An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter.
This essay aims to trace the history and use of the story of the virgin birth of Jesus in the ante-Nicene Christian literature. In doing this, special attention is paid to the patristic field, which has not hitherto been thoroughly investigated with such a purpose in view. What is here offered on the New Testament material is introductory to the main body of the essay, and, as a prerequisite to tracing the use and effects of the New Testament stories in the subsequent Christian literature, aims to determine whether these narratives in reality represent a double or only a single attestation of the virgin birth, and also to ascertain what is their exact meaning.
The question whether the account of the virgin birth has in the New Testament a single or a double attestation is, broadly speaking, the question of the common origin or independence of the infancy sections of Matthew and Luke. Resch holds that Matthew and Luke used a pre-canonical child history, which had been translated from Hebrew into Greek, and that, if we had that history, it would be a harmony of the infancy stories of the first and third gospels. Conrady thinks that the protevangelium of James is that pre-canonical source which both Matthew and Luke used, and that, moreover, Luke had access to Matthew's account. Whether the infancy stories are more independent than these theories would imply can be ascertained only by a comparative examination of the material....