SECTION I

preliminary remarks

The remembrance which the Church has preserved, and the testimony she has given to the childhood of the Lord Jesus, form a series of incidents, together displaying, in artless, poetical, and sacred delineation, on one side, the full reality and historic nature; on the other, the perfect ideality, of the individual life of Jesus in its beginnings and earliest events. They form a cycle: they manifest themselves, by the most speaking facts, to belong to the Christology of the childhood of Jesus. This cycle is naturally a circle of most mysterious and tender images, exhibiting the beauties and graces, as well as the terrors of poetry, in the most absolute reality. These images only differ from many of the productions of actual poetry, by surpassing, in their strict conformity to the due proportions of ideal perfection, all that is glaring and enthusiastic in more ordinary poetry, and, at the same time, all the images of the fancy. Their reality has always had the effect of banishing from the centre of Christian doctrine, the mutilated forms of Ebionitism, which cannot believe in the full spiritual glorification of corporeity.

In our days, indeed, the history of Christ’s childhood seems to have been almost abandoned to Ebionitism. The practice of removing the ideality of Christ’s life to greater and still greater distances from its commencement, has been constantly persevered in. At first, in accordance with the views of the ancient Ebionites and Socinians, it was not till His baptism that He was allowed to become the Son of God. Then, not till long after His baptism, and after having, as was supposed, first passed through the school of John the Baptist. Again another advance was made, and it was said that it was not till after His death that the image of Christ was produced, as an embellished remembrance of the actual Christ. And, further still, Paul is said to have been the inventor of mature, universal Christianity. A new station is next formed, by the opinion that the perfectly ideal, or, as it is rather thought, idealistic, view of the life of Jesus, given in the pseudo-Gospel of John, did not arise till about the end of the second century. At last, even the present times are passed by, and Christianity is first to become a truth in the times of the coming Spirit. These spouting prophets of a spirit, who is not to kindle but to extinguish the light of the Gospel history, take one step further, and expect, with the Jews, the advent of the Messiah in a new religion. There is now but another advance, the abolition of all religion. Such is the historical progress of Ebionitism.

It is part of the notion of Christianity, that, as the incarnate Word, it should be perfect from its very origin. Christianity is distinctly a new principle, the principle of all improvement, and cannot itself meanwhile need improvement. It is the principle of the identity of the eternal Word and human corporeity, of real and ideal life; therefore it rejects every attempt to introduce into its origin, that incongruence between ‘the ideal and life’ which oppresses the ancient זon. It comes forth from the heart of God, as a new and miraculous life: hence a halo of miracles is formed around this central miracle; the rays of the rising sun.

To whom are we indebted for the history of Christ’s childhood? It is almost unnatural to let this question take the form of a laboured investigation. Mothers are the narrators of the histories of children. It was undoubtedly Mary who was the evangelist of the youthful history of Jesus, and it is not obscurely that she is pointed out as his authority by Luke (chap. 2:19). It would be but natural that she should have preserved a written remembrance of what occurred in the house of Zachariah. The colouring, too, of a woman’s memory and a woman’s view is unmistakeable in the separate features of this history. When it is once ascribed to a female narrator, we feel that the fact, that ‘wise men from the East’ are introduced without further preface, that the taxing of Herod is designated the taxing of Cזsar Augustus, who was really at the bottom of it, and many other difficulties, are at once explained. Then also we comprehend he indescribable grace, the quiet loveliness, and sacredness, of this narrative. That Mary, who at all events survived the pentecostal effusion of the Spirit on the Church of Christ, should have related to that Church the most important incidents of the childhood of Jesus, and that these communications should have been preserved as holy relics, is so simple and natural a supposition, that it would be superfluous to discuss it further.

───♦───

Notes

The chief considerations which have been advanced against the history of Christ’s childhood, proceed from the above-mentioned Ebionite view of the life of Jesus. Having, however, already refuted this view, we shall not have occasion to enter any further into an explanation of the circumstance, that these communications have been so generally disregarded, in comparison with other portions of the sacred narrative; separate and special difficulties will, however, be treated of in their proper places.