thout it,
it is entirely unintelligible. We know from the recently discovered
ancient Syrian translation of the Gospels that the two streams of
thought--that Christ was the Son of God, and that at the same time he had
an earthly father,--could flow side by side, quite undisturbed, without the
one rendering the other turbid.

It was the misunderstanding of the spiritual birth of Christ from his
divine Father, and even from his divine mother (the Ruach, feminine, the
holy spirit), that appeared to make it necessary to deny him an earthly
father, and to assert that even his human mother did not conceive and give
birth to him in the ordinary way. In the earliest period of the Christian
church this was otherwise. It was considered at that time that in Christ
the divine sonship went hand in hand with the human, and further that the
one without the other would lose its true meaning. In a Syrian palimpsest,
which was recently discovered in the convent at Mount Sinai by Mrs. Smith
Lewis, and which, being written in the fifth century, presupposes a still
older Syrian translator, we now see an original Greek text, probably of
the second century, in which the Davidic genealogy of Joseph (Matthew i.
16) is really the genealogy of Jesus, for it is there said, "Jacob begat
Joseph; Joseph to whom the virgin Mary was espoused begat Jesus, who is
called Christ." In the twenty-first verse it reads also, "And she shall
bear him a son," and in the twenty-fifth verse, "And took unto him his
wife, and she bare him a son, and he called his name Jesus." This purely
human birth of Jesus does not in any manner disturb the belief in his true
divine origin, as the Son of God, as the first-born, the image of God,
whose name was called the Word of God, _i.e._ Logos. On the contrary, it
removes all difficulties with which so many Christians have contended,
openly or in silence, when they asked themselves how it is possible to
conceive a human birth, a human mother, without a human father. Even a
deification of the mother, or even of the grandmother, such as is
proclaimed by the Roman church, does not help any honest soul out of this
mire which has been made by well-meaning but ignorant theologians. The old
Christian philosophers, the old church fathers, saints, and martyrs, alone
give us light and leading. As long as we conceive the divine sonship of
Christ from the Jewish or Greek mythological standpoint, the true divine
nature of Christ remains a mer