He was sinless.
He said:
“Which of you convinceth me of sin?”
For two thousand years he has been in the concentrated light of a hostile world’s merciless investigation. The light has been turned on the land in which he lived. Every rod of ground over which he travelled has been dug up, or surveyed, or trodden. His words have been weighed, balanced to a nicety against any probability of error, mistake, imagination, fancy or misquotation. His words have been split open as men break open rocks. All the contents of his words have been put in the crucible of criticism. Every thought has been insistently and unsentimentally assayed for, even, the suspicion or the slightest hint of an alloy. His teachings have been chemically dissolved and turned into their component parts. The saline base of truth has been sought for at any risk to the compounded speech he made.
And after all! not one self-respecting, authoritative lip has uttered a charge against him.
In the hush of a world that cannot even murmur, he steps forward and once more rings down his challenge:
“Which of you convinceth me of sin?”
He stands out among his fellows as a white shaft under a starless midnight. He rises above the passions of men as an unshaken rock in the midst of a wild, lashed sea. He is to man’s best character as harmony is to discord, as a smile is to a frown, as love is to hate, as blessing is to cursing, as a garden of lilies to a desert of sand, as heaven is to earth, as holiness is to sin and as life to death.
If he were sinless, he was absolutely holy; he was so holy that his very presence brought out the sin in others. Sinful men and women fell at his feet and confessed their sins. At sight of him demons tore their way out of the bodies they possessed and fled as clouds of darkness before the sun, crying as they fled, “Thou art the holy one of God—hast thou come to torment us before the time?” Tormented as they were even then, as sin always is when confronted by holiness; as vice is before virtue; as a lie is before the truth.
He was sinless.