Annet Peter
The Miraculous Conception
Joseph dreamed that he saw an angel, that the angel told him his wife was with child by God himself, (the Holy Ghost being God), and ver. 24, "Then Joseph being raised from his sleep, did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him, and took unto him his wife." But did Joseph dream? Perhaps he did; but whether he did or did not, clear enough it is that he, and he alone, could relate that he had dreamed; whether or not he did make such a relation we are not told, but we are left to infer that he did, because somebody, nobody knows who, has written that he did say he had dreamed. But if he had dreamed, and had personally related his dream to every one of us, would that be any reason for our believing that God had got his wife with child, and that an angel had been sent to tell him so? Talk of blasphemy; in what can this relation be paralleled as blasphemous, except indeed by the grossest credulity? A poor, ignorant man relates a dream, and all the world are called upon not only to believe his relation of that dream, absurd, abominable, and ridiculous as it is, but to place their everlasting happiness upon the absurd relation, to inculcate a belief for it into their children, to waste their substance in paying people to preach it, and to persecute to death those whose minds cannot receive the monstrous doctrine as undoubted truth. Moral evidence there is none, there can be none; – there is nothing in the story which can be compared and contrasted; there is nothing out of it which can elucidate it; it is nothing more than a pretended relation of a credulous man —That he, being a sleep, had dreamed a dream.:
According to the account given by St. Luke, not one word of all this story is true.
St. Luke. Chap. I. – Here the story is altogether, from the beginning to the end, a different one from that told by Matthew. Here there is no account,
1. Of Mary being found with child.
2. Of Joseph's intention to put her away.
3. Of Joseph's dreaming.
4. Of the angel appearing to him.
5. Of his changing his mind, and resolving to keep her.
It should be observed, that these five items include the whole account in Matthew. So, in Luke, not one of the circumstances related are told by Matthew. In Matthew, Joseph is made the important personage, while poor Mary seems to have been ignorant of all that was passing; in Luke she is made the important personage, and poor Joseph is now as ignorant as Mary was according to the former relation.
Luke's account is indeed very circumstantial, he says it was the angel Gabriel who visited Mary, but although he relates the very words which passed between them, it does not appear that Mary knew she was conversing with an angel; he did not announce himself as an angel, nor is there one word in the dialogue between them which can fairly be said to indicate any such understanding on the part of Mary: she does not appear to have been at all surprised at the visit, private and abrupt as it was. "She was troubled at his saying," not at his presence, "and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be;" at this salutation she might, to be sure, be somewhat confounded, although she immediately afterwards submitted herself so humbly to her guest. "All these things she kept in her heart," for it does not appear that she communicated any of them to her husband; to him she never opened her lips on the subject; no angel visited him, sleeping or waking, to tell him of it; nothing is said about his "knowing her not till she had brought forth her first-born" they lived together in the ordinary way of poor people, as man and wife, until she was brought to bed in a stable, Joseph all the time considering the child as his.
Luke's story, stripped of its verbiage, is this: – The angel Gabriel was sent by God to Mary, who was espoused to Joseph. The angel addresses her very familiarly – she becomes alarmed, and the angel tells her she shall "conceive in her womb, and bring forth a son, and shall call his name Jesus." Mary, in her simplicity, asks how that can be, "seeing I know not a man." The angel replies, – "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee." And Mary says, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word." Mary then went to her cousin Elizabeth, who lived at a distance "in the hill-country, where she staid about three months," and then she came home again. Afterwards Joseph and Mary go to Bethlehem to be taxed, (enrolled); here Mary is delivered in a stable, there being no room in the inn.
A Mr. Le Clerc, a very learned, that is, a very bookish man, made what he called a harmony of the Evangelists; he puts the relation of Luke first, and supposes all that he relates, happened to Mary, before Joseph and she got together: and that she concealed from him all that had passed between her and the angel Gabriel, and between her and Elizabeth; and that Joseph being left in utter ignorance of all that had passed, resolved to put her away. To prevent this, says the learned Doctor, an angel appeared to him in a dream (what does appearing in a dream mean, simply in his imagination) and told him the story as related by Matthew. The learned Doctor says: "Joseph being awaked from his dream, perceived it had been sent by God, as well because Mary, upon his enquiry, related to him what had happened to her just after the same manner as the angel had told him in his sleep."