period of hunan progress we have begun a new chronological era with him, and are in the habit of reckoning the years backward and forward from his birth; but even the point from which this era should commence is any thing but certain. In the year 525 A.D. the Roman Abbot Dionysius Exiguus fixed it as it is now used, but students of the subject have long been agreed that the data upon which he based his calculations were insufficient, and that he most likely made a mistake of several years. Nor is our knowledge any more definite with regard to the descent of Jesus, and the circumstances of his birth. Even as to the place where he was born opinions differ.

You may naturally ask the cause of all this uncertainty, and it is not difficult to explain. The fact is that the Apostles and other preachers, who brought the gospel to Jews and heathens, confined themselves entirely, in speaking about Jesus, to the time of his public activity in Israel, and laid. special stress upon his death and resurrection. To this they' could bear witness. Of what went before they had seen nothing, nor had they made any inquiries about it; for at first it was only the most important facts that excited attention. In these early times no special interest was felt in the birth and youth of Jesus, for his disciples tacitly assumed that it was not as an infant, a boy, or a young man, but as a public teacher, and above all in his death, that Jesus had shown himself to be the Christ and our redeemer.

And when the later Christians wished to know more of these early days, there was no one left who could give them any information. Were they content to rest in their ignorance then, inasmuch as it was impossible to learn any more, and fate would have it so? Not at all. It was far more in the spirit of the age to try to determine what must have happened. And indeed the Christians firmly believed that they could draw from a source of information which deserved such implicit confidence that even if there had been persons living who were personally acquainted with the facts, it would hardly have been necessary to consult them. This source of information was the Old Testament. Jesus was recognized as .he. Messiah promised to the fathers; and the prophets had written about the Messiah. It was firmly believed that they had foretold a number of details of the life of the Christ, and that in doing so they could not possibly have made mistakes. Not content with finding in the prophecies and Psalms all sorts of allusions or definite predictions as to the life of Jesus, the

Christians saw in the fortunes of the people of Israel or of its greatest heroes, such as Moses, a foreshadowing of what was to happen to the Messiah. And so by putting together a number of texts from the Old Testament, generally explained in a grossly arbitrary style, they made up a complete history of Jesus. We shall notice this again and again as we advance. We can now understand the way in which they would attempt to fill the great gap in the history of the early years of Jesus, and can make use of our knowledge at once in explaining the origin of these two pedigrees and other things connected with them.

The narratives of the Old Testament have familiarized us with the Messianic expectation. Several of the prophets1 distinctly say that in the golden age of the future, for which they hope, a descendant of David will hold sway over Israel as king. Now Jesus had not yet become a king; but, thought the Christians, he would be one ere long when he returned from heaven. Was he really of the race of David then? The simple fact is that we know nothing about it; and perhaps you may think that it does not much matter. No more it does. To us, at least, he is neither greater nor less for being or not being a descendant of David. We honor him far too much to attach any value to such an accident. Jesus himself, too, considered it a matter of little or no consequence, and perhaps indirectly denied that his descent was royal.2 But the early Christians thought otherwise. They argued: Jesus is the Christ, and therefore it is absolutely certain, on the testimony of all those prophetic utterances, that he must have been of the race and family of David. This argument necessarily involved the belief that the great-nephews of Jesus, the grandsons of his brother Jude, were also descendants of David; and an old churchFather tells us that the suspicious Emperor Domitian, hearing that in the country of the Jews there were men of royal extraction still alive, had these relatives of Jesus brought before him; but the sight of their hands hardened by honest work allayed his fears.

The general statement that Jesus must have been a son of

1 Isaiah xi. 1, 10; Jeremiah xxiii. 5, xxx. 9, xxxiii. 15, 17, 21, 22; Ezekiel xxxiv. 23 f., xxxvii. 24 f.; Hosea iii. 5; Amos ix. 11; Michah v. 2; Zechariah iii. 8, vi. 12, xii. 8.

2 Matthew xxii. 41-46 (Mark xii. 35-37).

8 John vii. 42: Acts ii. 30, xiii. 23; Romans i. 2, 3; 2 Tim. ii. 8: Hebrew vii. 14; Revelation v. 5. xxii. 16.

David did not long satisfy the Christians; and by the aid of names and catalogues from the Old Testament they constructed pedigrees for Joseph, the father of Jesus. We have already alluded to the two which Matthew and Luke have preserved for us. The first begins with Abraham; the other goes back to Adam. These pedigrees have not the smallest historical value. Only to mention a single point, their authors did not shrink from the most arbitrary handling of their materials for the sake of obtaining symmetrical results with special reference to the sacred number seven and its multiples. (3 × 14 in one case and 5 × 14 + 7 in the other.) Moreover, these two registers destroy each other. Not only do the names differ in almost every case, but in the one there are exactly fourteen generations more between Jesus and David than in the other. But it does not follow that they have no interest for us. In the first place, they offer a striking illustration of the way in which history was written in those days. Again, on comparing the two, we see the different spirit in which the two compilers worked. The first list, which only mounts up to Abraham the ancestor of Israel, intends to represent Jesus distinctly as Israel's Messiah, and must therefore have ariser in Jewish-Christian circles. The other, which goes up tc "Adam the son of God," the ancestor of all mankind, wishes to show that Jesus belongs to the whole human race, and is "the second Adam," the true man, and the son of God. This list, therefore, must be of Heathen-Christian origin, or rather must have passed through a revision made in the Heathen-Christian spirit. Finally, it follows of necessity from both the genealogies that their compilers entertained no doubt that Joseph was the father of Jesus. Otherwise the descent of Joseph would not have been in the least to the point.

Connected with this firm belief that the Messiah must be a descendant of David was the conviction that as David's son he must be born in David's city, that is Bethlehem. This was deduced from a passage in Michah, which was understood to mean "at Bethlehem, in Judæa, shall Christ be born," " though the prophet really meant nothing whatever of the kind. There was a great difficulty here. The primitive tra dition declared emphatically that Nazareth was the place from which Jesus came. We may still see this distinctly enough in our Gospels. Jesus is constantly called the Naza

1 1 Corinthians xv. 45, 47.

2 Matthew ii. 46; compare John vii. 42.

2

rene, or Jesus of Nazareth. This was certainly the name by which he was known in his own time; and of course such local names were given to men from the place of their birth, and not from the place in which they lived, which might constantly be changing. Nazareth is called in so many words his own, that is, his native city, and he himself describes it so. But in spite of all this the Christians were convinced that he must have been born at Bethlehem, so they had to assume that Joseph and Mary were at Bethlehem at the time of his birth. Matthew simply says that it was so,3 and adds that they settled at Nazareth some years afterwards for a special reason; and then running off upon the sound of the name he sees in this change of abode the fulfilment of another prophetic intimation indirectly conveyed by the history of Samson: "He shall be a Nazarite unto God," says the angel to Manoah's wife; and the words, thought the Evangelist, referred to Jesus as well as Samson, for there was not so much difference between Nazarite and Nazarene ! ®

6

Sometimes the Old Testament could not supply the missing particulars which seemed necessary to explain some admitted fact in the life or character of Jesus, and then there was nothing left but to fill in the gap by guess-work. In such cases it happened, not infrequently, that the literal interpretation of spiritual expressions, and the misunderstanding of the metaphorical style of the East in which the Gospel was first preached, so totally distorted the ancient tradition as to draw conclusions from it which it was never for a moment intended to sanction. An example of this process, too, will help us to understand the origin of the accounts of the descent of Jesus.

In the first and third Gospels we read that Jesus was born miraculously, and that Joseph was only his foster-father. How did this belief arise? In the first place, we must notice that it was a common idea in ancient times that great founders of religions such as Buddha and Zoroaster, philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato, and kings such as Romulus and Alexander, had had no earthly father. Perhaps the Christians were confirmed in this idea with regard to their own Master by applying a passage in Isaiah, which they

1 Matthew xiii. 54 (Mark vi. 1).

2 Matthew xiii. 57 (Mark. vi. 4; Luke iv. 23, 24), compare John vii. 41, 42

and i. 45, 46.

8 Matthew ii. 1.

6 Matthew ii. 23.

4 Matthew ii. 22, 23.

Isaiah vii. 14.

5 Judges xiii. 5.

completely misunderstood, to the mother of the Messiah, and therefore to the mother of Jesus.1 Besides this, they very truly saw in Jesus an altogether unique personality. They felt how far above all other men he stood; that his nobility of soul, his goodness, his purity, his exaltation of character, and his love raised him above all comparison with other men. They were not content to explain these facts from the beauty of his natural disposition, its happy development, and the holiness and strength of his will. They were determined to find a supernatural cause. Three separate representations found acceptance in succession. In the earliest times the Christians believed that when Jesus was baptized the Holy Spirit descended upon him. Somewhat later he was said to have been born into the world miraculously, and not as an ordinary human being. Finally, an existence in heaven previous to his appearance on earth was ascribed to him in order to account to some extent for his being so far exalted above other men.

But it was that misunderstanding of figurative language, of which we spoke just now, that was the chief cause at work in this instance. "Jesus was born of the Holy Spirit," said the believers. To understand this declaration, we must bear in mind the peculiar usages of New Testament language. It needs but little knowledge of ourselves and others to teach us that to be and to do good is no easy task that we can accomplish without effort. Our perverse and selfish nature has to be subdued, and our better moral nature raised to supremacy. But what we should express now-a-days by saying we must change our lives and become new and better men," is expressed in New Testament language thus: We must be born again, born of the Holy Spirit, the principle of all good. So when the disciples wished to say of Jesus that he did not need to become good because he was good, that he did not need to become another and a new man because he new man already, they expressed it by saying, "He was not born again, because he was born of the Holy Spirit from the first." And when the original meaning of this expression was forgotten, it was easily misunderstood and taken literally instead of metaphorically.

Beyond the particulars already mentioned and explained, the first Evangelist has nothing to tell us of the descent of Jesus. The story of his birth was afterwards embellished in various ways, but Matthew is still very short and simple. 2 John iii. 3, 5, 6; Titus iii. 5.

1 Matthew i. 23.