[Even for the item of the two asses in Matthew there is a myth-explanation. Many writers of the biographical school, who compensate themselves for their difficulties by ascribing a peculiarly crass stupidity to the apostles and evangelists at every opportunity, decide that the narrator or interpolator posited the two asses, an ass and its colt, because he found in Zechariah a Messianic prediction so phrased, [86] and did not understand that the Hebraic idiom simply meant "an ass." Yet one member of the school, Dr. Conybeare, fiercely denounces myth-theorists for claiming to understand Jewish symbolism better than the Jews did. Either principle serves the turn. When Tertullian says that Jesus is the Divine Fish because fishes were parthenogenetically born, and Jesus was born again in the waters of the Jordan, Dr. Conybeare is sure of the wisdom of Tertullian. This thesis, first found in Tertullian, is to decide the question, to the exclusion of any reflection on the fact that the Sun at Easter had before the Christian era passed from the sign Aries to the sign Pisces in the zodiac. But when Matthew reads Zechariah's two asses as meaning two asses, Matthew is to be dismissed as a Jew who did not understand the commonest Hebrew idiom. The simple fact that the Septuagint does not give the duplication, putting only "a young colt," will serve to indicate to any careful reader that the evangelist or interpolator was following the Hebrew, and therefore is to be presumed to have known something of Hebrew idiom. And the just critical inference is that both passages had regard to the zodiacal figure of the Two Asses for the sign Cancer, from which we have the myth of Bacchus riding on two asses. [87] Further, it is probable that the similar passage in the Song of Jacob [88] has also a zodiacal basis. These details, which Dr. Conybeare absolutely withholds from his readers, indicate the mythological induction put by the present writer. In an unconstruable sentence, Dr. Conybeare appears to argue [89] that to secure any consideration for such a thesis we must "prove that the earliest Christians, who were Jews, must have been familiar with the rare legend of Bacchus crossing a marsh on two asses," and "with the rare representation of the zodiacal sign Cancer as an ass and its foal."