David Brown on German Higher Critics and Matthew and Luke’s accounts of the virgin birth

[Reformed Covenanter]

... Strauss, and after him Keim, hold that since Luke places the angelic visit to Mary before the Conception, while in Matthew the same angel appears, not to Mary, but to Joseph, and not before, but after, the Conception, therefore the two accounts are irreconcilable. Never, I venture to say, was more frivolous objection to the consistency of any Biblical narrative advanced. Yet Meyer, I regret to say, endorses it. In Germany such things may be accounted formidable objections, but in this country I do not believe there is one critic, of any name for impartiality and grasp, who sees, or even imagines, any discrepancy between the two records. Who that is not seeking some pretext for getting rid of the stupendous fact would find any inconsistency between a divine announcement to the Virgin Mary, to prepare her for what had never occurred in the history of human births before, and a subsequent visit to Joseph, to set his troubled mind at rest as to the condition of his betrothed, and assure him that there was no bar to the honourable connection to which he was looking forward? ...

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David Brown on German Higher Critics and Matthew and Luke’s accounts of the virgin birth

The two records of it are held to be inconsistent with and exclusive of each other. Schleiermacher holds that each of them is credible in some particulars, while in others each of them contains mat…

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[ZackF]

As the kids say, “as if…”

Why these 19th century scholars thought they stumbled onto something that got past the scholars before them is beyond me.

 

[Phil D.]

Meyer is a bit of an enigma. Men like Ellicott, Warfield and Hodge all regarded him as the best exegete of New Testament Greek in their century. When it came to higher criticism, however, while he was a stalwart defender of doctrines like the Virgin Birth against his more liberal German contemporaries, he stumbled over some elementary issues like reconciling chronologies in the Gospels. Swallowing camels while straining at gnats...