ethical standard, will more fully appear as we
proceed. He came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it,--not by
dying on the cross, for the law nowhere says, or even intimates,
anything about anybody dying on a cross or anywhere else. He came to
fulfill it by living up to its full ethical and spiritual import, and
teaching others to do so. "Moses had summed up the law in ten
commandments, the Pharisees of the time of Jesus had made of these ten
thousand--to be exact, six hundred and thirteen--and Jesus reduced them
to two,"--and kept them. This is how he fulfilled the law.

Next, Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary by the same process of
natural generation by which all other human beings come into the world.
Paul, the earliest and most elaborate writer of the New Testament,
nowhere gives us the remotest hint that he had ever heard of any such a
thing as the supernatural birth; and it is wholly unthinkable that if
such had been the truth he should have been ignorant of it; or that if
it sustained such a vital relation to the Christian system of religion
to which he devoted his whole life, he should never in the remotest
manner refer to it.

Mark's gospel, written to the best of our knowledge about fifty years
after the death of Jesus, nowhere refers to it. As we have already
seen, we do not know what the Apostle Matthew may have written, as we
do not have his original writing at all. The early Ebionite copies of
the Greek translation and transcription did not contain the first two
chapters, and consequently no reference to the supernatural birth. We
are left to fall back on Luke and we will have to examine his story a
little in detail. In all of its details, including the genealogy, it
is quite different from that in Matthew. Luke alone mentions the visit
to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve years old, and in which he was
missed from the company when they started on the return home. When
Joseph and Mary found him in the temple, she is quoted as saying, "Son,
why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold thy father and I have sought
thee sorrowing." Now, if Jesus was _not_ really the son of Joseph, but
of the Holy Ghost, his mother certainly knew it; and if so her
statement, "_thy father_ and I have sought thee sorrowing," was not
only a deliberate untruth; but if Jesus was God, he also knew it was an
untruth. Another inconsistency in the story is, that if Jesus was thus
the son of the Holy Ghost, and therefore