e phrase. When, however, we call to our aid
the most orthodox and enlightened men of the second century, we find that
such men as Justin, Tatian, Theophilus, Athenagoras, Apollonius(30) and
Clement, to say nothing of Origen, believed in Jesus as the only begotten
son of God(31) in the sense which these words had at that time for every
one who spoke and thought in Greek. This Son is often represented as
distinguishable from the Father, but not as separable. Of a Son of God in
the Jewish sense of the word, of a descendant of David, the evangelist
would never have said that all things were made by him. That could be
affirmed only of the true Son of God, of the Logos, as the thought of God,
which is uttered in the visible world.

In what sense this Logos was recognised in Jesus, is certainly a difficult
question, and here the work of Celsus would have been of great use to us,
for he expressly states that he has no objection to the Logos idea; but
how philosophers could accept an incarnation(32) of this Logos in Jesus,
was beyond his understanding. It must be borne in mind that matter and
flesh were held by Celsus to be something so unclean, that according to
him the Deity could only operate on matter by means of an endless number
of intermediaries (a true _foetus oeonum_). This obscurity in the conception
of Jesus as Logos by the Christian church is the reason why Celsus does
not regard Joseph as the natural father of Jesus, but Panthera. Origen, of
course, denounces this very indignantly; and the legend is nothing more
than one of the many calumnies, which are nearly always to be traced among
the opponents of a new religion and its founders. For the true nature and
the divine birth of Christ, as Origen himself seems to feel, such a story
would naturally have no significance whatever. It remains true, however,
that no writer of authority of the second and third centuries has clearly
explained in what sense the Christian church conceived Jesus as the Logos.

Three conceptions are possible. The first appears to have been that of the
Fourth Gospel, that the Logos, in all its fulness, as the Son, who in the
beginning was with God and was God, by whom all things were made, became
flesh in Jesus, and that this Jesus gave to those who believed in him as
Logos the power themselves to become sons of God, born like him not of
blood nor of the will of flesh, but of God. This may also explain why the
legendary details of the birth of Ch