One more tradition must be noted. The consummation of praise for a king
is to declare that he is the son of no earthly father, but of a god. His
mother goes into the temple of Apollo, and Apollo comes to her in the
shape of a serpent, or the like. The Roman emperors, following the
example of Augustus, claimed the title of God. Illogically, such divine
kings insist a good deal on their royal human ancestors. Alexander,
claiming to be the son of Apollo, is equally determined to be the son of
Philip. As the gospels stand, St. Matthew and St. Luke give genealogies
(the two are different) establishing the descent of Jesus through Joseph
from the royal house of David, and yet declare that not Joseph but the
Holy Ghost was the father of Jesus. It is therefore now held that the
story of the Holy Ghost is a later interpolation borrowed from the Greek
and Roman imperial tradition. But experience shows that simultaneous
faith in the descent from David and the conception by the Holy Ghost is
possible. Such double beliefs are entertained by the human mind
without uneasiness or consciousness of the contradiction involved. Many
instances might be given: a familiar one to my generation being that of
the Tichborne claimant, whose attempt to pass himself off as a baronet
was supported by an association of laborers on the ground that the
Tichborne family, in resisting it, were trying to do a laborer out of
his rights. It is quite possible that Matthew and Luke may have been
unconscious of the contradiction: indeed the interpolation theory does
not remove the difficulty, as the interpolators themselves must have
been unconscious of it. A better ground for suspecting interpolation is
that St. Paul knew nothing of the divine birth, and taught that Jesus
came into the world at his birth as the son of Joseph, but rose from
the dead after three days as the son of God. Here again, few notice
the discrepancy: the three views are accepted simultaneously without
intellectual discomfort. We can provisionally entertain half a dozen
contradictory versions of an event if we feel either that it does not
greatly matter, or that there is a category attainable in which the
contradictions are reconciled.
But that is not the present point. All that need be noted here is that
the legend of divine birth was sure to be attached sooner or later
to very eminent persons in Roman imperial times, and that modern
theologians, far from discrediting it, have very logically affirmed the
miraculous conception not only of Jesus but of his mother.
With no more scholarly equipment than a knowledge of these habits of
the human imagination, anyone may now read the four gospels without
bewilderment, and without the contemptuous incredulity which spoils
the temper of many modern atheists, or the senseless credulity which
sometimes makes pious people force us to shove them aside in emergencies
as impracticable lunatics when they ask us to meet violence and
injustice with dumb submission in the belief that the strange demeanor
of Jesus before Pilate was meant as an example of normal human conduct.
Let us admit that without the proper clues the gospels are, to a modern
educated person, nonsensical and incredible, whilst the apostles are
unreadable. But with the clues, they are fairly plain sailing. Jesus
becomes an intelligible and consistent person. His reasons for going
"like a lamb to the slaughter" instead of saving himself as Mahomet
did, become quite clear. The narrative becomes as credible as any other
historical narrative of its period.