28 Jun The death of Christ: The defeat of a great man?
By Dr Ajith Fernando
Some years ago I spoke at a meeting in Sri Lanka on the topic of Christian witness. I was early for the meeting, so I chatted with some of the people in the audience before the meeting started.
One of them was a well-known Buddhist writer. He told me that the Buddha was superior to Jesus because, even though Jesus lived a noble life, he was defeated through death in his battle for righteousness. Paul must have encountered this type of argument often. He said, “but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles…” (1 Cor. 1:23).
It was foolishness to the Gentiles. F. F. Bruce says, “In the eyes of the Gentiles the idea that salvation depended on one who had neither the wit nor the power to save himself from so disreputable a death was the height of folly.”
And this is the viewpoint of a typical self-sufficient contemporary person. Many view Jesus as a weakling who was too weak or too afraid to say a word in his defense when he was subjected to the humiliation that surrounded the events of the cross.
To read the full article, click on June 2016 SACYN Times