The Virgin Birth of Christ. 257 as usual, to recount the Virgin birth. It is not a contradiction, if Matthew is silent on the earlier residence in Nazareth, which Luke’s object led him fully to describe. SILENCE OF MARK AND JOHN . The objection on which most stress is . laid (apart from what is called the evidently “mythical” character of the narra tives) is the silence on the Virgin birth in the remaining Gos pels, and other parts of the New Testament. This, it is held, conclusively proves that the Virgin birth was not known in the earliest Christian circles, and was a legend of later origin. As respects the Gospels—Mark and John—the objection would only apply if it was the design of these Gospels to narrate, as the others do, the circumstances of the nativity. But this was evidently not their design. Both Mark and John knew that Jesus had a human birth—an infancy and early life—and that His mother was called Mary, but of deliberate purpose they tell us nothing about it. Mark begins his Gospel with Christ’s entrance on His public ministry, and says nothing of the period before, especially of how Jesus came to be called “the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). John traces the divine descent of Jesus, and tells us that the “Word became flesh” ' (John 1:14) ; but how this miracle of becoming flesh was wrought he does not say. It did not lie within his plan. He knew the church tradi tion on the subject: he had the Gospels narrating the birth of Jesus from the Virgin in his hands: and he takes the knowl edge of their teaching for granted. To speak of contradiction in a case like this is out of the question. SILENCE OF PAUL. How far Paul was acquainted with the facts of Christ’s earthly origin it is not.easy to say. To a certain extent these facts would always b« regarded as among the privacies of the innermost Christian circles—so long at least as Mary lived— and the details may not have been fully known till the Gospels
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