was composed expressly for use on this occasion. It is still preserved among our Apocryphal Gospels, and represents Jesus as describing to his disciples the life and still more the death of his foster-father. The Catholic Church has enrolled him among the saints, records a host of miracles performed on his behalf, and honors him with the title of Confessor and Patriarch." Indeed, a few years ago Pope Pius IX. commended the Church, under its trying circumstances, to St. Joseph's special protection. But to return to our story and the difficulties that it presents. The task which the commentators thought it their duty to undertake in the interests of faith was three-fold. In the first place they had to reconcile Matthew and Luke. To take a single instance: At what point in the third Gospel were the visit of the magi and the flight to Egypt to be inserted? Not after the presentation in the temple; for immediately after that event Joseph and Mary went back to their home in Nazareth, and were therefore no longer to be found in Bethlehem. And yet not before; for the child was more than a year old at the visit of the magi, and the murderous plans of Herod would have made a subsequent presentation in the temple impossible. The fact is that there is no room at all for these events in the narrative of Luke, which represents the birth of the Messiah as having been already proclaimed widely enough by the shepherds and by Simeon and Anna. The second difficulty refers to this wonderful star. In ancient times the Jews, like other peoples, might very well believe that there was some immediate connection between the stars and the life of man, an idea which we still preserve in the forms of speech, that so and so was born under a lucky or under an evil star. They might therefore suppose that the birth of great men, such as Abraham for instance, was announced in the heavens. In our century however, if not before, all serious belief in astrology has ceased, and it would be regarded as an act of the grossest superstition for any one to have his horoscope drawn; for the course, the appearance, and the disappearance of the heavenly bodies have been long determined with mathematical precision by science. But if this is the case, it is impossible that the magi could have been apprised of the birth of the great King of the Jews by the rise of a new star. And yet the commentators, in their efforts to rescue the credit of this story, have searched the heavens with the utmost diligence, have talked of the conjunction of two planets, and have even called to their aid a certain comet that was observed in China! But, unfortunately, the phenomenon that Matthew describes is very different from either a conjunction or a comet. And however much these harmonizers might congratulate themselves on their discovery, one does not quite see how a star in the heavens could point out the way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, advance in front of the travellers, and stand still over one particular house! This is so utterly absurd that it cannot even be accounted for as an optical delusion. The third point of difficulty is presented by the slaughter of the innocents. Not, indeed, that Herod was incapable of such a hideous crime, but the hopeless stupidity with which he is represented as having gone to work is quite inconsistent with his well-known craftiness. Не summons the magi secretly, as if on purpose to arouse their suspicions; he is afraid that they will not return, and yet sends no one to observe them; he gives orders, in his senseless fury, for a wholesale massacre, when he could easily have discovered, in so small a place, the particular house and child that had been honored by so distinguished a visit ; he does not even so much as inquire whether the child he is looking for, and against whom his orders are directed, may not have escaped already. Moreover, Josephus, who gives us a minute account of the atrocities perpetrated by Herod up to the very last moments of his life, does not say a single word about this unheard of crime, which must have been so notorious. Surely he must have known of it, and must have mentioned it, had it ever been committed! ties. I will not delay you by enumerating the devices, sometimes very ingenious but always futile, by which ancient and modern commentators have endeavored to escape these difficulYou must have already discovered the true character of this scene. The Christians drew it in accordance with the indications they believed to be contained in the Old Testament, under the form of direct prophecies or foreshadowing types. The writer of the legend of Balaam1 had sung of a star that rises from Jacob," by which he meant a glorious monarch, and, specifically, Jeroboam II. But in later times his words were taken to mean that the coming of the Messiah would be heralded by a star. Thus in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, a hundred years after the death of Jesus, a certain Jew who gave himself out as the Messiah 1 Numbers xxiv. 17. See vol. ii. chap. xviii. p. 199. and headed the last great insurrection of his countrymen, assumed the name of Bar-Cochbah, "son of a star." As recently as in the fifteenth century of our era, a Jewish scholar named Abarbanel (A.D. 1463) concluded that the birth of the Messiah was close at hand, because there was a conjunction of two planets in the sign of the Zodiac called the Fishes (Pisces), which Abarbanel held to be closely connected with the fates of Israel! At the birth of Moses, he says, the same phenomenon occurred. Again, the Christians read in the Prophet and the Psalmist that the princes of the heathen would come to the light of Israel with presents of gold and frankincense, and bow down in reverence before the great King. If Jesus was the Christ, then all this must have been fulfilled in him. 1 But there was more. Antiquity in general delighted in representing great men, such as Romulus, Cyrus, and many more, as having been threatened in their childhood by fearful dangers. This served to bring into clear relief both the lofty significance of their future lives and the special protection of the deity who watched over them. The Christians were familiar with a striking example of this kind of legend in the story of Moses. As Josephus tells the tale,2 his life, together with that of all the male infants of about his age, was threatened by Pharaoh on account of the prediction of a priest that "at that time a child should be born among the Israelites who should humble Egypt and exalt his own people." Later on, again, he had to fly from the court for his life. And inasmuch as Moses, the mediator of the Old Covenant, is constantly brought into comparison with Jesus as the mediator of the New, it followed that the experiences of the former were to be regarded as a foreshadowing type of the lot of the latter. Jesus, no less than Moses, must be "the child of Providence." Indeed, the writer of the narrative in the second chapter of Matthew had his attention so closely fixed upon Moses that he puts into the mouth of the angel who addresses Joseph the very words which Yahweh was said to have uttered to Moses. Even in later times the Church had not forgotten the meaning of the slaughter of the innocents of Bethlehem. Thus Prudentius, a poet of the fourth century, sang in his Hymn for Epiphany": 1 Isaiah xlix. 7, lx. 3-10; Psalm 1xxii. 10, 11. 2 See vol. ii. p. 250 So, too, the Old Testament was supposed to indicate that the Christ must retire to Egypt in order to come back again. For Israel itself, often called God's son, or God's first-born,* was the type of the Messiah, the Son of God. So the Christ too, like Israel, must have been in Egypt, and what was written of Israel, "Out of Egypt have I called my son," must actually apply to Jesus also. Lastly, the wail of sorrow raised over the inhabitants of Judah carried away in captivity to Babylon was actually forced into a prophecy of the murder at Bethlehem. But the whole scene, while typifying the fulfilment in Jesus of the hope of the fathers, prefigured in the history and oracles of Israel and the lives of its heroes, is also a prophetic forecast of the fate of Jesus himself, of the reception which his gospel would meet, and the significance of his person to the world. The sword hangs over him, even as a child, by a silken thread, and so will dangers ever surround him on all sides; so will the powers of the world ever conspire against his flock. But as God's eye keeps watch over the helpless babe, so shall no one lay a hand on him until his hour is come; 1 so shall Providence watch over the Church of Christ. Op. posed to these distinguished heathen who come from distant lands to bow down before Jesus stands Herod, with Jerusalem's citizens, her priests and her Scribes, at his side," shrinking from no enormity in his attempt to crush the Christ. Even so shall the heathen, with their longing for salvation, their eagerness for the gospel, their faith and their reverence, stand out in sharpest contrast against the blind and stubborn hostility of the Jewish nation. These sages from the East who fall prostrate before the child are the first-fruits of the countless host who shall bend the knee in his name, so that the 1 Exodus iv. 22; Jeremiah xxxi. 9. 6 2 Hosea xi. 1. Compare Jeremiah xxxi. 15. very cradle of Jesus prophesies of the subjection of all the heathen world to him. It is upon this last point that the tradition of the Church has laid the greatest stress. As if instinctively feeling that the story was a legend, and might therefore be treated with perfect freedom, it has not exactly elaborated the narrative of Matthew, but has modified it and made it more definite. The magi were changed, in accordance with a passage in the Old Testament, into kings, and their number fixed at three, to correspond with the three presents; their names were said to be Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar, and each was made the representative of one of the three quarters of the world known to the ancients. The youngest of them, as the representative of Africa, was always represented as a Moor. In their gifts, too, some of the church-Fathers, even as early as the third century, find a symbolical significance. Jesus received the gold as king, the frankincense as God, and the myrrh as man, in anticipation of his martyr's death. Thus the poet Juvencus (about A.D. 300) says in a line of his Gospel History: "Gold, frankincense, and myrrh, to the King, the God, the Man!" There is certainly something in the whole story that stimulates the curiosity and leaves the imagination free to work. The star is described to us by one of the Apostolic Fathers2 as "excelling all the stars in brilliance, of indescribable glory, and astonishing every one by its novelty. All the other heavenly bodies, with the sun and moon, made a circle round it, but it poured its light over them all." In the course of time it was related that the magi came from Persia to Bethlehem in consequence of the predictions of Zoroaster, the founder of their religion, that they were led to the place by an angel in the form of a star, and received a gift from Mary, which they gratefully accepted in return for their presents. This gift was one of the cloths in which the child had been swaddled ; and when they came back to their own country they kindled a fire (the Persians reverence fire as divine) and threw the cloth into it. But it would not burn, so they preserved it with the utmost reverence among their treasures. Two Apocryphal Gospels, that of the "Infancy of the Redeemer," in use among the Nestorians of Syria, in which the story just given occurs, and the Latin "History of Mary's Birth and the Childhood of the Redeemer," are particularly full in 1 Psalm lxxii. 10; Isaiah xlix. 7. 2 See p. 22. |