F. L. Anderson
Jesus,
Paul, And Christianity
"Christianity is a historic religion because Christ, its
founder, was a historic person. In the beginning of the
Christian era there appeared in history One who changed its
current from a downward to an upward trend. He was born in
Bethlehem and reared in Nazareth a small town of Galilee, af
an humble family of the Jews who were then subjected under
the provincial Roman rule.
He received His elementary training in a synagogue school in
which the Jewish child studied from the ages of six to
twelve. Although the people of Galilee enjoyed more
liberality in religion than those of Judea, the Jewish
religion everywhere was oppressed by a narrow, Rabbinical
leadership which headed up in Jerusalem.
The boy Jesus had no highly literary education but became
well grounded in Aramaic, and in the knowledge of the Hebrew
language and the Sacred Scriptures of the Jews. He mastered
also Greek into which these Scriptures had been translated
centuries before His time. While supporting as a carpenter
the family of the deceased Joseph He "cut His way forward"
in the mastery of the Rabbinical lore and the Hebrew
prophets, becoming deeply learned in the true religion of
Israel. At the age of thirty, He appeared at the Jordan,
asking baptism of John, and soon after He initiated His
ministry, which grew into a religious movement, that has
reached today the uttermost confines of the world.
Jesus, different from any other teacher in history, called
attention to His person rather than His doctrine. The
religion of the Christ of the Gospels is an experienced
relation between Him and His believer-disciple. His
personality was unique, attracting vast throngs about Him,
reminding some of Elijah in His denunciation of sin; others
of the tender-hearted Jeremiah weeping over the sins of the
people. His authoritative teaching, which threatened to
supercede that of the Pharisees, and his assumption of the
true Messianic role, which stirred deeply the enmity of the
vested interests of the Annas Bazaars, aroused an antagonism
which during three intense years waxed ever fiercer until it
brought Him to the cross at Jerusalem.
History confirms the testimony of the gospel traditions,
first oral then written, to the fact of His incomparable
claims, His sinless life, His vicarious death on the cross
and His resurrection from the tomb. The influence of His
life and teachings, substantiated by the actual
transformation of the lives of those who believed on Him,
swept on and surmounted the antagonism of the bigoted Jewish
rulers, met and defeated the subtle heathen philosophies of
the Greeks and passed unscathed through the ruthless Roman
persecutions, to emerge with victory at last.
Saul of Tarsus equipped with the culture of the Tarsian
University and the theology of Gamaliel, who became the
chief and first persecutor of the Nazarenes, was
miraculously converted on the Damascus road and sent forth
as the apostle to the Gentiles, to bear the message and
plant the banner of Christianity in the chief provincial
capitals of the Roman Empire.
In the mortal struggle of young Christianity with its
heathen enemies, during the first three centuries, it gained
a signal victory, when Constantine bowed to the Galilean
Peasant."
F. L.
Anderson, "The Man of Nazareth" Ch. 1
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