Truth About The Crucifixion — Page 32
DR. ABA EBAN, an eminent scholar who lectured on Hebrew,. Arabic and Persian literature at Cambridge University and later served as Foreign Minister of Israel, has, in his outstanding work. MY PEOPLE, summed up his view of Jesus at page 105 as follows: Jesus was a Pharisaic Jew. He had lived among the common people of Galilee and was the spokesman of their ideas. . Galilee was the stronghold of a robust Jewish patriotism, which found resonance in the teaching of Jesus, insofar as they conformed with those of the ancient prophets. He never considered himself a universal prophet outside the Jewish context. It cannot even be said that he was indifferent to the external forms of religion. He meticulously kept Jewish laws, made a pilgrimage to. Jerusalem on Passover, ate unleavened bread and uttered a blessing when he drank wine. He was a Jew in word and deed. . He declared in the Sermon on the Mount that he had not come to destroy the Law but to fulfil. . The Rev. Dr. Don Cupit, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, an eminent Anglican theologist, affirmed in a television interview a month ago, that Jesus was wholly man, a prophet, but not God. . Rodney Hoare, in his book The Testimony of the Shroud, which is due to be published within the next few days, opines that the picture of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels is of a solid, complete human being through whom God was able to speak and act in the same way as He did through prophets and saints. He observes:. Looked at objectively, the Gospels contain plenty of evidence for Jesus having been not only a normal man of the first century, but also particularly a Jewish one. His knowledge knew very human restraints, and he was strictly first-century Jewish. . . . It is really his powerful Jewishness which argues most forcefully against his being a part of God. . He did not address himself to God's creatures in general but predominantly to his own people. He moved in purely Jewish circles as far as posible. . . . His teaching was always within 34 •