God, and his mother knew it,
why should she worry about his being missing from the caravan?
Couldn't God take care of himself and find his way back to Nazareth at
any time he wished to go? On another occasion, mentioned by all the
synoptics, when Jesus was teaching, his mother and brethren are
reported as calling for him, evidently for the purpose of restraining
him in his work, or persuading him to desist,--and this is the
interpretation that has been most generally given to these passages,
and the answer which Jesus gave supports it as correct,--such a course
is entirely inconsistent with any conception that his mother at the
time _knew_ him to be the supernaturally born Son of God.

Turning now to the Fourth Gospel, we have not only an entirely
different character, but an entirely different philosophy as to his
life and mission. Not a word is said or anywhere hinted about a divine
birth. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God.... and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us."
To state it in the simplest words I can command, the theory of the
Fourth Gospel is that of the old Alexandrian philosophy of the
incarnation of the Divine Logos, or Word, or message from God, in human
flesh, applied to Jesus of Nazareth. His pure and simple manhood is
recognized, into which, in some mystical manner, nowhere explained, the
Divine Logos, or Word, or Life, or God Himself, entered into _the man_
Jesus, whereby he became the Son of God and the Messiah,--and not by
the process of miraculous generation in the flesh. The old Ebionite
doctrine was that this Divine Logos, or Word, or Spirit of God entered
Jesus at his baptism, and that he thereby became the Messiah,
distinctively "the Son of God" by divine selection, and not by
supernatural generation.

There is no evidence that his disciples during his lifetime ever had
the slightest conception that he had a supernatural birth. When Philip
tells Nathaniel that he has found the Messiah of whom Moses and the
prophets wrote, he also tells him that this Messiah is "Jesus of
Nazareth, the son of Joseph."

Even after the death of Jesus the disciples seem to have had no
knowledge of any supernatural birth. The two on their way to Emmaus,
after the crucifixion, express their disappointment: "We hoped that it
was he who should redeem Israel." No such expression of disappointment
can possibly be reconciled with any thought that this Jesus who