es to
illuminate certain truths of Christ's message and teaching that the
other Gospels do not. Mark, the earliest Gospel, does not refer to the
miraculous birth. At the commencements of Matthew and Luke you will read
of it, and it is to be noted that the rest of these narratives curiously
and naively contradict it. Now why do we find the miraculous birth in
these Gospels if it had not been inserted in order to prove, in a
manner acceptable to simple and unlettered minds, the Theory of the
Incarnation, Christ's preexistence? I do not say the insertion was
deliberate. And it is difficult for us moderns to realize the polemic
spirit in which the Gospels were written. They were clearly not written
as history. The concern of the authors, I think, was to convert their
readers to Christ.

"When we turn to John, what do we find? In the opening verses of this
Gospel the Incarnation is explained, not by a virgin birth, but in a
manner acceptable to the educated and spiritually-minded, in terms of
the philosophy of the day. And yet how simply! 'In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' I prefer John's
explanation.

"It is historically true that, in the earlier days when the Apostles'
Creed was put forth, the phrase 'born of they Virgin Mary' was inserted
for the distinct purpose of laying stress on the humanity of Christ, and
to controvert the assertion of the Gnostic sect that he was not born at
all, but appeared in the world in some miraculous way.

"Thus to-day, by the aid of historical research, we are enabled to
regard the Creeds in the light of their usefulness to life. The myth of
the virgin birth probably arose through the zeal of some of the writers
of the Gospels to prove that the prophecy of Isaiah predicted the advent
of the Jewish Messiah who should be born of a virgin. Modern scholars
are agreed that the word Olmah which Isaiah uses does not mean virgin,
but young woman. There is quite a different Hebrew word for 'virgin.'
The Jews, at the time the Gospels were written, and before, had
forgotten their ancient Hebrew. Knowing this mistake, and how it arose,
we may repeat the word Virgin Mary in the sense used by many early
Christians, as designating the young woman who was the mother of Christ.

"I might mention one or two other phrases, archaic and obscure. 'The
Resurrection of the Body' may refer to the phenomenon of Christ's
reappearance after death, for which modern psyc