with the
doctrine of the Angel-Messiah has been without avail, although the most
learned Christian divines, for many generations past, have endeavored to
do so.

So, too, of the stories of the Presentation in the Temple,[133:2] and of
the child Jesus at Jerusalem,[133:3] _Joseph is called his father_.
Jesus is repeatedly described as _the son of the carpenter_,[133:4] or
the _son of Joseph_, without the least indication that the expression is
not strictly in accordance with the fact.[133:5]

If his parents fail to understand him when he says, at twelve years old,
that he must be about his Father's business;[133:6] if he afterwards
declares that he finds no faith among his nearest relations;[133:7] if
he exalts his faithful disciples above his _unbelieving mother_ and
brothers;[133:8] above all, if Mary and her other sons put down his
prophetic enthusiasm to _insanity_;[133:9]--then the untrustworthy
nature of these stories of his birth is absolutely certain. If even a
_little_ of what they tell us had been true, then _Mary at least_ would
have believed in Jesus, and would not have failed so utterly to
understand him.[133:10]

The Gospel of Mark--which, in this respect, at least, abides most
faithfully by the old apostolic tradition--says not a word about
Bethlehem or _the miraculous birth_. The congregation of Jerusalem to
which Mary and the brothers of Jesus belonged,[133:11] and over which
the eldest of them, James, presided,[133:12] can have known nothing of
it; for the later Jewish-Christian communities, the so-called Ebionites,
who were descended from the congregation at Jerusalem, called Jesus _the
son of Joseph_. Nay, the story that the _Holy Spirit_ was the father of
Jesus, must have risen among the _Greeks_, or elsewhere, and not among
the first believers, who were Jews, for the Hebrew word for _spirit_ is
of _the feminine gender_.[134:1]

The immediate successors of the "congregation at Jerusalem"--to which
Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brothers belonged--were, as we have
seen, the Ebionites. Eusebius, the first ecclesiastical historian (born
A. D. 264), speaking of the _Ebionites_ (_i. e._ "poor men"), tell us
that they believed Jesus to be "_a simple and common man_," born as
other men, "_of Mary and her husband_."[134:2]

The views held by the Ebionites of Jesus were, it is said, derived from
the Gospel of Matthew, _and what they learned direct from the Apostles_.
Matthew had been a hearer of Je