In none of these instances did Christ repudiate the claims attributed to Him, or say He had been misunderstood. In fact, only once did He offer any explanation at all. He then appealed to the passage in the Old Testament, 'I said, Ye are gods,'[443] and asserted that He was much better entitled to the term, since He was sent into the world by the Father, and did the works of the Father. After which He again asserted His unity with the Father, which was the very point objected to by the Jews.
[443] Ps. 82. 6.
Moreover, not only during His life did Christ make these claims to be Divine, but He persevered with them even when it brought about His death. It is undisputed that the Jews condemned Him for blasphemy, and for nothing else. This is the teaching not of one Gospel alone, but of each of the four.[444] Every biography of Christ that we possess represents this as the real charge against Him; though, of course, when tried before the Roman governor that of disloyalty to Cæsar was brought forward as well.
[444] Matt. 26. 65; Mark 14. 64; Luke 22. 71; John 19. 7.
There is only one conclusion to be drawn from all this. It is that Christ did really claim to be both superhuman and Divine; that He deliberately and repeatedly asserted these claims during His life; that this provoked the hostility of the Jews, who frequently wanted to kill Him; that He never repudiated these claims, but persevered with them to the end; and was finally put to death in consequence.
(C.) The Great Alternative.
We pass on now to the great alternative, which is forced upon us by combining the teaching and the claims of Christ. Before pointing out its importance we must notice a favourite method of trying to get out of the difficulty, which is by saying that the teaching of Christ occurs in the first three Gospels, and the claims in the Fourth; so if we deny the accuracy of this single Gospel the difficulty is removed. But unfortunately for this objection, though the Divine claims occur chiefly in the Fourth Gospel, the superhuman ones are most prominent in the other three; and we have purposely chosen all the passages illustrating them from these Gospels alone. And what is more, they occur in all the supposed sources of these Gospels—the so-called Triple Tradition, the source common to Matthew and Luke, etc. Everywhere from the earliest record to the latest, Christ is represented as claiming to be superhuman. And such claims are equally fatal to His moral character if He were only a man. For no good man, and indeed very few bad ones, could be so fearfully presumptuous as to claim to be the absolute Ruler of the world, still less to be its Redeemer, and, least of all, to be its one and only Judge hereafter.
This objection, then, cannot be maintained, and we are forced to conclude that the perfect moral teaching of Christ was accompanied by continual assertions of His own superhuman and Divine character. And as this was a point about which He must have known, it is clear that the statements must have been either true or intentionally false. He must, therefore, have been Divine, or else a deliberate impostor. In other words, the Christ of the Gospels—and history knows of no other—could not have been merely a good man. He was either God as He claimed to be, or else a bad man for making such claims. This is the Great Alternative.
Moreover, it is absolutely unique in the world's history. Nowhere else shall we find a parallel to it. In Christ—and in Christ alone—we have a Man Whose moral character and teaching have fascinated the world for centuries; and yet Who, unless His own claims were true, must have been guilty of the greatest falsehood, and blasphemy. This is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the facts we have been considering, and all attempts to avoid it fail hopelessly.