had so
recently been crucified was the "eternal Son of God" incarnated in
human flesh. On the day of Pentecost Peter speaks of him in no higher
terms than "A man approved of God."

If Jesus was supernaturally born, as a matter of course his mother knew
it all the time; yet during the whole life of Jesus she is nowhere
mentioned as giving the slightest intimation of it; but on the contrary
all the record we have of anything she did do or say would naturally
lead to just the opposite conclusion. Of course no one else knew
anything about it. Taking it naturally for granted, that at least at
the beginning, his disciples knew nothing of it, if they ever learned
it afterwards, there must have been some special time, condition or
circumstance under which they came into possession of these remarkable
facts. Yet, there is not a hint in the New Testament about any such
time, place, circumstance or incident.

How then did the idea of a supernatural birth and the deification of
Jesus come about, if it was not a real fact? Very simply and quite
naturally. Any one acquainted with ancient history knows that in that
age of the world, and for centuries before, it had been almost a
universal custom, especially in Greece and the Roman empire, to
attribute some supernatural origin to, and deify their
heroes,--sometimes while they were yet alive, but most certainly after
their death. Just so, after the death of this remarkable man, and his
cult continued to gather adherents, time and distance lent perspective,
and he naturally grew larger and greater in their estimation, until,
naturally and inevitably, permeated by the universal thought of the age
in which they lived, they gradually came to look more and more upon
their great master as being something more than ordinarily human, until
this thought gradually ripened into his deification; and of course to
be consistent with this he _must have been_, like all other deified
heroes, supernaturally born. And out of this the legend of Bethlehem,
in both its forms, in Matthew and Luke, somehow grew,--nobody knows
exactly how. It is just like many other myths of past ages. The first
we know of them they are full grown and complete; yet, like all other
things, they _must_ have had a natural and gradual growth.

As to where he was born we do not know, nor is it material. It is by
far the most probable that he was born at Nazareth where his parents
lived. The legend that he was born at