22 “Few would say, with Westcott, that virgin‐birth is implied though not explicitly asserted in Jn. i. 14....” (Mackintosh, ib., p. 528). 23 The view that i. 13 should be read “Who was born, &c.”, is that of Resch, Blass, and Th. Zahn. The reading appears in Tertullian, Irenaeus, Justin, but the weight of textual authority is against it. Nor is the reading, as representing what the Evangelist wrote, intrinsically probable. It would rule out the maternity of Mary as well as the paternity of Joseph. The birth would not only be not “of the will of man”; it would not even be “of blood”. There would be nothing human about it; from first to last it would be “of God”. In short, the reading leads directly to that docetic view of the Person of Christ, against which the Johannine Writings so earnestly contend. The same objection may be urged against the view that, in the accepted text of Jn. i. 13, the Virgin Birth is present to the writer’s mind “as a kind of pattern or model of the birth of the children of God” (W. C. Allen, _Interpreter_, Oct., 1905. Cf. Orr, op. cit., p. 111 f.; Box, op. cit., p. 145). Would not the Fourth Evangelist have regarded such a comparison as almost a denial that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh? Harnack has recently contended for the singular and for a reference to the Virgin Birth. He thinks that the verse was added in the margin, as a comment on i. 14, at a very early time and in the Johannine circle (Peake, _Commentary on the Bible_, p. 747 a). 24 Cf. Sanday, op. cit., pp. 71, 143‐55; Moffatt, INT., pp. 533 ff.; E. F. Scott, _The Fourth Gospel, Its Purpose and Theology_, pp. 32 ff.; Jülicher, INT., p. 396 f. 25 iv. 44 (“For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country”), unless it is a gloss, probably refers to Judaea, not Galilee. Cf. Moffatt, INT., p. 553. Mr. Thompson argues that it refers to Galilee (op. cit., p. 158). 26 “In order to explain his silence, we must remember his strict exclusion of all that might imply a passivity in the divine Logos. It was by His own free act that the Son of God entered the world as man. The evangelist shrank from any theory of His origin that might impair the central idea of full activity, from the beginning of His work to the end” (Scott, ib., p. 187). 27 According to Cheyne (_Bible Problems_, pp. 76 ff.), the chapter contains a Jewish Messianic legend of Babylonian origin, which was the source of the Virgin Birth tradition. 28 The passage which begins with the words: “And Mary said unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” 29 Or was taken from Q. See Harnack’s _Sayings_, p. 314; _Oxford Studies in Synoptic Problem_, p. 187. 30 EB., col. 2955 n. Cf. Plummer, ICC., St. Lk., p. 63.