Hey, Mars!
I think you will enjoy these deathbed snippets. Good biographical summaries--interesting insights...
JESUS CHRIST
EVERY scholar who has critically investigated Gospel story of the life of Jesus Christ admits now that, whether the narrative contains a nucleus of history or not, a mass of myth has surrounded it. Here, however, we are concerned with the record as it stands written.
It is not improbable that Jesus at first expected that God would intervene on his behalf and that he would be acclaimed as the Messiah. When he saw more and more clearly that a revolt against the Roman power was hopeless he declared that the Kingdom of God is not of this world. At this stage of his mission he prepared for the martyrdom that is so often the lot of the prophet. But till the last act of the drama he was persuaded that he was under God's care, and shortly before the end he announced that his second advent was near at hand.
He spoke "with authority," a claim which no other teacher could make in the same sense, he raised the dead, he was Lord of the Sabbath, and through him alone could man live forever. Despite all this "authority," at his death, which was the culmination of his mission to save mankind, he "began to be sorrowful and very heavy," prayed that his cup of bitterness "might pass from him," and at the very last exclaimed, "My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?"
Many "liberal" Protestants to-day deny that the strong language used by Jesus about the future life was meant to be taken literally. Let them settle that themselves. What matters is the tragic fact that for more than a thousand years his language convinced Christians that an eternal hell is a real place, and that its penalties are incurred as the result of unbelief. No other "spiritual" authority has done so much to drench the world in blood.
infidels.org |
