the golden light of the new day. Miraculous it all is, and professes to be; not indeed in the
connection of these events, which succeed each other with psychological truthfulness; nor
yet in their language, which is of the times and the circumstances; but in the underlying
facts.46 And for these there can be no other evidence than the Life, the Death, and the
Resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. If He was such, and if He really rose from the dead,
then, with all soberness and solemnity, such inception of His appearance seems almost a
logical necessity. But of this whole narrative it may be said, that such inception of the
Messianic appearance, such announcement of it, and such manner of His Coming, could
never have been invented by contemporary Judaism; indeed, ran directly counter to all its
preconceptions.47
41. According to Jewish tradition, the yet unborn infants in their mother's wombs
responded by an Amen to the hymn of praise at the Red Sea. This is supposed to be
indicated by the words ρωθµµ λ)ρ#ψ (Ps. lxviii. 27; see also the Targum on that verse).
Comp. Keth. 7 b and Sotah 30 b (last line) and 31 a, though the coarse legendary
explanation of R. Tanchuma mars the poetic beauty of the whole.
42. The poetic grandeur and the Old Testament cast of the Virgin's hymn (comp. the
Song of Hannah, 1 Sam. ii. 1-10), need scarcely be pointed out. Perhaps it would read
fullest and best by trying to recall what must have been its Hebrew original.
43. 1st stanza vv. 46-49.
44. 2nd stanza, vv. 5 0-53.
45. 3rd stanza, vv. 54-55.
46. Weiss, while denying the historical accuracy of much in the Gospel-narrative of it,
unhesitatingly accepts the fact of the supernatural birth of Jesus.
47. Keim elaborately discusses the origin of what he calls the legend of Christ's
supernatural conception. He arrives at the conclusion that it was a Jewish -Christian
legend - as if a Jewish invention of such a 'legend' were not the most unlikely of all
possible hypotheses! But negative criticism is at least bound to furnish some historical
basis for the origination of such an unlikely legend. Whence was the idea of it first
derived? How did it find such ready acceptance in the Church? Weiss has, at considerable
length, and very fully, shown the impossibility of it s origin either in Jewish or heathen
legend.
Three months had passed since the Virgin-Mother entered the home of her kinswoman.
And now she must return to Nazareth. Soon Elisabeth's neighbours and kinsfolk would
gather with sympathetic joy around a home which, as they thought, had experienced
unexpected mercy - little thinking, how wide-reaching its consequences would be. But
the Virgin-Mother must not be exposed to the publicity of such meetings. However
conscious of what had led to her condition, it must have been as the first sharp pang of
the sword which was to pierce her soul, when she told it all to her betrothed. For,
however deep his trust in her whom he had chosen for wife, only a direct Divine
communication could have chased all questioning from his heart, and given him that
assurance, which was needful in the future history of the Messiah. Brief as, with exquisite
delicacy, the narrative is, we can read in the 'thoughts' of Joseph the anxious contending
of feelings, the scarcely established, and yet delayed, resolve to 'put her away,' which