59.  How completely foreign all this is to the apostolic thought and feeling is clear when we notice that excepting the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke the New Testament tells us nothing whatever of the years which preceded John the Baptist’s ministry in the wilderness.  The gospels are books of testimony to what men had seen and heard (John i. 14); and the epistles are practical interpretations of the same in its bearing on religious life and hope.  The apostles found no difficulty in recognizing the divinity and sinlessness of their Lord without inquiring how he came into the world or how he spent his early years; it was what he showed himself to be, not how he came to be, that formed their conception of him.  Yet the early chapters of Matthew and Luke should not be classed with the later legends.  Notwithstanding the attempts of Keim to associate the narratives of the infancy in the canonical and apocryphal gospels, a great gulf separates them:  on the one side there is a reverent and beautiful reserve, on the other indelicate, unlovely, and trivial audacity.

60.  The gospel narratives have, however, perplexities of their own, for the two accounts agree only in the main features,—­the miraculous birth in Bethlehem in the days of Herod, Mary being the mother and Joseph the foster-father, and Nazareth the subsequent residence.  In further details they are quite different, and at first sight seem contradictory.  Moreover, while Matthew sheds a halo of glory over the birth of Jesus, Luke draws a picture of humble circumstances and obscurity.  These differences, taken with the silence of the rest of the New Testament concerning a miraculous birth, constitute a real difficulty.  To many it seems strange that the disciples and the brethren of Jesus did not refer to these things if they knew them to be true.  But it must not be overlooked that any familiar reference to the circumstances of the birth of Jesus which are narrated in the gospels would have invited from the Jews simply a challenge of the honor of his home.  Moreover, as the knowledge of these wonders did not keep Mary from misunderstanding her son (Luke ii. 19, 51; compare Mark in. 21, 31-35), the publication of them could hardly have helped greatly the belief of others.  The fact that Mary was so perplexed by the course of Jesus in his ministry makes it probable that even until quite late in her life she “kept these things and pondered them in her heart.”

61.  No parts of the New Testament are challenged so widely and so confidently as these narratives of the infancy.  But if they are not to be credited with essential truth it is necessary to show what ideas cherished in the apostolic church could have led to their invention.  That John and Paul maintain the divinity of their Lord, yet give no hint that this involved a miraculous birth, shows that these stories are no necessary outgrowth of that doctrine.  The early Christians whether Jewish or Gentile would