Luke 1:32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give to him the throne of his father David: It is no use to say that Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable is superadded by the tradition of the followers. Who among His disciples, or among their proselytes, was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived from the higher source. About the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with profundity of insight, which, if we abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in His inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract in the concrete than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life. (John Stuart Mill.) Parallel Verses KJV: He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: |
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