JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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To see Jesus in mere moral and ethical terms—as One who lived as an example, who
died as a martyr, but whose resurrection is only found in our fond memories of Him is to
emasculate Him. For His virgin birth and His perfect life only find spiritual and eternal
significance if His death was an atoning sacrifice for man and that He actually rose that third day
victorious over death, sin and Satan. The birth of Jesus Christ has only salvific (the possibility of
salvation) value if it is seen in the shadow of the cross and the empty tomb. In God's perspective
all three events—birth, death, resurrection—are but one Event.
THE WITNESS OF HISTORY
"I have never been interested in an historical Jesus. I should not care if it was proved
by someone that the man called Jesus never lived, and that what was narrated in the
Gospels was a figment of the writer's imagination. For the Sermon on the Mount
would still be true for me."21
--Mahatma Gandhi
Some skeptics claim that the gospels do not purport to record history in the first place;
rather, they were intended as pious myths and legends. Such a claim simply flies in the face of
the nature of the gospel literature. The gospels do not read like myths. Christian philosopher and
apologist J. P. Moreland shares his experience in addressing myth.
"In my doctoral program, I was walking into the library one day, and I ran across
a student who was reading the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament. I went over
to him and I said, 'What in the world are you doing?' And he said, 'I have a master's
degree from Harvard in business, and I have a master's from UCLA in classics, and
an under-graduate degree in classics from Harvard. I'm finishing my Ph.D. degree
from UCLA in classics, and I was reading the Greek New Testament here recently.'
He was Jewish, and he went on to say, 'I became a committed follower of Jesus of
Nazareth. And I just wanted to come over here to USC because I knew there were
Christian graduate students studying philosophy.' I asked, 'How did you become a
Christian?' He said, 'Dr. Moreland, I have studied myth most of my education. I
know the earmarks of myth; that's all I study. My undergraduate training was in
mythology; my graduate training has been in mythology. And I was practicing
Koine Greek reading the Gospel of Luke, and I got halfway through it, and as a
Jew, I said, 'My God, this man really did these things. What am I going to do?
This is history. It reads like history. It doesn't read like myth. I know what myth
tastes like because all I do is read it, and that is not myth.'"22
Similarly C. S. Lewis, an Oxford don who was professor of Medieval and Renaissance
literature at Cambridge, was an expert in the field of mythology and testified: