Daniel Rops
The Mystery of Jesus
"There was once a man who lived during a precisely
defined period in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberias Caesar. His existence
is an incontestable fact. He was known as a manual worker, a carpenter using
the hammer and the plane, with shavings curling round his ears. He could be
seen walking along a road which is still pointed out to us; in the evening
he would be stretched upon a bed of rushes or a string hammock, tired out
and sleeping like any other man, just like one of us.
Yet he said the most surprising things that have ever been heard. He said
that he was the Messiah, the heaven-sent witness through whom the chosen
people were to fulfill their glorious destiny. More astounding still, he
said he was the Son of God. And he was believed. He found men to accompany
him along the roads of Palestine, as he traveled across the country. He
performed miracles with disconcerting ease. There were many who believed
that he would bring about the political independence of Israel.
But then, any mystic can collect devoted fanatics. The culmination of this
scandal was that the man was suddenly wiped out, without putting up the
slightest resistance. So far from being discouraged by this failure, several
of his disciples went out into the world to bear witness to his divinity,
even with their blood, and ever since mankind, seeing in this defeat the
sign of victory, has prostrated itself before a common gibbet, just as if
tomorrow a church should raise the scaffold for the veneration of the crowd.
... Jesus is at once of history and beyond it. Considering the number and
the agreement of the witnesses concerning him and the abundance of the
written testimony through which his gospel has been transmitted, one is
inclined to say that there is no individual of his time about whom we are so
well-informed. Yet as he himself foretold he has become the center of a
thousand years of dispute, which each generation renews in contemporary
terms.
That this man of poor and uncultivated stock should remake the basis of
philosophy and open out to the world of the future an unknown territory of
thought; that this simple son of a declining people, born in an obscure
district in a small Roman province, this nameless Jew like all those others
despised by the procurators of Caesar, should speak with a voice that was to
sound above those of the Emperor's themselves, these are the most surprising
facts of history.
...Hence forward he is the measure of everything that happens. The life of
Christ is contained in history and contains it. It is not merely the
vindication of some nameless tragic humility, it is the supreme explanation
and the final standard by which everything is measured, from which history
itself takes meaning and justification."
Daniel Rops "Jesus And His Times" Translated from the French by
Ruby Miller (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., INC, 1954) pp. 11-13
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Disclaimer: I may not agree with some of
these quotes but I believe in the general statement that "all truth
is God's truth."
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