I thought that the whole thing was a cobweb and wished Scaurus would pass to something more interesting. But he continued, “My rabbi suggested that Luke had invented a new genealogy. But when I dissented—for I am convinced that neither Luke nor Matthew invented, and that these early writers generally were very simple honest souls—he asked me whether I knew of any instance in the gospels where the name spelt in Greek _Eli_ or _Heli_ was misunderstood. I replied that there was one instance where Jesus used it to mean _my God_, but the bystanders took it to mean _Elias_. ‘Well then,’ said the rabbi, ‘I should not be surprised if your honest compiler Luke, a learned man perhaps in Greek, but innocent of Hebrew, had got hold of some tradition saying, _Jesus was supposed to be the son of Joseph, being the son of God_. Though in Hebrew there is a difference between the spelling of _El_, God, and the name _Eli_, there is not much difference in Greek. And Luke, having once started on the scent of a new pedigree supposed to connect Jesus with _Heli_, ransacked various Jewish genealogies till he found one containing the name, and adopted it as a substitute for Matthew’s.’ This was what my rabbi suggested. All I can say is that it seems to me more probable than that Luke invented the genealogy.” Scaurus entered into further details to vindicate Luke’s honesty, concluding as follows, “My own belief is that the parents of John and of Jesus were good, pure, simple, noble-minded people, liable to dreams and to the seeing of visions and to the hearing of voices. As to ‘dreams,’ by the way, look at the earliest account of the Lord’s appearing to Solomon, ‘In Gibeon, the Lord appeared to Solomon _in a dream … Solomon awoke, and behold it was a dream_.’ Then look at the later account in Chronicles, ‘_In that night did God appear unto Solomon_.’ No ‘dream’ and no ‘awaking’! _Verbum sapienti!_ The facts above alleged—to which I could add—when combined with the influence of prophecy—seem to me to explain everything in Matthew’s and Luke’s Introductions as being at once morally truthful and historically untrue.” Later on, Scaurus said, “Luke himself in his story of Christ’s childhood, does not seem to me to be so consistent as an educated writer would have been if he had been dishonestly inventing. For he represents Mary as saying to her son, ‘Behold, thy father and I seek thee sorrowing.’ By ‘thy father’ she means Joseph. But could she have used this language, or felt this sorrow, if she had realised indeed that her son was not one of the many children of the Father of Gods and men, but that he was unique, God incarnate? This and many other points convince me that Luke (in his account of the birth) is not composing fiction, but only compiling, harmonizing, adapting, and moulding into a historical shape, what should have been preserved as poetic legend.”