16 MRS. A. S. LEWIS, ON THE GENEALOGIES OP OUR LORD. 



verse 16 had been altered in the early centuries, and so they 

 translated it " Now." 



Is " Now " right ? I allow that the small particle Be might 

 be so rendered, and that it is not so emphatic a disjunctive as 

 aWa, but it is surely significant that our revisers have rendered 

 Be as " but " in Matthew i, 20, Matthew ii, 19, 22, and in 162 

 other passages of the same Gospel. 



If you will accept my " But " the whole narrative is brought 

 into harmony ; and the quibbles of those who find in it two 

 narratives pieced together are rendered useless. 



There are also other considerations. Joseph was more than 

 the foster-father of our Lord. He was a legal parent. Without 

 him there would be no sense in Matthew's giving us that 

 genealogy, and a very insufficient basis for the claim of Jesus to 

 be the son of David. Descent in that royal house was never 

 through a woman, and never is so, even in our own enlightened 

 age, except where the male line has utterly failed. Joseph 

 deserved the high honour, for he threw the shield of his 

 protection over Mary at a most trying time, and his faithfulness 

 to. her brought it about that our Lord was born in wedlock. 



Semitic custom invariably gives the child of a woman's first 

 husband to her second one. This rule is the same in old Arab 

 custom, in Moslem law, and in Hindu law. Tor proof of this 

 I refer you to IJobertson Smith's XinsJn^:) and Marriage in 

 Ancient Arabia, pp. 109-120, to Sir Henry Maine's Dissertation 

 on Early Law and Custom, p. 20. 



The Syriac versions bring out the position of the Virgin 

 Mary in regard to Joseph much more clearly than the Greek 

 MSS. There is an unfortunate ambiguity about the fxefxyr^Grev- 

 fievrjv of Luke i, 27, and a, still greater one about our word 

 " espoused." I hold that the claim of the Ferrar reading found 

 in the Greek versions of that group 13 w ixvrjorevOelaa Trapdevo^ 

 'Mapta/jb iyevvrjcrev ^Irjaovv tov Xeyo/uievov Is^piarov, to be the 

 original reading is greatly weakened by its being rendered 

 in the Latin of Codex Bez^e, " Civi desponsata virgo Maria peperit 

 Chi'istum Jesnmr This is quite at variance with the facts. 

 Mary was much more than betrothed to Joseph at the time 

 of our Lord's birth. She had the full legal status of his wife ; 

 else how, I may ask, could she have travelled with him to 

 Bethlehem ? All Oriental ideas of propriety would have been 

 outraged if it had been otherwise. The early Syriac versions 

 leave us in no doubt on this point. When the visit of the Angel 

 to Mary is related by Matthew, whether in the old Syriac of the 

 second century or in the Pcshitta of the very early fifth, the 



