MRS. A. S. LEWIS, ON THE GENEALOGIES OF OUR LORD. 19 



bridge." And at once there flashed on me the solution of a 

 difficulty which I have often felt. How could a star visibly 

 move in the sky ? And if the wise men saw a remarkable star 

 to the east of them ; why did they not go off to India ? The 

 fact that they travelled to Palestine shows that the star was 

 in the west when they saw it. They went to Palestine, over 

 which the star appeared to stand, and they could not go further 

 west, because of the sea. 



It happened curiously enough that Dr. Deissmann was 

 visiting us at that time, and as he is one of the first living 

 authorities in Biblical Greek, I took the passage to him. He 

 asked me at once for a Greek Testament, went off to his room 

 to look at it, and in two minutes he returned saying : " You are 

 quite right, the passage may be read just as well, ' We, being 

 in the east, have seen His star.' Such loose constructions are 

 quite common in English." We have not quite forgotten 

 Miss Hobhouse's " To continue the concentration camps is to 

 murder the children," and how an evil suggestion was read into 

 this which she herself has repudiated. 



On the origin and value of these variants opinions must differ. 

 Some further discovery may perhaps tell us whether the Sinai 

 text is older or younger than Tatian's Diatessaron ; and that 

 will no doubt influence greatly the verdict of scholars on this 

 point. What I am anxious about is that the question shall 

 not be prejudged ; and any attempt to fix either the date of 

 the translation or the name of the translator from the evidence 

 we now have appears to me to be fraught with nothing but 

 mischief ; for it discourages people from trying to investigate 

 the facts. Eather let us be content to say " We do not know," 

 when we have not a scrap of evidence to guide us to a true 

 solution. 



Discussion. 



The Chairman said that he felt much indebted to Mrs. Lewis for 

 her able paper : but would not detain the meeting long as the subject 

 was one to which he had not given much study. He thought the 

 instances given of a grandfather being called the father helped one 

 much, and made it easier to understand how different names should 

 appear in the two genealogies. Doubtless what happened was that 

 at first the original " nucleus " was the record of the Evangelists ; but 

 later, when new material came to be added from different sources — 



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