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interpolation; the statement that our Lord, though He was sitting on the well when His disciples left Him at Sychar, was found by them when they returned, standing and talking to the woman, and many other little points of a like kind. A recent critic of my book The Old Syriac Gospels, the Rev. Dr. Moffatt, who has shown himself slow to adopt new theories like Sir William Ramsay's South Galatian one, judges them to be due to revision rather than to an original text. I do not think So. It cannot be due to revision when the supposed discrepancy between St. John and the Synoptists as to the scene of our Lord's trial has quite disappeared by the rearrangements of the matter in the XVIIIth chapter of St. John's Gospel,* whereby verse 24 is restored to its true place after verse 13; my discovery, partly at Sinai and partly at home, that the Greek word πpтоя ог πрŵтоν (for and B differ) in John i, 41, was originally pwï, that the two dots over the last letter of this word caused it to be mistaken for a 7, and that Andrew found his brother Simon not after the tenth hour, but at the dawn of the next day after his meeting with the Saviour (a reading found also in three of the best Latin MSS. a.e.r.) as mane." Dr. Burkitt accepted this reading immediately after I had published it in the Expository Times, and he made the further suggestion that Luke vi, 1, with its impossible grammar (in some MSS.) is capable of a similar solution. Dr. Wilkins, of T.C.D., has pointed out another instance in the Odyssey, book xxiv, line 24, where for the last twenty years all editors have printed рw instead οι πρῶτος οι πρῶτον. These and many other things cannot surely be due to revision; quite probably they are records from the memory of some of the early disciples. Dr. Moffatt approves of those in John i, 41, John xviii, 13, 24, 14, and Luke xvii, 10. These might have predisposed him in favour of the others. To one of these I wish to draw your attention, before I close, as it is connected with the Birth story. The Sinai text makes the wise men say in Matthew ii, 2, "We have seen His star from the east, and are come to worship him." One day I happened to be transcribing this passage: and I asked myself, "What can 'from the east' mean?" Is there any justification for it in the Greek? Looking closely at the original text, I saw that if you take it to be a loose construction, common in popular speech, you might just as easily read, "We, being in the east, have seen His star," as you might say, "I have seen Brooks' comet in Cam

*This was perceived by Dr. Martin Luther in his translation of the Bible into German, edit. 1558, 1664.

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 Diatessarōn; 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. Rather 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

these sources caused the variety. But the fact that no attempt was made in early times to make the two genealogies agree by cutting out, or adding, spoke well for the honesty of transcribers. He understood that the usually accepted theory was that both were genealogies of Joseph: but the other theory made the matter easier of reconciliation. Mrs. Lewis' explanation of the vision of the star as suggested by the Sinai MS. was very interesting, and quite reconcilable with the Greek. The only difficulty was, as the star in this case would be in the west, why did not the wise men travel on from Bethlehem till they reached the sea. He asked Mrs. Lewis to explain on what grounds the revisers had rejected "wife" for "betrothed."

Canon GIRDLESTONE said: All will join in thanking Mrs. Lewis for her interesting paper on a subject of very ancient dispute. If I differ from her it will not be taken that I do not appreciate her case, and it may add interest to the discussion. Our subject involves the study of Jewish methods of registration. St. Matthew traces the line of Joseph down from the patriarchs; St. Luke traces it up to our first parents, and so to God. If we turn to I Chron. vi, we find two genealogies of Samuel, one going down and the other up, and with several variations of names. I discussed them in the Expositor for November, 1899. In Josephus' life there is a reference to the fact that at certain times genealogies had to be re-copied, and this would possibly lead to mistakes and omissions. The first of the three missing names in St. Matthew begins with the same letters as the name that follows (whether in Hebrew or in Greek), and this may account for the omission, though the theory held by Mrs. Lewis seems quite a reasonable one. The complications round Zerubbabel's name are considerable. Salathiel was probably son of Neri of Nathan's line, and Zerubbabel the son of Pedaiah was adopted by him. Something similar happened in the case of Joseph. view was worked out by Julius Africanus, one of the most learned men of his age. Hammurabi's code deals with adoption and is at the

This

root of Jewish law. The 188th section orders that if a man teaches his adopted son a handicraft no one can take the lad away from him. This was evidently done by Joseph in the case of Jesus, who was his legally adopted son. Two royal lines converged in the carpenter. If the crown of David had been assigned to his successor in the days of Herod it would have been placed on the head of Joseph. And who would have been the legal successor to Joseph Jesus of

Nazareth would have been then the King of the Jews, and the title on the Cross spoke the truth. God had raised Him up to the house of David.

Mr. MARTIN ROUSE said: It is a pleasure indeed to listen to the result of new research made by one of those two ladies who brought to light the most ancient Syriac version of the Diatessaron and who, to establish and enlarge their discoveries, made three more pilgrimages to the remote library of Sinai where they had found

it.

The most remarkable and delightful thing in Mrs. Lewis' paper is that she has found in the Jerusalem Talmud the statement that Mary, the mother of our Lord, was the daughter of Heli. This confirms my own previous conviction that, as Matthew's genealogy is the official one-of Joseph, who took the place of a father to Jesus, so is Luke's the natural one-of Mary, the only earthly parent of the Saviour. For her omission from it and the mention of her husband alone we find two analogies-the first in I. Chron. ii, 35 f., the second in Ezra ii, 61-63. In the first case Sheshan, having no sons, gives a daughter in marriage to his Egyptian servant Jarha; and the son of this marriage is next mentioned and all his descendants, the pedigree being thus throughout Sheshan's, not Jarha's. In the second case a priest named Hakkoz marries a daughter of Barzillai, the succourer of King David, and takes her family name, so that when his descendants on returning from the Babylonian captivity claim to be priests their male or priestly ancestry beyond Hakkoz can no longer be traced. In neither case is the daughter's name mentioned; but the genealogy goes on from father-in-law to son-inlaw and thence to grandson or later descendant, just as in Luke iii, 23, the genealogy passes from the father-in-law Heli to the son-in-law Joseph and thence to the grandson Jesus.

It is deeply important to prove that Mary was herself descended from David. I once met and tried to re-establish in the faith a thoughtful young man who had been unsettled by a remark of the late Chief Rabbi Adler that the evidence for the Messiahship of Jesus failed in the most important item, since both the pedigrees given of Him in the Gospels traced His ancestry up through Joseph, while there was otherwise no evidence that His mother was a descendant of David.

Yet there is other evidence, though it is immensely strengthened

by establishing, as has been done to-day, that the second Gospel pedigree is that of Mary.

When the angel was foretelling to Mary the birth of the Holy Child, he said, "The Lord God shall give Him the throne of His father David." Now if Joseph, her betrothed, had alone been descended from David, Mary would have answered, "I am not yet married to Joseph," whereas she did answer simply, "I am an unmarried woman," which plainly implies, if I were married, since I am descended from David, I could infuse my royal blood into a son, but how can I have a royal son while I am a virgin?

Again, Joseph was a poor man; he would not have spent a longer time from his trade at Nazareth than was needful for reporting himself at Bethlehem to the census-taker and for saluting a few friends there; so when he started Mary must have been very near her time of delivery-say two or three weeks. He surely would not have taken her on that three days' mountainous journey to Bethlehem when she was in that condition, unless she as well as he was "of the house and lineage of David." And this view, as we learn from the paper (p. 17) is strikingly confirmed by a reading in the Sinaitic Syriac Version.

The Revised Version of 1 Chron. iii, 17, 18, makes it clear that both Salathiel and Pedaiah were sons of Jeconiah, the name Assir just following Jeconiah's in the Authorized Version being rendered, as it may lawfully be, "captive," and verse 17 being thus brought into the same form as verse 16. Salathiel and the second son Malchiram doubtless both died before having children, Pedaiah then taking Salathiel's place, and one of the other sons mentioned Malchiram's place, in raising up children to their brothers; and so Zorobabel was later called the son of Salathiel, though he was really (ver. 19) the son of Pedaiah.

On the other hand, the Zorobabel, son of Salathiel, in Luke's pedigree can hardly be the same as Zorobabel, son of Salathiel, in Matthew's; for the former stands twenty generations back from Joseph inclusively, while the latter stands only twelve back; and this difference is out of all proportion to the whole number of generations in the respective pedigrees, which in Luke is forty-two from Joseph back to David, and in Matthew (when the three expunged kings are restored) is thirty-two. There is analogy enough for the repetition of such a combination of names even in