Now, if the Moses legend is to be held Egyptian, the Miriam legend may well be so too; and in the items that the Egyptian princess who saves the child Moses is in a Jewish legend named Merris, and that one of the daughters of Ramses II is found to be named Meri, [416] the analogy is worth noting. But the central mythological fact is that a Mother-Goddess, a "Madonna" nursing a child, is one of the commonest objects of ancient worship throughout Asia and North Africa. [417] When, then, mothers of Gods born in caves, or Dying Demigods, are found bearing such names as Myrrha and Maia; when Maia is noted to have the meaning "nurse," and Mylitta that of "the child-bearing one," we are not only moved to surmise a Mother-Goddess-name of many variants, of which Miriam-Mariam is one, but to infer a wide diffusion of legends concerning such a goddess-type. Figures of such a goddess abounded throughout the East. [418] That is, in brief, the mythological case at this point. Mary in the gospels, the virgin bearing a divine child, flying from danger, and bearing her child on a journey, in a cave, is the analogue of a dozen ancient myths of the Divine Child; the Menaced Child is common to the myths of Moses and Sargon, Krishna and Cyrus, Arthur and Herakles; the stable-ritual of the Adoration is prehistoric in India in connection with Krishna; the "manger" (a basket) belongs equally to the myths of Zeus, Hermes, Ion and Dionysos; and the threatening king is a myth-figure found alike in East and West. [419] All this is ostensibly "sun-myth." And we are asked by Dr. Conybeare to believe, on the strength of one late and palpable interpolation in Mark, which has no other word concerning the childhood, parentage, or birthplace of Jesus, its Son of God, that his mother Mary was a well-known figure in Nazareth about the year 30, and that it is merely she who is made to play the mythic part in Matthew about a century later. The simple use of common-sense, even by a reader who has not studied comparative mythology, will reveal the improbability of such a development; and Dr. Conybeare, who vehemently denies, for other purposes, that the early Christians in Palestine could have any knowledge of pagan myths, is the last person who could consistently affirm it. But when we realize that under the shell of official Judaism there subsisted in Palestine as everywhere else the folk-lore of the past; [420] when we remember the "weeping for Tammuz" at Jerusalem and the location of the birth of Adonis in the very stable-cave of the Christ-legend at Bethlehem, we can quite rationally conceive how, once the Jesus-myth was well re-established, old pre-Judaic elements of it came to the front, and found from the later gospel-compilers a welcome they could not have had in the Judaizing days. [421]