[426] Mark 10. 18.
[427] Edersheim's Life and Times of the Messiah, vol. ii., p. 339.
The remaining two passages, 'I go unto the Father; for the Father is greater than I'; and 'I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God and your God,'[428] are easier to explain, since here it is obvious that they refer to Christ's human nature alone, as it was in His human nature alone that He was ever absent from the Father. And even here He carefully distinguishes His own relationship to God from that of His disciples. For though He teaches them to say our Father, yet when including Himself with them, He does not here or anywhere else say our Father, or our God; but always emphasises His own peculiar position. While we may ask in regard to the first passage, would anyone but God have thought it necessary to explain that God the Father was greater than Himself? Anyhow, these passages do not alter the fact that Christ did repeatedly claim to be both superhuman and Divine.
[428] John 14. 28; 20. 17.
(3.) How these Claims were understood at the time.
We have now to consider how these claims were understood at the time. And first, as to Christ's friends. We have overwhelming evidence that after His Resurrection all the disciples and early Christians believed their Master to be both superhuman and Divine. And to realise the full significance of this, we must remember that they were not polytheists, who did not mind how many gods they believed in, and were willing to worship Roman Emperors or anyone else; but they were strict monotheists. They firmly believed that there was only one God, yet they firmly believed that Christ was Divine. This is shown throughout the New Testament.
Thus the writers of the first three Gospels, though they usually record the events of Christ's life without comment, yet in one passage identify Him with the God of the Old Testament, referring the prophecy about the messenger of the Lord our God to the messenger of Christ.[429] And as to the Fourth Gospel, it begins with asserting Christ's Divinity in the plainest terms, saying that the Word, who afterwards became flesh, was God. And it appropriately ended, before the last chapter was added, with St. Thomas declaring this same belief, when he addressed Christ as my Lord and my God, which titles He fully accepted.[430] Yet immediately afterwards, the author says he wrote his Gospel to convince men that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. Evidently then this expression, the Son of God, meant to him, and therefore presumably to other New Testament writers, who use it frequently, that Christ was truly God—God the Son—my Lord and my God—in the fullest and most complete sense.
[429] Isa. 40. 3; Matt. 3. 3; Mark 1. 3; Luke 3. 4.
[430] John 1. 1; 20. 28.
With regard to the Acts an argument on the other side is sometimes drawn from St. Peter's speaking of Christ as 'a man approved of God unto you by mighty works,' thus implying, it is urged, that St. Peter did not know Him to be more than man.[431] But since he says he was only appealing to what his hearers knew to be true (even as ye yourselves know), how else could he have put it? His hearers did not know that Christ was God; they did know that He was a man approved of God by many wonderful miracles, because they had seen them. Moreover, in other places the Acts bear strong witness to the Divinity of Christ, as for instance when St. Paul speaks of the Church of God which He purchased with His own blood, or St. Stephen says Lord Jesus receive my spirit; or when the Apostles are represented as working their miracles, not in the name of God the Father, but in that of Christ.[432]