IS JESUS GOD - PART TWO

                                              IS JESUS GOD ?

    PART TWO

     (copied from
      Y-Jesus. com)




Great Moral Teacher 

Even those from other religions acknowledge that Jesus was a great moral teacher. Mahatma Gandhi spoke highly of Jesus righteous life and profound words. Likewise Jewish scholar, Joseph Klausner, wrote .."It is universally admitted that .... Christ taught the purest and sublimest ethics .... which throws the moral precepts and maxims of the wisest men of antiquity  far into the shade.

Jesus'  Sermon on the Mount has been called the most superlative teaching of human  ethics ever uttered  by an individual. In fact, most of what we know today of  "equal rights"  actually is the result of Jesus' teaching.  Historian Will Durant,a non-Christian, said of Jesus that "he lived and struggled unremittingly  for 'equal rights'; in modern times He would have been sent to Siberia.
 'he that is greatest among you let him be your servant' - this is the inversion of all political wisdom, of all sanity."

Many, like Gandhi, have tried to separate Jesus' teachings on ethics, from His claims about Himself, believing that He was simply a great man
Who taught lofty moral principals. This was the  approach of one of  America's Founding Fathers, President Thomas Jefferson,  who cut and pasted a copy of the New Testament, removing sections he thought referred to Jesus' deity, while leaving in other passages regarding Jesus' ethical and moral teaching.  Jefferson carried around his cut and pasted New Testament with him, revering Jesus as perhaps the greatest moral teacher of all time. 

In fact, Jefferson's memorable words in the Declaration of Independence were rooted in Jesus' teaching that each person is of immense and equal importance to God, regardless of sex, race, or social status. The famous  document sets forth: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...."

But one thing Jefferson didn't answer :  If Jesus falsely claimed to be God, He couldn't have been a good moral teacher.  But did Jesus really claim deity?  Before we look at what Jesus claimed, we need to examine the possibility that He was simply a great religions leader. 

next post tomorrow