Against this mythical derivation of the narrative, two objections have been recently urged. First, if the history of the star originated in Balaam’s prophecy, why, it is asked, does not Matthew, fond as he is of showing the fulfilment of Old Testament predictions in the life of Jesus, make the slightest allusion to that prophecy? [413] Because it was not he who wove this history out of the materials furnished in the Old Testament; he received it, already fashioned, from others, who did not communicate to him its real origin. For the very reason that many narratives were transmitted to him without their appropriate keys, he sometimes tries false ones; as in our narrative, in relation to the Bethlehem massacre, he quotes, under a total misconception of the passage, Jeremiah’s image of Rachel weeping for her children. [414] The other objection is this: how could the communities of Jewish Christians, whence this pretended mythus must have sprung, ascribe so high an importance to the heathen as is implied in the star of the magi? [415] As if the prophets had not, in such passages as we have quoted, already ascribed to them this importance, which, in fact, consists but in their rendering homage and submission to the Messiah, a relation that must be allowed to correspond with the ideas of the Jewish Christians, not to speak of the particular conditions on which the heathen were to be admitted into the kingdom of the Messiah. We must therefore abide by the mythical interpretation of our narrative, and content ourselves with gathering from it no particular fact in the life of Jesus, but only a new proof how strong was the impression of his messiahship left by Jesus on the minds of his contemporaries, since even the history of his childhood received a messianic form. [416] Let us now revert to the narrative of Luke, chap. ii., so far as it runs parallel with that of Matthew. We have seen that the narrative of Matthew does not allow us to presuppose that of Luke as a series of prior incidents: still less can the converse be true, namely, that the magi arrived before the shepherds: it remains then to be asked, whether the two narratives do not aim to represent the same fact, though they have given it a different garb? From the older orthodox opinion that the star in Matthew was an angel, it was an easy step to identify that apparition with the angel in Luke, and to suppose that the angels, who appeared to the shepherds of Bethlehem on the night of the birth of Jesus, were taken by the distant magi for a star vertical to Judea, [417] so that both the accounts might be essentially correct. Of late, only one of the Evangelists has been supposed to give the true circumstances, and Luke has had the preference, Matthew’s narrative being regarded as an embellished edition.