ABSTRACT
If a reader, taking up the first Gospel without any knowledge of the third, or of any later Christian literature bearing on the subject, should confine himself strictly to the statements of Matthew, he would conclude that Joseph the betrothed husband of Mary, discovering that his future wife was with child not by himself, thought of privately putting her away; that the only intimation of the true cause of Mary’s pregnancy was received by him in a dream, in which he thought that the angel of the Lord announced to him that the child had been conceived by the Holy Ghost, and that he should be called Jesus the Saviour, in order to fulfil a prophecy of Isaiah (i. 22–23) that the Messiah should be born of a Virgin; that on the strength of this dream, and of this alone, he took to him Mary his wife, without availing himself of his rights as a husband until after the birth of her firstborn: that after his birth some wise men, or Magi, from the East, who had seen his star, came to Jerusalem, to see if they could find him; that Herod, hearing of their errand, was troubled, and all the people were thrown into alarm; that the chief priests, when questioned as to the birthplace of Messiah or Christ, answered at once that it must be Bethlehem in accordance with a prophecy of Micah (ii. 6); that Herod (7) having ascertained the time at which the Magi had seen the star, sent them to look for the child, bidding them to return to him that he too might go and worship him; that as soon as they set out from Jerusalem, the star which they had once before seen reappeared, and guiding them forwards, stood at last over the very spot where the child was, that after presenting to him in the presence of his mother, Mary, their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod; while Joseph and Mary were in like manner warned to take the child away secretly into Egypt, and that accordingly, in order to fulfil a prophecy of Hosea (15), Joseph took the child and his mother straight from Bethlehem into Egypt, leaving Herod, when he discovered that he had been cheated by the Magi, to command a general massacre of the children in Bethlehem and its neighbourhood, in order to fulfil another prophecy by Jeremiah; that on the death of Herod, Joseph, again taught by an angel in a dream, returned with the child from Egypt, 50but being afraid to go to Jerusalem, went by a side route to Galilee, and took up his abode at Nazareth (23) to fulfil some other prophecies.
