Transfiguration of Jesus

“ Evidence which ought to convince a reasonable man should be deemed sufficient.
The standing objection from the days of Celsus, that Jesus should have shown himself after his resurrection to his enemies, is unreasonable. It is as if one should refuse to believe the transfiguration, the raising of the daughter of Jairus, or the agony in the garden, because not witnessed by the multitude, and by only Peter, James, and John of the Apostles. ”

“ When therefore you see any one not only with a thorough understanding of the theology concerning Jesus, but also making clear every expression of the Gospels, do not hesitate to say that to Him the garments of Jesus have become white as the light. But when the Son of God in His transfiguration is so understood and beheld, that His face is a sun, and His garments white as the light, straightway there will appear to him who beholds Jesus in such form Moses,—the law—and Elijah,—in the way of synecdoche, not one prophet only, but all the prophets—holding converse with Jesus ”

“ The case is similar with Paul’s testimony as to those who, like him, saw the Saviour after his death.6 It is possible that the people concerned saw something, that they saw a Jesus “risen up” in heavenly transfiguration; but that this was the Jesus of the so-called historical theology, whose existence is hereby established, even its supporters would not in all probability insist upon; for in their view the historical Jesus had in no way risen from the dead: but here also there would only be question of a purely subjective vision of the ecstatically excited disciples. ”

“ These discourses were later transformed by tradition into an actual miraculous giving of food. Here, therefore, Weisse endeavours to substitute for Strauss's “unhistorical” conception of myth a different conception, which in each case seeks to discover a sufficient historical cause.
The miracles at the baptism of Jesus are based upon His account of a vision which He experienced in that moment. The present form of the story of the transfiguration has a twofold origin. In the first place, it is partly based on a real experience shared by the three disciples. ”

“ The mythic theory accepts an historical groundwork for many of the stories about Jesus, but it does not seek to explain the miraculous by attenuating it into the natural—as by explaining the story of the transfiguration to have been developed from the fact of Jesus meeting secretly two men, and from the brilliancy of the sunlight dazzling the eyes of the disciples—but it attributes the incredible portions of the history to the Messianic theories current among the Jews. ”

“ But even after such dangers have been avoided, even after the historian, by setting arbitrary limits to his process of elimination, has succeeded in reconstructing a purely human Jesus, the Jesus thus constructed is found to be entirely unreal. ”

“ The astringents used to remove the brilliant colours of miracle and transcendence have proved so strong as to destroy the portrait they were intended to restore. By proposing the dilemma, A miraculous Christ or a mythical Christ, the Radicals have shown the difficulty of drawing the picture of an historical Jesus from which the transcendent elements have been removed. It should be noticed further that the "historical" Jesus who is left has a diminishing importance for religion, and even for ethics. ”

“ This criticism brings us back to the necessity of recognizing a resurrection which was in some real sense corporeal, difficult as that conception is for us. The gospels assert this with great simplicity and delicate reserve. They represent Jesus as returning to his disciples with a body which was superior to the limitations which hedge our lives about. It may be well described by Paul's words, "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." ”

“ If in all this it is shown to be possible, or even probable, that in the Jesus of the Gospels we have not a deified man, but rather a humanised God, there remains but to find an answer to the question as to what external reasons led to the transplanting of the God Jesus into the soil of historical actuality and the reduction of the eternal or super-historical fact of his redeeming death and of his resurrection into a series of temporal events. ”

“ An apologist of our days who must affirm the one resurrection, seeing that his whole religion is based upon it, and who, though valiantly defying science, seeks to conciliate historical possibility, finds his task quite heavy enough in accounting for the facts that the risen Jesus “was seen of above five hundred brethren at once,” and yet that no record of his rising can be found beyond the limits of the New Testament. ”

“ The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions! ”

“ Under such conditions of origin, how can we begin to separate reason and revelation? Gnosticism, stoicism, platonism, the Old Testament, the stories of the life of Jesus, the broadening of Christianity, all went together to make possible the mystic theology of this gospel.
But the more Jesus was transformed into a god, the more he lost his human characteristics. The figure of Jesus becomes elusive and shadowy; he lives among men but is not of them. To make God a man or man a second God was an impossible task. ”

“ They deny the immaculate conception and miraculous birth of the Christ, and have very great doubts about his crucifixion and resurrection. Their Christ is purely ideal. The fact is that Christendom has worshipped the literal Jesus for the ideal Christ for nearly twenty centuries, though their conceptions of him have been manifold and contradictory. No wonder that so many intelligent Christian sects in the early ages of the church utterly denied the existence of Jesus as an historic person. ”

“ Our regeneration is indeed an image of it, but the glorification of Jesus infinitely transcended our regeneration; for we never ascend into oneness with the Divine that dwells in our Inmost, or Holy of Holies, whereas Jesus ascended into the bosom of the Father, and, as "sitting on the right hand of the Father," exercises all Divine power—is, in other words, the one and only Divine. He who has "all power in heaven and earth" is the only God of heaven and earth. ”

“ A Roman governor, a tetrarch, a Jewish high priest, converted by the apparition of Jesus, would have made a greater impression on a man of sense than a hundred secret apparitions to his chosen disciples. The conversion of the Sanhedrim at Jerusalem to the faith, would have been of greater weight than all the obscure rabble which the apostles prevailed on to believe their improbable marvels, and persuaded that they had seen Jesus alive after his death. ”

“ That every conception which represents the resurrection of Christ as a simple reanimation of his mortal body, is far from the original conception, and (2) that the question generally as to whether Jesus has risen, can have no existence for any one who looks at it apart from the contents and worth of the Person of Jesus. ”

“ THERE are many earnest, honest Christians in these modern days, when naturalistic criticism is at work to destroy the very foundations of human belief, who feel that the virgin birth of Jesus was unnecessary. They ask in all sincerity, Why could not Jesus be Divine, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, and still be the son of Joseph? They urge that perhaps the Bible account was a later invention of men, and say frankly that they do not see any need of it. ”

“ If we turn away from the true Jesus of Nazareth because he has been disfigured and misrepresented by the Churches, we turn away from that in which our weak wills and desponding souls are meant to find their most obvious and natural help and inspiration—from that symbol of the Divine, which, of necessity, means most to us. ”

“ Matthew and John do not speak of this ascension. If we leave it to them, we must say, that Jesus is still on earth according to the first of these evangelists, his last words to his disciples gave them to understand, that he would "remain with them until the end of the world." To fix our ideas on this subject, Luke tells us, as we have seen, that Jesus ascended into heaven the very evening of the day of the resurrection. But he afterwards informs us, that Jesus tarried forty days after his resurrection with his disciples. Faith only can extricate us from this embarrassment. ”

“ The dogma of the resurrection of Jesus is only attested by men whose subsistence depended on that absurd romance; and as roguery continually belies itself, these witnesses could not agree among themselves in their evidence. They tell us, that Jesus had publicly predicted his own resurrection. He ought therefore to have risen publicly; he ought to have shewn himself, not in secret to his disciples, but openly to priests, pharisees, doctors, and men of understanding, especially after having intimated, that it was the only sign which would be given them. ”

“ There is not a miraculous story or incredible legend incorporated in the New Testament as a part of the history of Jesus, that was not afloat in some shape or form, on the wings of tradition in nearly every religious country, ages before his birth. The model for each and every miracle was already constructed, was already in the market, and already a part of the history or tradition of other and older Gods. And all that was wanted to make it appear as a part of the history of the Christian's deified Jesus, was to fill in names and dates. ”

“ The meaning of these words is evidently this, that every one (whether young or old, male or female, one who has lived an outwardly moral or immoral life,) who believes that the poor, despised Jesus of Nazareth, of whom we read in the New Testament, was the promised Christ or Messiah, such a one is no longer in his natural state, but is born again, is born of God, is a child of God. The question therefore is, Do you believe that Jesus, who was born at Bethlehem, and crucified under Pontius Pilate, is the promised Saviour, the Messiah, the one for whom the Jews were to look? ”

“ There was this difference between men and Jesus in the resurrection. Men forever cast aside their natural bodies at death. Jesus, indeed, put aside his outward physical material body, but there was provided in its place a form of Divine substances which enabled him forever to dwell with men on the plane of the natural. Unlike men, he is forevermore on even the lowest plane of being, as the disciples saw after the resurrection. ”

“ We have thus, by a serious historical inquiry, reached the conclusion, that Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of the Christian religion, declared, before His crucifixion, that He was about to die for the sins of men, and that this assertion of His was sealed with the divine approval by the unique miracle of the resurrection. We have also seen that this was the Good News, which Paul and all the other Apostles preached, and on which the early Church was 65founded. It is this that has won for Jesus the love of myriads; it is this that has been the magnet to draw them away from sin. ”

“ In fulfilment of a promise made by Him shortly before the crucifixion, and repeated before the ascension, He and the Father conjointly sent the third person in the Trinity to endue with power from on high the simple men whose duty it now became to proclaim the gospel of salvation to the world. Jesus is now on the throne of His glory, but sooner or later He will come again to wind up the present dispensation and to be the Judge of the quick and the dead at a grand assize. ”

“ Even in the representations of historical theology he is scarcely more than the shadow of a shadow. Consequently it is self-deceit to make the figure of this “unique” and “mighty” personality, to which a man may believe he must on historical grounds hold fast, the central point of religious consciousness. Jesus Christ may be great and worthy of reverence as a religious idea, as the symbolical personification of the unity of nature in God and man, on the belief in which the possibility of the “redemption” depends. ”

“ According to a very early tradition, of which the obscured traces remain in the synoptic gospels, Jesus received the pneuma at the time of his baptism, when the Holy Spirit, or visible manifestation of the essence of Jehovah, descended upon him and became incarnate in him. This theory, however, was exposed to the objection that it implied a sudden and entire transformation of an ordinary man into a person inspired or possessed by the Deity. ”

“ The crucifixion of a man is a possible occurrence; but the corporeal resurrection of a man who has suffered death is impossible. These reputed appearances of Jesus, if they have a historical foundation, were evidently mere subjective impressions or apparitions. Although he is declared to have remained on earth forty days, he made, at the most, but two or three brief visits to his disciples, appearing and disappearing like a phantom. ”

“ The Latter-day Saints and every other person who is entitled to salvation, and all except those who have sinned against the Holy Ghost, may know that Jesus is the Christ in the same way that Peter knew it. Miracles do not give this knowledge to mankind, though they may serve as collateral evidence to strengthen the believer. The miracles of Jesus were known to the Jews, yet they suffered him to be put to death as a deceiver of mankind and one possessed of a devil. ”