Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/291

Letter 22] the infancy of Jesus, that we find even the compiler of St. Matthew's Gospel apparently ignorant that the home of the parents of Jesus was (if St. Luke is correct on this point) not Bethlehem, but Nazareth. It is hardly possible to deny his ignorance when we find in the First Gospel these words: "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judæa.... And he arose and took the young child and his mother and came into the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judæa, he was afraid to go thither; and being warned [of God] in a dream, he withdrew into the parts of Galilee and came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth." Obviously the writer is ignorant that "a city called Nazareth" was the original home of the parents of Jesus, and that they had no reason for returning to "Judæa;" his whole narrative assumes that Bethlehem in Judæa was the home, and that the parents of Jesus were only prevented from returning thither by the fear of Archelaus, which forced them to leave their native city and to take up their abode in "a city called Nazareth." Now it is probable that St. Luke's account is here the correct one, and that the erroneous tradition found in the First Gospel was a mere inference from the prophecy that "from Bethlehem" there should "come forth a governor." But what a light does this discrepancy throw upon the uncertainty of the very earliest traditions about the infancy of Jesus when we find the only two Evangelists who say anything about it, differing as to the place where the parents of Jesus lived at the time when they were married! I have no doubt that St. Luke did his best, in the paucity, or more probably in the variety, of conflicting traditions, to select those which seemed to him most authoritative and most spiritual. Even the most careless reader of the English text must feel, without knowing a word of Greek, that St. Luke's first two chapters—which contain the stories of the infancy—are entirely