The second question was asked even during Jesus’ lifetime—­“Whence hath this Man these things?” The New Testament writers deal with the question of Jesus’ origin in a variety of ways.  The earliest of our present gospels opens its narrative with the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus as He answers John’s summons to baptism.  It seems to explain His uniqueness by the extraordinary spiritual endowment bestowed upon Him in manhood.  The first and third gospels contain besides this two other traditions:  they introduce Jesus as the descendant of a line of devout progenitors, going back in the one case to David and Abraham, and in the other still further through Adam to God.  They bring forward His spiritual heredity as one factor to account for Him.  Side by side with this they place a narrative which records His birth, not as the Son of Joseph through whom His ancestry is traced, but of the Holy Spirit and a virgin-mother.  This gives prominence to the Divine and human parentage which brought Him into the world.  In Paul and John and the Epistle to the Hebrews, there is incarnate in Jesus a preexistent heavenly Being—­the Man from heaven, the Word who was from the beginning with God, the Son through whom He made the worlds.  They present us with a Divine Being made a man.  This last conception is not combined by any New Testament writer with a virgin-birth.  When our New Testament books were put together, the Church found all four statements in its Canon, and combined them (although some of them are not easily combined) in its account of Jesus’ origin.

Historical scholars have difficulty in tracing any of these accounts but the first directly to Jesus Himself; but they come from the earliest period of the Church, and they have satisfied many generations of thoughtful Christians as explanations of the uniqueness of the Person of their Lord.  Some of them do not seem to be as helpful to modern believers, and are even said to render Him less intelligible.  We must beware on the one hand of insisting too strongly that a believer in Jesus Christ shall hold a particular view of His origin; the diversity in the New Testament presentations of Christ would not be there, if all its writers considered all four of these statements necessary in every man’s conception of his Lord.  And on the other hand, we must point out that it is a tribute to Jesus’ greatness that so many circumstances were appealed to to account for Him, and that all of them have spiritual value.  All four insist that Jesus’ origin is in God, and that in Jesus we find the Divine in the human.  All four—­a spiritual endowment, a spiritual heredity, a spiritual birth, the incarnation of God in Man—­may well seem congruous with the Jesus of our experience, even if we are not intellectually satisfied with the particular modes in which these affirmations have been made in the past.  The question of Jesus’ origin is not of primary importance; He Himself judged nothing by its antecedents, but by its results—­“By