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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.
Following the fragmentary hints to be found here and there in patristic and mystical theology, he assumes that virgin-spousals and virgin-birth were to have been the law in that Paradise from which man lapsed back into natural conditions through sin; that in the case of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph the paradisaic law was but resumed in this respect.
But if I may venture a personal judgement, I cannot see that even the Apostles' creed will be able to retain its place as a summary of essential Christianity. The articles which deal with the Descent into Hades and the Resurrection of the Body, and perhaps those which deal with the Virgin-Birth and Ascension of our Lord, are dubious, if not false, and cannot fairly be regarded as indispensable.
There is reason to believe that, sooner or later, the doctrine of the virgin-birth, with its only too evident dependence upon classic mythology and its obvious violation of biological facts, will be resigned and Jesus acknowledged to have been born as all men are. We moderns see no shame in such biological facts.
To crown the absurdity of the whole, we are given two genealogies of Joseph, who is no relation to Jesus at all, if the story of the virgin-birth be true, while none is given of Mary, through whom alone Jesus is said to have derived his humanity. We have, therefore, no genealogy at all of Jesus in the Gospels.
We must regard life as essentially female, since there is no choice but to look upon living forms which have no sex as female, and since we know that in many of the lower forms of life there is possible what is called parthenogenesis or virgin-birth.
At the moment then when Sirius, the star from the East, by coming to the Meridian at midnight signalled the Sun's new birth, the Virgin was seen just rising on the Eastern sky the horizon line passing through her centre. And many people think that this astronomical fact is the explanation of the very widespread legend of the Virgin-birth.
If, on the other hand, he was the divinization of some actual man, more or less known either personally or by tradition to his fellows, then in all probability the name of his mortal mother would be recognized and accepted; but as to his father, that side of parentage being, as we have said, generally very uncertain, it would be easy to suppose some heavenly Annunciation, the midnight visit of a God, and what is usually termed a Virgin-birth.
Those doctrines which we have described in the preceding chapters doctrines of Sin and Sacrifice, a Savior, the Eucharist, the Trinity, the Virgin-birth, and so forth were in their various forms seething, so to speak, all around. It was impossible for any new religious synthesis to escape them; all it could do would be to appropriate them, and to give them perhaps a color of its own.
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