XVI. THE NATIVITY 73

This bed, it will be noticed, is on a shelf of rock. This is in compliance with the idea founded on the Protevangelion and the apocryphal book known as the Gospel of Infancy,¹ that our Saviour was born in a cave, associated with the scriptural statement that He was laid in a manger, of which the apocryphal gospels do not speak.

The vain endeavour to exalt the awe of the moment of the Saviour’s birth has turned, in these gospels, the outhouse of the inn into a species of subterranean chapel, full of incense and candles. “It was after sunset, when the old woman (the midwife), and Joseph with her, reached the cave; and they both went into it. And behold, it was all filled with light, greater than the light of lamps and candles, and greater than the light of the sun itself.” (Infancy, i. 9.²) “Then a bright cloud overshadowed the cave, and the midwife said: This day my soul is magnified.” (Protevangelion, xiv. 10.³) The thirteenth chapter of the Protevangelion is, however, a little more skilful in this attempt at exaltation. “And leaving her and his sons in the cave, Joseph went forth to seek a Hebrew midwife in the village of Bethlehem. But as I was going, said Joseph, I looked up into the air, and I saw the clouds astonished, and the fowls of the air stopping in the midst of their flight. And I looked down towards the earth and saw a table spread, and working-people sitting around it; but their hands were on the table, and they did not move to eat. But all their faces were fixed upwards.” (Protevangelion, xiii. 1-7.⁴)

It would, of course, be absurd to endeavour to institute any comparison between the various pictures of this subject, innumerable as they are; but I must at least deprecate Lord Lindsay’s characterising this design of Giotto’s

¹ [“The Arabic Gospel of the Childhood (Evangelium Infantić) is a Catholic recension of all the stories of the childhood from the birth of Jesus till His twelfth year. It is a special favourite with the Nestorians of Syria” (Smith’s Dictionary of Christian Biography, vol. ii. p. 705). The Latin version of it is included in Tischendorf’s Evangelia Apocrypha.]

² [Chapter iii. in Tischendorf, p. 182.]

³ [Chapter xix. in Tischendorf, p. 36.]

⁴ [Chapter xviii. in Tischendorf, pp. 33-34.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]