Mythology

child. While he is considering putting her away privately, he is told by an angel in a dream that Mary is with child of the Holy Ghost. The angel tells him to take her as his wife, and to call the child Jesus, a name which in Hebrew means ‘Saviour’, for, says the angel, ‘He shall save his people from their sins: The narrator then adds that all this is happening as the fulfilment of the sign of Immanuel, given to King Ahaz by the prophet Isaiah. To this point we shall return later. Then the narrative goes on to relate that, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the time of Herod the Great, wise men (lit. ‘mages’) came to Jerusalem from the East, inquiring where the King of the Jews had been born, and saying that they had seen his star in the East and had come to worship him. Herod and all Jerusalem are disturbed at the news, and Herod calls the chief priests and scribes together and asks them where the Messiah was to be born. They tell him that, according to the prophecy in Micah 5:2, this would take place in Bethlehem. Herod sends the mages to that village, and, on the basis of their astrological calculations, plans to kill all the children in Bethlehem and the neighbouring district who are under two years old. Joseph is warned in a dream to take Mary and the child and flee into Egypt. The narrator then describes Herod’s slaughter of the children and says that this is the fulfilment of a prophecy of Jeremiah (31:15); he also says that the flight into Egypt is a fulfilment of the oracle in Hos. II:I, ‘Out of Egypt have I called my son: When Herod is dead, Joseph is again told by an angel in a dream that it is safe to return to the land of Israel. He does so, but, discovering that Herod has been succeeded by his son Archelaus, is afraid to return to Bethlehem, and, by angelic direction, goes and settles in Nazareth, in order to fulfil another prophetic word, which has never been identified, ‘He shall be called a Nazarene.’ It is generally recognized that the Lukan and Matthaean accounts of the circumstances under which the birth of Jesus took place cannot be harmonized. Luke has invested the historical circumstance with a mythological colouring which is intended to bring into strong relief the divine purpose directing the events, and to show that the pattern of divine activity in redemption, outlined in the Old Testament in those cult myths which we have been studying, has now reached its climax. The canticles which Luke has either composed or borrowed from the psalmody of the early Church are wholly Old Testament in spirit and expression, and are intended to glorify the God of Israel who has thus guided the course of world-history to its consummation. It is noteworthy that in his two chapters devoted to the circumstances attending the birth of Jesus, Luke does not once declare that this or that event was the fulfilment of some particular prophecy; yet he invests his whole narrative in these two chapters with an Old Testament colouring which is the result of a supreme art. In the corresponding chapters of Matthew, on the other hand, the mythological element is employed in a different way and with a different result. In the first place, we find here the beginning of a tendency which develops to an uncontrolled extent in early patristic literature, the tendency to seek for fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy in events of the life of Jesus. In this short section of the gospel no less than five passages from the Old Testament are cited as fulfilled by incidents in the early life of Jesus. The third of these quotations, from Hos. II:I, in its Old Testament setting runs, ‘When Israel was a child then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.’ Here the prophet is referring to the tradition that the beginning of Yahweh’s relations with Israel went back to the deliverance from Egypt. The early Christian writer saw in the word ’son’ a reference to Christ, and drew the inference that the new Israel, embodied in Jesus, must have experienced an Exodus from Egypt.

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