Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/834

Rh ['he intro- luctory hapters of Juke’s lospel. 81 0 raising of J airus's daughter. Luke’s other principal miracle, l the draught of ﬁshes, is also considered by 1nany to have arisen from metaphor misunderstood. It is connected by Luke with the calling of Simon Peter, an incident men- tioned both by Matthew and by Mark; yet neither Matthew nor Hark describes or gives the slightest hint of any such miracle i11 connexion with the calling of Peter. In the next place, the metaphor describing the apostles as ﬁshermen and converts as ﬁsh, borrowed from Jeremiah perhaps (xvi. 16), is applied by our Lord both to the apostles, as “ﬁshers of men,” and to the preaching of the gospel, which he de- I scribes as a “net ” catching all sorts of ﬁsh, bad and good. As the sea in the Old Testament is regarded as the type of ' “sin,” everything favoured the addition and development ' of this metaphor. Accordingly Philo (Creation) describes ﬁshes as typical of the lowest kind of unenlightened exist- ence; and Clement of Alexandria addresses a hymn to Christ, as the ﬁsher of men catching ﬁshes with the bait of eternal life from the hateful wave of the sea of vices ('1'/re Instructor, iii. 12). It is of course possible that the de- veloped symbolism which we ﬁnd in Clement may have been entirely the effect, and in no degree the cause, of the. narrative in Luke v. 6 ; and in any case the full discussion of this question would require more space than the limits of this article allow. Passing now from the main body of Luke’s Gospel, we I come to the introduction, which name we may give to the ﬁrst two chapters, describing the birth and childhood of I Jesus, and the birth of His forerunner John, the son of Zacharias. The doctrine of the miraculous incarnation, although distinctly stated in Ilatthew’s Gospel, nevertheless required further conﬁrmation. This doctrine appears to have been spoken of from the earliest time, in language which might give rise to different conclusions, according as it was interpreted literally or metaphorically. For ex- ample, in the Apocalypse, “ tl1e Man Child who was to rule over all nations with a rod of iron ” is said to have been born of a woman who was “ clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of , twelve stars," who, after her son had been “caught up into heaven,” fled “into the wilderness where she hath a place prepared of God” (Rev. xii. 1-6). It seems certain that the writer represents by the woman, not the Virgin Mary, but the Church——tl1e Spiritual Israel; and in later times the letter of the Church of Lyons (Euseb., II.E., v. 1) speaks of the “ Virgin Mother ” as having her children re- stored to her from the dead (meaning that the church received back, as martyrs, those who had ﬁrst recanted and I then renounced their recantation). J11stin Martyr also . protests that, even though he should not be able to prove the pre-existence of Jesus, and even though it should appear that He was born man of men, yet it would still be true I that He is Christ; “for,” adds he, in his dialogue with Trypho (chap. xlviii.; or, ed. Morel], p. 267), “ there are some, 0 my friends, of our race,1 who confess Him to be Christ, but who declare that He is man of - men, to whom I do not assent : nor would very many that have formed the same opinions as I have say as they say, because we have been commanded by Christ Himself not to follow the teach- ings of men, but the proclamations made by the blessed prophets, and taught by Him.” The expression “not very many” (of; 7r}u:ia-rm) indicates that (rt) even in Justin’s time (150 A.D.) a large though not very large number of Christians in Samaria or J udaea believed that Christ was the son of Joseph, and that (b) a principal part of the evidence for the contrary belief was based upon “the proclamations of the prophets.” On the other side, what 1_Another reading {me-r¢'puu would make Justin refer to Jewish Christians; but the inference would remain unaffected. GOSPELS [sv.'or'rtcAL. germs of wild and fanciful doctrine were in the air may be inferred from the Gospel of the Hebrews, which will not allow that Jesus had even a human mother, but speaks of His mother as being the Holy Spirit (liirchhofer, p. 45], and cf. p. 454). In opposition to these divergent but heterodox beliefs, it became increasingly necessary to maintain the doctrine that Jesus was at once a man, born of a human mother, and divine, born of the heavenly Father ; and this needed to be reatlirmed now, during the prosperity of the church, in a somewhat less apologetic tone than characterized the narrative of Matthew. When we speak of Luke’s “supplying the deficiencies of .latthew,” we must not be supposed to mean that Luke had before him, or even knew the existence of, .lattl1ew’s Gospel. It has been shown above that he probably knew of no apostolic written narrative (see p. 806 above). Though Matthew’s was probably written some years before Luke’s Gospel, very many years might elapse before a treatise used in one church or province might be recognized as authori- tative beyond its original boundaries. But by “supply- ing the deﬁeiencies” we mean that the conscience and faith of the church required in Luke's time some further and more vivid embodiment of the spiritual truth involved in the incarnation than was contained in the unsupple- mented narrative of Matthew. For example, it was not a suﬁieient argument against the Jewish slanderers who asserted that Jesus was born of adultery, to say that Joseph, when purposing to put Mary away, was warned by an angel in a dream to give up his purpose. Something more positive, and in a higher tone, not a dream, but an angelic visitation, was needed to confirm the divine origin of the Son of God. Moreover, in order to set forth still more emphatically the subordination of John the Baptist to the Lord, it was needed that the church should know that the prophet (who himself also had his own birth heralded by angels) was from the ﬁrst acknowledged by his parents as the mere forerunner and messenger of Him that was to come, to whom, even in his mother’s womb, the inferior prophet did obeisanee. Further, when Jesus was born, it was not enough that wise and learned men from the East should come to worship Him. It was necessary to show that the- poor and simple toilers of the earth, typiﬁed by night- watching shepherds, were also privileged to behold His glory, and were the ﬁrst to hear with the ear of faith the divine message of the birth of the Redeemer. The testimony offered to the divine Son of David by Zacharias, who represents the priestly tribe of Levi, and by Elisabeth, who was one of the daughters of Aaron,‘-’ and the blessing of Simeon, and of Anna who is said to have been of the distant tribe of Asher,—-all this em- blematic homage from Israel to its Redeemer would be inadequately replaced by Matthew’s brief story of the ﬂight into Egypt; and, although refusing to feed a frivolous curiosity with frivolous legends on the child- hood of Jesus, the church would naturally cherish the story which told how the youthful Redeemer, when missed by Mary and Joseph, was found in Ilis 1"ather’s house. A narrative of this kind, not vulgar nor colloquial, and yet not too reﬁned or scholastic, but framed both in language 9 The importance attached to the co-operation of Levi with the “Lion of the tribe of Judah" is clearly seen in the very early (before 135 A.D.) apocryphal book entitled The Testaments Qf the Twrclre Patriarchs (Sinker, p. 104), in which “ Christ is spoken of as coming forth from the two tribes of Judah and Levi, as typical of His twofold oﬂice of King and Priest.” The symbolism of Origen, as regards Zacharias and Elisabeth is far more fanciful ; he sees ( In la‘:-any. Jomm., ii. 27) in the meanings of Elisabeth (“the oath of my God") and Zacharias (“ memory") a reference to the birth of John (“the gift of God”): “ (‘K -rﬁs -Irtpi Oeoii Mu1'7u-ns Kart‘: 73»! -rot? Geoff 1'7,uci'sv "Opxov -rev rep! I -rails 1ra-répas" (Luke i. 73).