Note 3 — Chapter XII · FAILURE OF THE LOGIA THEORY

But it fares no better when confronted with the opening chapters of Luke. For the Blass school these are to be dated 50–60. Already Luke’s “many”3 had drawn up their narratives; and these, we are to suppose, included the miracle story of the birth of John, the Annunciation, the kinship and intercourse of Elizabeth and Mary, the preparation of John “in the desert,” a different account of the birth at Bethlehem, the appearance of the Divine Child in the Temple, and all the rest of it; but no mention of the flight into Egypt. We are asked to believe that all these added narratives were current among the faithful “from the first,” but that Mark and Matthew did not see fit to include them in their Gospels, though Matthew saw reason to tell of the flight into Egypt, and Luke to suppress it. Whatever may be the outcome of the “liberal” method of handling the Gospels, it is safe to say that this will never appease the critical spirit. The “gospel of the Infancy” thus embodied in Luke is visibly cognate with the “apocryphal” gospels which were never allowed into the canon, but were more or less popular in the Church. A compromise between traditionalism and the statistical method may set up the position that the stories were current from the first, although all fictitious; but this involves the awkward consequence that the whole atmosphere “from the first” is one of unrestrained invention. Would the inventors of all these myths have any scruple about putting in the mouth of “the Lord” any medley of teachings collected from the present and the past?