, the word translated "low estate" in verse 48—"for he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden"—has sometimes been regarded as introducing a discordant note. Wherein consisted the "low estate" of Mary?43 The phrase, "from henceforth," or "from now on," of the same verse has also caused difficulty. Why should the blessing which all generations are to ascribe to Mary be dated just from her visit to Elisabeth, rather /pg. 88/ than from the conception of the child, or from the birth, or from some other important event? Again, it has sometimes been thought not to suit the character attributed to Mary in these chapters that she should utter a hymn of praise at all. Elsewhere in Lk. 1–2 she is represented as silent and passive. The manner in which the hymn is introduced has also aroused objection. Elsewhere in the narrative, it is said, when similar poetical effusions are introduced, the presence of the Spirit is noted; here there is nothing but the simple words, "And Mary said." What follows the hymn has also been thought to be unnatural if Mary is regarded as the speaker: "And Mary abode with her about three months.…" If Mary has just been speaking, it is argued, her name would be omitted and Elisabeth's would be mentioned, instead of the reverse; that is, the sentence would read, "she abode with Elisabeth," instead of "Mary abode with her." These difficulties have led a considerable number of recent scholars (including Harnack) to suppose that in the

original text of the Gospel of Luke the Magnificat was attributed not to Mary but to Elisabeth.44 This hypothesis is not quite devoid of manuscript support.45 And apparently it overcomes some of the difficulties. The "low estate" of verse 48 now becomes thoroughly intelligible;46 it is simply the humiliation (very acute to a Jewish woman) of childlessness, like the "humiliation" of Hannah, which in the Septuagint of 1 Sam. 1:11 is expressed by the very same word in a clause very similar to the clause in the Magnificat.47 The phrase "from henceforth" now dates the blessing pronounced upon Elisabeth from the first movement of her child in the womb. The reserve of Mary now remains unbroken. The presence of the Spirit in the speaker now does not need to be mentioned in verse 46, because it has just been mentioned in verse 41. Finally, the "Mary remained with her" (instead of "she remained with Elisabeth") of verse 56 now becomes natural, for Elisabeth has now just been the speaker and does not need to be mentioned again by name.

Spitta,48 while admitting the validity of some of these arguments which have been urged against the common view that the narrator intended Mary to be regarded as the author of the hymn, is, on the other hand, unable to satisfy /pg. 89/ himself with the Elisabeth hypothesis. The external evidence for the omission of the subject of the verb "said" in verse 46, or for reading "Elisabeth" as the subject, is, he thinks, insufficient. It remains more probable, he argues, that the word "Mary" was first omitted by accident and then "Elisabeth" wrongly supplied in certain documents than that an original "Elisabeth" was changed to "Mary" in order that the hymn might be attributed to a more illustrious authoress.49 Furthermore, if the Magnificat, as the song of the barren Elisabeth, were an imitation of the song of the barren Hannah, the indication of the barrenness of the singer, which appears so plainly in the song of Hannah,50 would surely not have been omitted from the song of Elisabeth. The term "barren," being the very link which bound the two songs together, would not have been weakened into the general term "humiliation." Any other idea in Hannah's song, Spitta insists, would have been omitted more readily than that. Furthermore, the Elisabeth

hypothesis, Spitta continues, explains no better than the Mary hypothesis the looseness with which the song is fitted into the narrative: if Elisabeth were regarded as the speaker, the hymn should have been inserted after Lk. 1:25. At any rate, almost any place would have been more desirable for the insertion than that which was actually chosen. In verses 42–45, Elisabeth has greeted Mary as the mother of her Lord; Mary and her Son are here the allimportant figures. Surely Elisabeth would not proceed at once, in such a situation, to such an extravagant praise of her own son. Moreover, Spitta says, the words "with her" of verse 56 follow admirably upon verse 45; whereas according to Old Testament usage, if the psalm had intervened, the name "Elisabeth" would have had to be mentioned even if Elisabeth had been represented as the speaker of the hymn. The phenomena, Spitta thinks, can be explained only by the hypothesis that the hymn was foreign to the original story. Originally, Spitta thinks, the hymn was intended by its unknown Jewish author merely to express an Israelitish woman's rejoicing over a happy turn in the history of the nation, for which her sons had fought; it is inserted here by the hand of the Evangelist redactor.

An important objection to this hypothesis is that the motive of the redactor is far from clear. How did the Evangelist ever come to insert the hymn? According to Spitta himself, the plan of the narrative in Lk. 1–2 requires Mary to /pg. 90/ keep silent. If that plan is so clear to modern scholars, even after it has been spoiled by the insertion of the Magnificat, it should have been still clearer to the Evangelist before he made his insertion. He has respected it in other parts of the narrative; why has he upset it here? His action might indeed have been conceivable if he accomplished anything by it. If the Magnificat contained Lucan, or even merely Christian, ideas which the Evangelist was anxious to impress upon his readers, then the insertion of the hymn might be explicable. But Spitta himself has insisted that this is not the case. Or if the Evangelist had chanced upon a Jewish hymn that suited the situation of Mary in some remarkable way, conceivably he might have seized the opportunity of

embellishing his narrative by inserting it. But that, too, is far from the fact. The situation implied in the Magnificat can be defined, on the basis of the hymn itself, only in general terms. How, then, came the hymn to be attributed to Mary?

By way of answer to this question, Spitta suggests that the Evangelist attributed the hymn to Mary and inserted it just at this point because of the phrase, "his handmaid," in Lk. 1:48, which corresponds with Mary's words, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord," in verse 38, and because of the expression, "shall call me blessed," in verse 48, which corresponds with the words referring to Mary, "Blessed is she that believed," in verse 45.

It is interesting to observe at this point that the very verse (verse 48) which Spitta thus regards as being that in the original hymn which commended the use of the hymn to the Evangelist is excluded from the original hymn by Gunckel.51 Gunkel regards the verse as an addition of the redactor, who thus suited the Jewish psalm to its present (Christian) use; he thinks (1) that it constitutes an intrusion of an individual or personal element into a psalm which otherwise, like most of the Old Testament Psalms, might have been spoken by every pious Israelite, and (2) that it breaks up the form of this psalm by introducing a future tense ("all generations shall call me blessed") into the midst of the aorists which elsewhere are used, and which alone are proper to an "eschatological hymn" in which future blessings are celebrated as though they were already past.

These arguments for the exclusion of verse 48 are surely insufficient. Even if Gunkel is right in supposing that most of the Old Testament Psalms lack references to peculiar individual experiences and might be sung by any pious Israelite, yet just the Old Testament Psalms will show that there are many exceptions, to say the least, to this rule. And the argument from the form of the hymn depends upon the view that the aorists are aorists proper to an /pg. 91/ eschatological hymn in which the future events are viewed as having already happened. That view is by no means certain. At any rate, the treatment of the

hymn as a purely eschatological psalm seems to beg the question. The hymn may also very naturally be taken as a song of thanksgiving, possibly including future deeds of divine mercy, but spoken primarily in view of the event alluded to in verse 48.

But if Gunkel's excision of verse 48 from the original Jewish psalm were justified, the insertion of that psalm in the infancy narrative would become even more incomprehensible than it is when the verse is retained. For in the former case that poem would be merely an eschatological psalm, which might have been spoken at any time in the history of Israel. What could possibly have led the author of the infancy narrative to attribute such a psalm to the mother of Jesus?

Even if, however, verse 48, as is done by Hillmann, Hilgenfeld, and Spitta, be retained as part of the original Jewish composition, the insertion of the hymn in the infancy narrative still remains very strange. Even verse 48 fixes the situation presupposed by the hymn only in the most general way; it establishes a woman as the speaker, but it does not at all establish the nature of the benefit which is to proceed from her to all generations. Judith, for example, as the rescuer of Israel, might conceivably have uttered such a hymn.52 No doubt the words of verse 48 do suit the situation of Mary at this point in the narrative, and no doubt also the blessing which all generations are to ascribe to Mary is in relation to the blessing which Elisabeth has already in verse 45 pronounced upon her; perhaps also the words, "his handmaid," in verse 48 may really be felt by the readers as corresponding to the words of Mary, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord," in verse 38. But although such correspondences may be easy to detect after the hymn has already been inserted, they would hardly have occurred to anyone in the reading of a Jewish song. The Evangelist, on Spitta's hypothesis, would almost have to be imagined as searching through a collection of Jewish songs in order to discover the one least unsuited to his purpose. What was the necessity of such a painful search? The narrative would have done very well without the Magnificat. Hillmann53 considers it more probable that it was not the final redactor of the Gospel who inserted the Magnificat, but

that the final redactor found it already inserted in the Jewish Christian narrative that he used in the first two chapters. That does not change the case /pg. 92/ essentially. In some respects, it would have been harder for a Jewish Christian writer to insert a purely Jewish, non-Christian hymn into his narrative than for a Gentile Christian to do so. A Jewish Christian writer might indeed be more likely to be familiar with such a hymn; it might conceivably have been familiar to him from childhood. But on the other hand he would be less likely to think that such a familiar Jewish hymn could be palmed off successfully as a hymn of Mary the mother of Jesus— unless, indeed, his idea was that Mary herself could be represented as making use of an already existing hymn to express her feelings in an hour of exultation, just as in the Church today we use familiar hymns to express our feeling at peculiar junctures of our lives. This last supposition would hardly be in accordance with the intention of the narrator. It would certainly not fit the case of the Benedictus, where in introducing the hymn the narrator says that Zacharias "was filled with the Holy Ghost and prophesied saying…"; for that form of introduction would hardly be used if the hymn were to be regarded merely as an already existing Jewish hymn that Zacharias used; and the strong presumption is that the supposition also does not fit the case of the Magnificat.

We are therefore brought back to the primary difficulty that faces the hypothesis which we have been discussing. How did this supposedly Jewish hymn ever come to be attributed to Mary, or, for that matter, to Elisabeth? In general, it is unlikely that a Jewish hymn would be inserted in such a narrative, and at such a place, by a Christian writer. Spitta points to similar cases in the Old Testament—for example, to the song of Hannah, which, he believes, was originally separate from its present context. But even granting for the sake of the argument the critical conclusions adopted by Spitta for the Old Testament passages, the present case is somewhat different. There, Hebrew writers would be adopting Hebrew hymns; here, a Christian writer would be adopting a Jewish hymn, and adopting it altogether without compulsion, for insertion in the most sacred part of his

narrative. Would not the Christian consciousness of the newness of the Christian faith have precluded such disregard of the break between the old dispensation and the new?54 If the Evangelist (or the author of the narrative lying back of Lk. 1–2) had revised the supposed Jewish song so as to make a Christian hymn of it, then his employment of it would perhaps be in accordance with the habit of certain ancient writers, though not, we think, with the habit of the author of Luke and Acts. But that he should insert a simple Jewish song without redaction or only with /pg. 93/ such redaction as would not at all change the essential character of the hymn55 seems altogether beyond the bounds of probability. If the Evangelist were unscrupulous enough to put a simple Jewish hymn into the mouth of Mary, he would have been unscrupulous enough to make the hymn express his own ideas or refer to the later events in the life of Jesus. The insertion by the Evangelist of this Jewish hymn would be explicable only if, when the Evangelist wrote, it was already regarded as a hymn of Mary. But that merely pushes the problem a step further back. How came the hymn to be attributed to Mary in the first place? If it were a Jewish song, it would very probably have been known as such by the primitive Jewish Christian community. How came that community, then, to put it into the mouth of the mother of the Lord, at a time, too, when she had probably not long been dead? 56

The hypothesis, then, that the Magnificat was originally just a Jewish song, a foreign element inserted into the infancy narrative, must be rejected. Is it then simply a part of that narrative? Was it composed by the author of the narrative—that is, by the author of Luke's source in Lk. 1–2, since it has already been shown that composition by Luke himself is extremely unlikely? This hypothesis cannot altogether be excluded from consideration. The author of the source might conceivably have exercised the freedom of an ancient historian by attributing to his characters not words which they actually spoke, but words which, in view of the situation, they might fittingly have spoken. /pg. 94/

An exceedingly strong objection to such a view arises from the absence, in the hymn, of specifically Christian ideas and of references to later events. A Christian writer, after the resurrection, in composing a hymn for the mother of the Lord, could hardly have failed to insert in it some more definite prophecy of the life or death or resurrection of her Son—unless indeed he were writing before the death of Mary, when such an anachronism would have provoked contradiction. But in this latter case he would scarcely have ventured to compose the hymn at all.

The force of this argument might perhaps be partially avoided if we could suppose that the Magnificat and Benedictus, in company with other parts of Lk. 1, belonged originally to non-Christian tradition about John the Baptist, preserved in the circle of John's disciples. The hypothesis that there is such non-Christian Johannine tradition in the first chapter of Luke was favored by Völter,57 with an elaborate documentary theory, and has received the weighty support of Harnack,58 who, however, posits simply independent oral traditions about John and about Jesus, not independent documents. Of course, if the Magnificat and Benedictus were composed by nonChristian disciples of John the Baptist, then the absence from them of specifically Christian ideas no longer requires explanation. But the documentary theory of Völter is quite inadequately supported; and the more cautious theory of Harnack (more cautious because, since traditions are less easily studied than documents, assertions can be made about them with greater impunity) is also incapable of proof. Of course, the theory that both hymns were originally Johannine and non-Christian presupposes the view that the Magnificat belonged originally to Elisabeth rather than to Mary. But that view is beset with difficulties. It might conceivably be held in a form which would suppose the Magnificat to have been transferred by the Christian historian from Elisabeth to Mary.59 But in view of the absence of specifically Christian ideas in the hymn, all motive for such transference was lacking. The most that might by any possibility be admitted is that if a choice had to be made between the view that the Magnificat was composed by a disciple of John and the view that it

was simply a Jewish psalm, the former alternative might be preferable. But at best it would be merely the lesser of two improbabilities. At any rate, Harnack, as distinguished from Völter, cannot possibly use his theory of John-the-Baptist tradition to explain the absence of /pg. 95/ specifically Christian ideas in the hymns; because Harnack is quite certain that the hymns were composed by the Gentile Christian Luke.

One hypothesis alone overcomes all objections—the hypothesis that the Magnificat in its Greek form is actually derived from a Semitic song of Mary herself. That hypothesis explains, on the one hand, the absence from the hymn of specifically Christian ideas and of reference to later events in the life of Jesus; and it explains, on the other hand, the inclusion of such a hymn in a Christian narrative. It does justice, therefore, to the element of truth in Harnack's position as over against Gunkel's, and also to the element of truth in Gunkel's position over against Harnack's; but it avoids the errors which adhere to each of their positions. The more one studies alternative theories, the more one is led back to the simple view that the Magnificat was actually a song of Mary the mother of Jesus.

To many modern readers, no doubt, that will seem to be a highly adventurous conclusion. But it will seem so only because Joseph and Mary and Zacharias and Elisabeth as they appear in the infancy narrative are thought to be legendary figures. If, on the other hand, the narrative is based upon fact, why may not the mother of Jesus have been endowed with the gift of simple poetry, so that, under the immediate impression of her wonderful experience, she may have moulded her store of Scripture imagery, made part of her life from childhood, into this beautiful hymn of praise? Why must the mother of Jesus of Nazareth have been a nonentity? Just on naturalistic principles, the question may well be asked, to say nothing of the view which would make her the chosen vessel for the incarnation of the Son of God. Why may she not have possessed gifts that fitted her in some measure for her inestimable privilege?60 The hypothesis becomes more acceptable when one examines again the manner in

which the hymn is introduced. Modern criticism is perhaps correct in observing that the Magnificat is inserted rather loosely in the narrative. Perhaps, indeed, the first impression of the reader is that the hymn is intended to be regarded as an immediate answer of Mary to the greeting of Elisabeth. But that is by no means certain. There is no perfectly clear indication of it either in the introductory words, "And Mary said," or in the hymn itself.61 It /pg. 96/ looks as though the hymn may perhaps have circulated separately, as a hymn of Mary, produced during the visit to Elisabeth, but without any indication of the exact day and hour when it was first spoken. It would then, if this view be right, have been inserted in the narrative of the infancy at the proper place, as an answer to the greeting of Elisabeth, but without any indication whatever that it was spoken extemporaneously. It could be an answer to Elisabeth's greeting without being an immediate answer.

The words, "from henceforth," or (more literally) "from now on," in verse 48 constitute no insuperable objection to this view. These words may indeed refer to verse 45, "Blessed is she that believed"; they may represent Mary as seeing in this blessing just pronounced upon her by Elisabeth the first of a long series of similar pronouncements.62 But this reference is by no means absolutely certain. The word "now" does not necessarily indicate the present moment but may refer merely to a present period of time.63 And even if the reference of the phrase to verse 45 is correct, still the hypothesis just suggested as to the composition of the hymn does not become impossible; the blessing by Elisabeth could still be in view as the occasion of the hymn even if the hymn was not actually composed in detail until afterwards. We are far from asserting that this view is certainly correct. It is, indeed, perhaps preferable to the view of Resch, that the hymn had gradually taken form in Mary's mind between the annunciation and the visit of Elisabeth, so that without being in the strict sense extemporaneous it could be spoken immediately as an answer to Elisabeth's greeting. Still other views are possible. If, for example, it should be insisted that the hymn was an utterance directly inspired by the Holy Spirit and so not subject to

the requirements of preparation that would otherwise be expected, we have no objection of principle to such a view; and it might be rendered more acceptable to the modern mind by the consideration that improvising of poetry may have been practised at that time and in that part of the world to a degree which is unknown in our modern Western civilization, so that the Spirit of God would not, according to the view in question, be using a method of utterance that was entirely out of connection with the natural habits of mind of the person through whom He would be speaking. But our point is that the view which we outlined first is also not impossible, and it could be held in the fullest loyalty to the intention of the narrator. Hence the ridicule that has sometimes been vented upon the Lucan narrative, /pg. 97/ for attributing to a simple Jewish maiden an improvised speech of such perfect artistic form, is misplaced. The sense of the narrative is not certainly violated if the Magnificat be regarded as the product of Mary's meditation during the three months which she spent in the hill country of Judæa.

Much of what has been said about the Magnificat could be repeated for the Benedictus. In the Benedictus, it is true, there is somewhat clearer indication of the occasion on which the hymn is intended to have been spoken, since the words, "And thou, child," etc., in verses 76–79, do point to a child, already born, as forerunner of the Messianic age. It is not surprising, therefore, that those who regard this hymn as an originally non-Christian Jewish poem suppose that these last four verses constitute a Christian addition. But even when these verses are regarded (as they certainly ought to be regarded) as an original part of the hymn, there is in the hymn the same absence, as in the case of the Magnificat, of specifically Christian ideas, and therefore there is the same difficulty of supposing that the hymn was composed by the author of the narrative. Moreover, the Benedictus is even more loosely inserted in the narrative than is the Magnificat. If the narrator had desired to put a hymn into the mouth of Zacharias, he would naturally have done so at Lk. 1:64, when Zacharias regained his speech and "spake, blessing God." Instead, the hymn is inserted in a general description64 of the growth of the child.65

↑ Back to top