One Solitary Life

Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman.  He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty.  Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher.         He never owned a home.  He never wrote a book.  He never held an office.  He never had a family.  He never went to college.  He never put His foot inside a big city.  He never traveled two hundred miles from the place He was born.  He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness.  He had no credentials but Himself. . .         While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him.  His friends ran away.  One of them denied Him.  He was turned over to His enemies.  He went through the mockery of a trial.  He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves.  While He was dying His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth – His coat.  When He was dead, He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.  Nineteen long centuries have come and gone, and today He is a centerpiece of the human race and leader of the column of progress.         I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that were ever built, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life.         { This essay was adapted from a sermon by Dr James Allan Francis in “The Real Jesus and Other Sermons” © 1926 by the Judson Press of Philadelphia  (pp. 123-124 titled “Arise Sir Knight!”).  If you are interested, you can read the original version .  Graham Pockett }

Albert Einstein's view of Jesus of Nazareth         The following comes from "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck,"The Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 26, 1929, p. 17. The questions are posed by Viereck; the reply to each is by Einstein. Since the interview was conducted in Berlin and both Viereck and Einstein had German as their mother tongue, the interview was likely conducted in German and then translated into English by Viereck.         Other portions of this interview might seem questionable, but this portion of the interview was explicitly confirmed by Einstein. When asked about a clipping from a magazine article (likely the Saturday Evening Post) reporting Einstein's comments on Christianity taken down by Viereck, Einstein carefully read the clipping and replied, "That is what I believe." See Brian pp. 277 - 278.         "To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?"         "As a child, I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene."         "Have you read Emil Ludwig's book on Jesus?         "Emil Ludwig's Jesus," replied Einstein, "is shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot."         "You accept the historical existence of Jesus?"         "Unquestionably. No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life. How different, for instance, is the impression which we receive from an account of legendary heroes of antiquity like Theseus. Theseus and other heroes of his type lack the authentic vitality of Jesus."         "Ludwig Lewisohn, in one of his recent books, claims that many of the sayings of Jesus paraphrase the sayings of other prophets."         "No man," Einstein replied, "can deny the fact that Jesus existed, nor that his sayings are beautiful. Even if some them have been said before, no one has expressed them so divinely as he."

The following passage was written some 700 years "before Christ" as they say. Disbelievers may say that it can't be applied to Jesus of Nazareth, because of the various features that differ from the life of Jesus. Believers, on the other hand, are impressed by the number of ways that this remarkable prophecy was realized in the life of Jesus and not in anyone else life that we know of.          Isaiah Ch. 52:13 - 53:1-           "See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. Just as there were many who were astonished at him – so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals – so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.         53:1 Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth."

"The Jefferson Bible - The Life and Morals of Jesus"         Thomas Jefferson didn't trust any of the "Christianity" of his day any more than he would that of our time, but that didn't prevent him from appreciating the genius of Jesus himself.  The introduction to his bible reads: 8 By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. 9 They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. 10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. 11 Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.12 Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.         "Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation,  none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus. . .  A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen."         "  He described his own work as "a paradigma of his doctrines,  made by cutting the texts out of the book and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject.         He told John Adams that he was rescuing the Philosophy of Jesus and the "pure principles which he taught,"  from the "artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests,  who have travestied them into various forms as instruments of riches and power for themselves."  After having selected from the evangelists "the very words only of Jesus,"   he believed "there will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."         Unlike many observers, Jefferson was able to separate Christianity from its representatives:         "The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind." – Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801. ME 10:237         Thomas Paine, another of America's great founding fathers, who was even less enarmoured with "Christianity" than Jefferson, if that were possible, nevertheless shared his appreciation of Jesus of Nazareth.  In his "Age of Reason", he wrote:         "Nothing that is here said can apply, even with the most distant disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ.  He was a virtuous and an amiable man.  The morality that he preached and practised was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some of the Greek philosophers, many years before; by the Quakers since; and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any. "

While there are not many mentions of Jesus in the secular history of the time, they overstate the case who say that there are no references to Jesus of Nazareth's life or death in any but Christian literature,   for there are at least one or two : Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome Book XV, chapter 47 (A.D. 64)         [during the Great Fire of Rome] ". . . neither human resources, nor imperial generosity, nor appeasement of the gods, eliminated the sinister suspicion that the fire had been deliberately started.  To stop the rumor, Nero, made scapegoats – and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved 'Christians' (as they were popularly called).  Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius' reign by the Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus (governor from 26 to 36 A.D.).  But in spite of this temporary setback, the deadly superstition had broken out again, not just in Judaea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome.  All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capital.  First, Nero had the self-admitted Christians arrested.  Then, on their information, large numbers of others were condemned – not so much for starting fires as because of their hatred for the human race.  Their deaths were made amusing.  Dressed in wild animals' skins, they were torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or made into torches to be seton fire after dark as illumination . . .  Despite their guilt as Christians, and the ruthless punishment it deserved, the victims were pitied.  For it was felt that they were being sacrificed to one man's brutality rather than to the national interest."         Now according to http://members.aol.com/FLJOSEPHUS/testimonium.htm         In Rome, in the year 93, the highly regarded historian Josephus published his lengthy history of the Jews.  While discussing the period in which the Jews of Judaea were governed by the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, it was believed for many centuries that Josephus had included the paragraph below.  But people in those days were not as scrupulous as the scholars of our time. As texts were copied by hand in the early centuries of the christian era for example, some tried to "improve" on them. Ever since the 17th century many have believed that this passage in Josephus is one of the many fraudulent passages that were inserted into copies of original documents that have long since been lost.          "About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man.  For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.  He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks.  He was the Messiah.  And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease.  He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him.  And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.  - Jewish Antiquities, 18.3.3 §63         (Based on the translation of Louis H. Feldman, The Loeb Classical Library.)   Many now doubt that such words could have been written by a historian who considered himself as a Jew, because it sounds too Christian and even claims that Jesus was the Messiah ('ho christos', the Christ)!   The critics believe that this paragraph was probably inserted into Josephus' book by a later Christian copyist, probably in the Third or Fourth Century.

Although I find it presumptuous, if not blasphemous, to claim to speak for God, and the site involved has a commercial purpose behind it, there is a flash presentation about God that many find very inspiring at www.theinterviewwithgod.com.