SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY. 337 



and he never recognized his foster-father Joseph as 

 his real parent. Joseph, indeed, wanted to leave his 

 betrothed when he found her pregnant without his 

 interference. He gave up this idea when an angel 

 appeared to him in a dream and pacified him. As it 

 is expressly stated in the first chapter of Matthew 

 (vv. 24, 25), there was no sexual intercourse between 

 Joseph and Mary until after Jesus was born. 



The statement of the apocryphal gospels, that the 

 Roman officer Pandera was the true father of Christ, 

 seems all the more credible when we make a careful 

 anthropological study of the personality of Christ. 

 He is generally regarded as purely Jewish. Yet the 

 characteristics which distinguish his high and noble 

 personality, and which give a distinctive impress to 

 his religion, are certainly not Semitical ; they are 

 rather features of the higher Aryan race, and espe- 

 cially of its noblest branch, the Hellenes. Now, the 

 name of Christ's real father, "Pandera," points 

 unequivocally to a Greek origin ; in one manuscript, 

 in fact, it is written " Pandora." Pandora was, 

 according to the Greek mythology, the first woman, 

 born of the earth by Vulcan and adorned with every 

 charm by the gods, who was espoused by Epimetheus, 

 and sent by Zeus to men with the dread " Pandora- 

 box," containing every evil, in punishment for the 

 stealing of divine fire from heaven by Prometheus. 



And it is interesting to see the different reception 

 that the love-story of Miriam has met with at the 

 hands of the four great Christian nations of civilized 

 Europe. The stern morality of the Teutonic races 

 entirely repudiates it ; the righteous German and the 

 prudish Briton prefer to believe blindly in the 

 impossible thesis of a conception " by the Holy 



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