Questions and Answers – Part 5: Christ.

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Taken from the book Világnézeti Válaszok (Answers Regarding Worldviews) by P. Béla Bangha

Is it certain that Jesus lived?

You might as well ask; is it certain that Julius Caesar or Saint Francis of Assisi lived? There are so many contemporary historical memories and records of Jesus, not only in the Gospels and the Christian writers of the earliest times, but also in Jewish and pagan writers (Josephus Flavius, Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny), and so great are the historical events connected with his person and influence, that it is impossible to doubt his existence, as the half-mad German Kalthof did. Not only is the existence of Jesus certain, but many of the main facts of His life, many details of His teachings and His actions can be read with historical certainty from the surviving authentic records, and more than that, from the enormous living movement which these events, teachings and actions immediately triggered in the surrounding world and which, in unbroken succession, is maintained as a living reality to this day.

Jesus was an excellent man, a wise teacher, a goodhearted friend of humanity, but he was not God.

The answer is simple. Then He was the wisest and purest, and He would have lied? For He did, indeed, constantly call Himself God: The only begotten Son of God, one with and of equal dignity with the Father, eternal almighty, the judge of the world. “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30) He constantly equates Himself with the Father (“Father, Son, Holy Spirit”), though as a man He calls Himself less than the Father.

At the Last Supper, in response to the Apostle Philip’s request to show him the Father, Jesus replied emphatically: “Have I been so long a time with you; and have you not known me? Philip, he that seeth me seeth the Father also.” (John 14:9). The Jews once wanted to stone him specifically for calling himself God: “For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.” (John 10:33) To the high priest’s solemn demand that he should say whether he was the Son of God, Jesus answered with the most emphatic “yes”, and when the high priest and the whole Jewish Sanhedrin became scandalized and branded it as blasphemy, Jesus did not retract his statement with a single word. He also accepted the solemn homage of Thomas, “My Lord, and my God” (John 20:28), though he could not have left these words unchallenged if he did not know himself to be truly God. He also solemnly declares himself to be the hearer of petitions to the Father, (John 14:13) He declares Himself to have been before Abraham, (John 8:58) and to have lived with the Father before the world was. (John 17:5) He forgives sins against God by His own authority, and declares that He will one day be the judge of the whole world.

Whoever speaks of himself in this way can only be God, or else a common fraudster, or perhaps a complete madman, but Jesus was not mad, but the wisest man and most brilliant thinker in the history of the world. Still less was he a swindler and a deceiver, because his pure moral character excluded the slightest sin, let alone such a capital crime of blasphemy and self-idolatry!

If Jesus proclaimed Himself God and let people worship Him as God, there can be only one explanation: that He was truly God.

The same is confirmed by the wonderful fulfillment of the Old Testament messianic prophecies in the person of Jesus; by the truly divine splendour of His teaching and moral excellence, far surpassing all humanity; by the many miracles he performed in broad daylight before the eyes of the masses, and observed by his enemies, especially his own resurrection; the astonishing vitality of his creation and of his Church, which, through two thousand years of storms, attacks, persecutions and spiritual changes, has remained unchanged and has become the starting-point of a new moral culture of radiant purity.

[…]

Jesus himself never calls Himself God, only the Son of God.

The two are not mutually exclusive; St. John himself says at the beginning of his Gospel, “the Word was with God.” But he also adds, “and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) Jesus is the Son of God, because He is one of the three divine persons; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The word “Son of God”, especially as Jesus repeatedly uses it, the only begotten Son of God, is, from the above, even more than the simple word “God”, which might be misunderstood and explained in terms of pagan polytheism.

The Gospel itself tells us that Jesus began his public career in the midst of doubts and temptations.

The Gospel does not speak of doubts, only of external temptations, which Jesus undertook for our edification, to give us an example of how to fight against temptations. It is precisely the supreme calm and certainty with which He responds to the words of the tempter that proves that Jesus was fully aware of His divinity from the beginning.

Did not Jesus Himself say, “the Father is greater than I” [John 14:28]?

Of course he said this, for He was necessarily less than the Father as a man. The “I” on His lips could mean the Godhead as well as the Manhood. As God, He was equal to the Father, and even one with him in the one Godhead; but as man, he was obviously less than the Father.

That Jesus called Himself the Son of God does not mean that He was truly God; for we are also sons of God.

There are three senses in which one can be a “son of God”. In the broadest sense, every human being is a child of God, that is, born of God’s creative providence. In a narrower sense, divine sonship is the possession of supernatural grace, the supernatural rebirth in God that comes when God no longer regards us as His servants but as his adopted sons. And in the strictest sense, “Son of God” is the second divine person, who, in some way that is not immediately clear to us, is eternally “born” of the Father, proceeds, comes from, flows out of; but in such a way that one thing, one essence, one God remains with him. That Jesus was the Son of God in this latter sense has been shown above. This divine sonship is expressed in Scripture as “only begotten Son”, whereas we men can only be adopted sons of God, children of God in a figurative sense. Jesus himself feels a very different relationship with the Father than we do; he never says, for example: “our Father” but in this way: “my Father and your Father”. He is the “only begotten Son”, who is “in the bosom of the Father”. (John 1:18)

How can a man be God?

Only by the divine person assuming a human nature as well, being clothed in human flesh and soul; but, of course, He also remains who he was from eternity; God, the only-begotten, eternal, divine Son of the Father. This dual nature is expressed by the word “God-man”, or in other words, “Word made flesh”.

How could finitude be united in Jesus with infinity, human weakness with divine perfection?

It would only be a contradiction if in Jesus the divine and human qualities were fused into one nature, and thus mutually diminished. But this is not the case. On the contrary, Jesus remained both fully God and fully man. In His humanity He was small and weak, but in His divinity He was infinite and omnipotent. In His humanity He became like us in all respects except sin, but in His divinity He is far above us. In his humanity he was born, grew, learned, tired, hungered, thirsted, wept, sweated, suffered, died, rose again; in His divinity He was eternal unchangeableness. All this did not cause any contradiction or division in Him, but, on the contrary, wonderfully complemented each other.

Jesus Himself says that even He, the Son of Man, does not know the day of the Last Judgment, only the Father.

That is correct: because in His humanity He could not know it. But He knew it as God, and of course, under the illuminating influence of His divinity, He knew it as man, but not on the basis of His human knowledge.

How could Jesus “pray” to the Father, if He Himself was identical in His essence with the Father?

As a man He could pray to himself as God; that is, His human soul could glorify the Godhead closely united to him, but totally different in essence. There is no contradiction in this, indeed it is a natural consequence of the two natures.

The doctrine of the Trinity is nothing but a disguised polytheism.

[…] Polytheism is completely excluded by the fundamental doctrine of Christianity, that the Trinity refers only to the divine persons, not to the one divine essence; that is, God is only one. The plurality of persons can in no way be opposed to the unity of essence, even if it is true that without revelation we would have no idea that “personhood” and “essence” do not always coincide. The fact that in our human beings the two coincide does not imply that they are conceptually the same thing.

It is still a contradiction: God is one and God is three.

It would be a contradiction if we were to say: one essence and yet three essences; one person and yet three persons. But: one essence and three persons is not a contradiction, any more than it is a contradiction to say: three men and one family, or one hundred soldiers and one company. We do not identify the three with the one, but the three divine persons with the one God. No conceptual contradiction can be detected in this.

The first Christians were very credulous.

The first Christians were not mindless enthusiasts and hysterics to defy the whole of the prevailing pagan and Jewish public life for the sake of a mere nothing, a legend, to assume the strict obligations of Christian morality, to renounce all the pleasures of life and to go en masse to martyrdom. It is not the Gospel story of Jesus Christ that is myth and legend, but rather those know-it-all, anti-religious theories and legends that would like to force the most striking, central phenomena of world history, which shine like the sun, into the narrow confines of their own everyday life.

The virgin birth of the Saviour is a typical myth found in 20-30 other mythologies.

This thesis would be difficult to prove. Even if the virgin birth is indeed mentioned in one or two mythologies, this only proves that pagan religious belief already considered the virgin birth to be a very honourable and noble idea. The only difference is that pagan mythologies are naïve tales without any real content, whereas the fact of the virgin birth of Christ is a historically proven reality (cf. Mt 1:20; Lk 1:35; etc.).

We are aware of many ancient pagan parallels of the Jesus-legends. Jesus is the Persian sun-god, Mary is the Egyptian goddess Astarte, the three divine persons are Brahman Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; and the Virgin Mother is the Egyptian Isis, the virgin mother of Horus.

Every single statement is a complete error. Jesus has nothing to do with the Persian sun god, maybe if we count that the Church itself likes to call Jesus the “Sun of Truth” in poetic metaphors, nor can Mary be called to be similar to the Egyptian Astarte in any form. Because, first of all, Astarte never existed, and Mary is a historical person. The legend of Astarte is full of moral filth, of immodesty, which is the exact opposite of the historical image of the Virgin Mary of the Gospels. Finally, the Virgin Mary has never been considered by Christianity as a goddess, but only as the most pure handmaid of God, and so the comparison with Astarte fails utterly on this point too.

As far as the three divine persons and the three divine figures of Brahmanism are concerned, there is no similarity other than a mere numerical similarity.

The mention of the legend of Isis is also an ignorant misrepresentation, because according to ancient Egyptian legends, Isis was not a virgin parent at all, but an ordinary goddess and mother, like thousands of others in pagan mythology.

Is there a significant difference between Jesus and, for example, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other great wise men?

Yes, there are essential differences, and they are many and profound. The pagan philosophers only recognized and expounded the natural theology and natural moral law, but even that imperfectly and often with grave errors, while Jesus proclaimed perfect and infallible divine truths. The teachings of the pagan wise men were entirely concerned with the worldly improvement of human life, whereas the teachings of Jesus are aimed at the attainment of eternal salvation. […]

It was not until Jesus was baptized in the Jordan that He was overcome by the consciousness of His messianic vocation.

The miraculous revelation of heaven at His baptism in the Jordan was nothing new to Jesus, and was not for Jesus’ sake, but for the sake of men, that they might believe in him. (Mt 3:17) Jesus knew Himself not only as Messiah, but also as God, from the very beginning.

What we know of Jesus’ life with historical certainty does not go beyond the natural. We must regard miracles as mere additions.

It is a desperate effort to try to explain the life and miracles of Jesus in a natural way. Jesus’ personality is itself such a miracle that can in no way be said to be natural. To say that the miracles in the life of Jesus are mere additions, as the so-called Tübingen school of the last century tried to make us believe, is as audacious as to claim that in the life of Napoleon, the battles and victories won are simple additions. It is not enough to claim such a thing, but it must be proven, and so far no serious attempt has been made to prove it.

The alleged resurrection of Jesus, too, was surely the result of mass hypnosis.

Such mass hypnosis and mass suggestion is unknown in the whole field of science. Suggestion can produce dreamlike, confused and illogical imaginations, but even then not exactly equally and identically in a crowd with many people, especially if this crowd is composed of doubting, sane and healthy individuals. It is, however, quite impossible for a whole series of people to suggest to themselves a whole long series of statements and actions with profound logical and moral content in the same way and in complete agreement by sheer imagination.

At the resurrection and appearance of Jesus, the disciples all saw, heard, felt the same things, received the same teachings, measures, ordinances, admonitions, and instructions of infinite wisdom, divine revelations. Would all of them have seen and heard all this by mere sick imagination? […] 

It is suspicious that only Jewish and Christian witnesses speak of Jesus and his alleged resurrection.

Big mistake! It is true that Jesus lived and died in a remote and insignificant corner of the Roman world empire, being part of a nation of no interest to the arrogant Roman world. Yet the personality of Jesus was so deeply engraved in the minds of his contemporaries that Roman pagan literature was compelled to take note of him and to speak of him repeatedly. Thus, Suetonius briefly mentions Christ in his biography of the emperor Claudius; Tacitus records that Pontius Pilate condemned him to death; Phlegon, a freedman [freed slave] of the emperor Hadrian, records that the sun was darkened at the time of Jesus’ death; Celsus, the pagan philosopher, writes at length about Jesus and attacks his doctrine, but in no way challenges the well-known, outstanding events of his life; and Pliny the Younger writes formally to the emperor about the Christians and their doctrines concerning Christ. Josephus Flavius, the Roman historian of Jewish origin (born c. 37 AD), also repeatedly mentions Christ.

Jesus still has many enemies today.

Of course! Not only the Son of God, but everyone who makes such high moral demands on people as He does, has many enemies. To all the servants of pride, of self-admiration, of immorality, to all the prisoners of irreligion and denial of God, Jesus is certainly unpopular. The enemies of Jesus are all those who live in sin and from sin, the seducers, thieves, deceivers of nations, adulterers, people who abort their children, child-murderers, drunkards, embezzlers. His enemies are those who, in their own political struggle, find the teachings of Jesus and the religious convictions of the Christian people an unpleasant barrier. It is also a striking phenomenon in the history of mankind that it is often the greatest benefactors of humanity who have suffered roadblocks, persecutions and undeserved death.

Jesus was also sometimes mistaken; for example, he believed that the end of the world would come in the lifetime of “this generation” (Mt 24:34).

This does not stand. In the chapter from Matthew, from which the quote is taken, the two great prophecies of Jesus about the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world are interwoven. Indeed, the generation that heard him did not die completely without some of its members having experienced the destruction of Jerusalem. As for the end of the world, it can also be said that the generation of Christ will not pass away in a spiritual sense until the end of the world is at hand. The way the evangelist presents these two prophecies makes it understandable that some confuse the two. But two verses later, Jesus Himself says that He does not want to define the time of the end of the world with these statements, because only the Father knows the day and hour. (Mt. 24:36) Only superficially, therefore, can one say that Jesus was “mistaken” about the time of the coming of the end of the world.

Jesus despaired on the cross.

Jesus did not despair on the cross. The cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” [Mark 15:34] is a simple and humble lament, a lamentation, an expression of spiritual pain, but not despair.

Also, it should be known that the phrase quoted was not even a simple lamentation, but much more than that: it was an application of the first line of Psalm 21 to Himself. And this psalm is the most beautiful and expressive messianic psalm: a prophecy of the Messiah’s redemptive suffering, in striking detail, a thousand years before the event. In this psalm it is foretold that the Messiah will be killed, surrounded and mocked by his enemies, given vinegar and gall to drink, pierced hand and foot, and His bones can almost be counted, His clothes divided up and a lot cast on His vesture [Matthew 27:35], so that the famous German scripture scholar Franz Delitzsch says of this psalm that it is a true Passion story, as if it had been written on Golgotha itself. The same psalm also prophesies the resurrection and eternal glory of the tortured Messiah. So when Jesus quotes this psalm in reference to Himself on the cross, it really meant something other than despair!

It is a horrible thought that God could only be atoned for by the bloody and cruel murder of His own Son! A God who thirsts for the blood of His Son!

[…] The Father did not thirst for the bloody death of His own Son, but the Son Himself, out of love and mercy, desired not only to descend to us, but also to make full satisfaction to divine justice for our sins by the bloody and voluntary sacrifice of His own body. The death of the God-man is not, therefore, a bloody cruelty, but, on the contrary, a majestic manifestation of divine mercy and love.

Jesus did not want to found a new religion at all: he wanted to restore the Jewish religion to its original glory.

Yes, but with essential elements added. Namely, by replacing the promises by their fulfillment, the synagogue by the Church, the old sacrifices by the uninterrupted, mysterious renewal of His one, final and redemptive sacrifice, and the grace of the sacraments. In other words: Jesus did indeed found a new religion, Christianity, but as a continuation and completion of the old, as the fulfillment of the Old Testament revelation.

Christianity is the result of historical development. Jesus Himself was gradually raised to the throne of divinity only by the enthusiasm of the first believers.

Pure fantasy! Christianity has, of course, also undergone a certain historical development: it has spread outwards more and more, and has also expressed the rich, divine content of its doctrines more and more clearly inwards. But in the light of history, Christianity cannot be regarded as a result of a development due to mere historical circumstances. Christianity has its origin in a great historical fact: the appearance, the ministry, the personality, the death and the resurrection of Jesus, without which it could not be explained by any historical development.

That only the blind enthusiasm and myth-seeking fervour of the early believers would have slowly woven the shiny wreath of the divine sonship around Jesus’ head, and that the original, miracle-free and divinity-free text of the Gospels would have been formed accordingly, are assumptions so audacious and clumsy that they are contradicted by every historical fact. The first Christians were not blind, mythical enthusiasts, but, on the contrary, the apostles themselves were initially very petty, sober, doubting men who, only with great difficulty, under the influence of the sunlight of revelations and miraculous deeds, opened their eyes and accepted the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus as an inescapable and undeniable truth. Nor did their followers believe them blindly, but only on the basis of the testimonies which the apostles had communicated to them.

What an idea, too, that thousands, tens of thousands, soon to be hundreds of thousands of men should have undertaken the greatest renunciations, sufferings, tortures, and deaths, without investigating that what the apostles preached was really true! Were all of them fools and madmen at that time to undertake a thousand pains and finally an agonizing death for nothing? […] 

What became of the nations who lived before Christ?

They lacked the fullness of light and grace that only the Church of Jesus offers to humanity. But they too could be saved if they believed in God and in the Saviour promised by God, and thus this redeeming grace had already served to justify them. They could not enter the kingdom of heaven until the act of salvation happened, and hence the ancient “Apostles’ Creed’”says that Jesus, after his death, “descended into hell”, that is, appeared among the souls waiting for salvation, to open salvation first to them. Christianity, like the redemptive death of Jesus, was itself a decision of God’s free grace, not a right on our part, and God must have had a reason for waiting thousands of years to send a Saviour; perhaps to show the voluntary, free-giving character of his redemptive intervention, and at the same time to give the world a foretaste of what it would sink to if left to its own devices without a Saviour.

Did Jesus really redeem humanity? For there is still so much sin, hatred and war on earth today!

Yes, but precisely where the teachings of Jesus are not recognized, accepted and followed. Christ has redeemed the world in so far as He has satisfied divine justice for our sins and, in addition, taught us the conditions of a life pleasing to God. But He has left it to us to use the fruits of His redemption for our own benefit by our own determination and our own moral ambition. If we do not do this, the redemption will indeed remain unfruitful for us.

Where and insofar as Jesus finds open doors in souls and society, there may also be suffering and affliction, but it will be ennobled and softened by the faith in Jesus, the help of grace and the radiance of eternal hope; sin and despair will not take up residence there. Are there wars? Is there hatred and exploitation on earth? Yes, where there is no Jesus, or where His doctrines are not understood and misinterpreted, there indeed all evil is rampant. It only follows that the world has a great deal to develop to become truly Christian and, with it, to have a truly great, happy and balanced life.

Salvation consists at maximum in Jesus teaching us the law of love for our neighbour.

Loving our neighbour is indeed one of Jesus’ supreme laws, though not the first, for the most important commandment commands us to love and serve God perfectly. But for Jesus, true love of God and of man is based on and conditioned by true faith, and the keeping of the commandments is the area of the enforcement of this double love. This is what those who wish to eliminate everything else from the Gospel and from Jesus’ precepts like to forget, and who wish to give priority to love of neighbour on a purely natural basis, by taking it out of the context of the love of God, true faith and the duty of keeping all the commandments. This is nothing less than a mutilation and falsification of the religion of Jesus. Besides, the essence of salvation is not to be found in the commandment to love, but in the atonement for our sins, the sacrifice of the cross.

Christianity’s belief in the afterlife reduces life on earth to meaninglessness.

On the contrary,  only this gives it its full moral significance. For it is on this life that our eternal destiny, lasting for endless ages, depends. Then this life is of unheard-of importance, because the question of our eternal happiness or unhappiness depends on how we have used this life: according to God’s commandments or in against them.

Christianity despises the body.

Perhaps more accurately, Christianity is primarily concerned with the soul, because it is indeed a million times more important whether we cherish the values of our soul than the values of our body. But Christianity does not despise the human body either, as a certain incompetent or biased literature constantly repeats, but on the contrary, it regards it as sacred: a masterpiece of God and companion of the soul; a temple in which the Spirit of God dwells, as St. Paul says (1 Cor. 3:16) The much-maligned Christian Middle Ages did not despise the body, as is shown by the great development of medieval sculpture and painting, which also revered the external form of man and, regarding it as the dwelling place of the Spirit, made it the subject of loving study and much artistic representation.

Christianity teaches contempt for the world.

No, it does not teach contempt for the world. It teaches only the right subordination of worldly things to the eternal purpose and divine law.

Besides, do we really need to worry that men today might want to despise worldly goods so much? The danger is far greater that excessive worldliness will lead men to rampant rivalry, to trampling on rights, to selfishness, to the exploitation of their neighbour. It is precisely the great Christians and the saints who have been the greatest promoters of the earthly well-being of nations.

Christianity despises married life, considers women to be a source of sin and despises motherhood.

This can often be read in certain newspaper articles and “scientific” ravings, but it is not the truth. So much so that it was Christianity that lifted woman out of the humiliating abyss into which antiquity had plunged her. It was Christianity that raised woman to the altar, that gave her the most glorious exaltation in the Blessed Virgin. And Christianity has elevated married life to the dignity of a sacrament. How, then, can such gross fabrications be used to infect public opinion again and again?

Christianity only considers love life a sin, considers women as an “occasion of sin” for men and men for women, if it is debauchery, prohibited outbursts of sexuality, contrary to the moral law and the Gospel commandment. Christianity does not allow the vulgar and unbridled defilement of women and motherhood, and generally warns that the main aim and guide is not the mere instinct of the body, but the laws of the soul. Of course, this does not please depraved and debauched men, and that is why they hurl insults on the sexual morality of Christianity.

The gospel is full of naivety. What does it mean, for example, that Jesus “ascended into heaven”? What is “heaven”? And that God “crowned” the Virgin Mary in heaven? Are there crowns in heaven? Made of what? Wood? Iron? Gold? Do they keep crowns there like in a theater prop room?

It is indeed naïve of us to imagine even the most sublime things in an earthly, childish, too human way. If, for example, we understand the Ascension as the body of Christ physically ascending to some place among the stars, and heaven is necessarily a place or state tied to material space. Or that the afterlife “crown” of which St. Paul speaks, that is, the final reward and glorification, means a kind of human “coronation”. If religion is compelled to work with both worldly and human images in its demonstration of spiritual things, if, for example, Scripture itself says on the first page that God not only conversed with men but also “walked” [Gen. 3:8] in paradise, this is of course nothing other than the expression in human forms of a direct and wonderful contact with God, of which every serious man can immediately understand what is the content and what the external form.

What is certain, however, is that religious life often accumulates an unnecessary amount of naive things through the fault of certain people, and that this undermines the authority of religion in the eyes of people of higher intelligence and more independent thinking. For example, the many pious folk tales which some people attach to religious life, the not always tasteful way in which certain groups of people practice their religious life in church and outside the church, the somewhat childish, even old-fashioned style in which they express their religious thoughts orally or in writing, sometimes do not really serve to the glory of religion.

But what can be concluded from these phenomena? Only that men are small, and like to put the greatest things into forms and formulas which are suited to their smallness. […] 

The teaching of Jesus is no longer recognizable today.

The true teachings of Jesus cannot indeed be recognized in the confusion of conflicting denominations, but they can be recognized in the one true Church, the Church which Christ founded and which he himself promised to preserve from all error.

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This text is in released under the Creative Commons Zero License. The original author died in 1939, therefore the original Hungarian text is in the public domain.