indeed difficult to see how
men can read the Benedictus or Magnificat without realizing this.
Every verse in them is full of Jewish thought and Jewish
expressions, such as would have been impossible had they been the
inventions of a later date.

--
# Chase, Supernatural Elements in our Lord's Earthly Life.
--

That is to say, these two chapters bear traces on the face of them
of being what they profess to be--a true and genuine account of
the human Birth of Jesus Christ, received ultimately from her who
alone could be competent to give it--the Virgin-Mother herself. For
it must be Mary's account if it is genuine. It is given to us by
St. Luke, who tells us that he "had traced the course of all things
accurately from the first," and who had gathered information
concerning, be it observed, "those things which are most surely
believed among the disciples."* "It is an account," says Bishop
Gore, "which there is no evidence to show the imagination of an
early Christian capable of producing; for its consummate fitness,
reserve, sobriety, and loftiness are unquestionable. What solid
reason is there for not accepting it?"+ It is extraordinarily
difficult to imagine that St. Luke, whose accuracy and care have
been, in recent years, so severely tested and found not wanting,
should have been so careless as to append to his Gospel a spurious
account of so momentous an occurrence as the human Birth of our
Lord. "Historical accuracy is not a capricious and intermittent
impulse," writes Bishop Alexander. "It is a fixed habit of mind,
the result of a particular discipline. Historians of the school
of the author of the Acts of the Apostles are not men to build a
flamboyant portal of romance over the entrance to the austere
temple of truth."#

--
* St. Luke i. 1-4.
+ Gore, Dissertations, p. 18.
# Bishop Alexander's Leading Ideas of the Gospels, pp. 154, 155.
--

(2) The account in St. Matthew's Gospel, if genuine, must have
come from Joseph. It is his perplexities which are in question,
and Divine intimations are given to him, on three occasions,
how to act for the safety of the mother and the Child. The facts
which appear in the Third Gospel are clearly prior to those
reported in the First: the Annunciation, Mary's visit to Judaea,
her return to Nazareth, precede Joseph's discovery and dream,
which follow appropriately upon the Virgin's return. How this
account has been preserved in the First Gospel we do not know,
for we kn