How then did the idea of a supernatural birth and the deification of Jesus come about, if it was not a real fact? Very simply and quite naturally. Any one acquainted with ancient history knows that in that age of the world, and for centuries before, it had been almost a universal custom, especially in Greece and the Roman empire, to attribute some supernatural origin to, and deify their heroes,--sometimes while they were yet alive, but most certainly after their death. Just so, after the death of this remarkable man, and his cult continued to gather adherents, time and distance lent perspective, and he naturally grew larger and greater in their estimation, until, naturally and inevitably, permeated by the universal thought of the age in which they lived, they gradually came to look more and more upon their great master as being something more than ordinarily human, until this thought gradually ripened into his deification; and of course to be consistent with this he _must have been_, like all other deified heroes, supernaturally born. And out of this the legend of Bethlehem, in both its forms, in Matthew and Luke, somehow grew,--nobody knows exactly how. It is just like many other myths of past ages. The first we know of them they are full grown and complete; yet, like all other things, they _must_ have had a natural and gradual growth. As to where he was born we do not know, nor is it material. It is by far the most probable that he was born at Nazareth where his parents lived. The legend that he was born at Bethlehem was doubtless a pure conjecture, made necessary by those who accepted him as the Messiah of Hebrew prophecy, to make it correspond with the prophetic declaration that the Messiah should be born at Bethlehem of Judah. This fully accounts for the Bethlehem story as the place of his birth. The fact is they are all purely conjectural, made to fit into some preconceived notion of his personality or character. We have no reliable account whatever of his birth or early life.