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We are told that Christ manifested “a strong and enduring courage which never shrank or quailed before any danger however formidable.” Is this true?
It is not. When he heard that John was imprisoned, he retreated to the Sea of Galilee (Matthew iv, 12, 13); when John was beheaded, he took a ship and retired to a desert (xiv, 13); in going from Galilee to Judea, he went beyond the Jordan to avoid the Samaritans; when his brethren went up to Jerusalem he refused to accompany them for fear of the Jews (John vii, 8, 9); when the Jews took up stones to stone him he “hid himself” (viii, 59); when the Pharisees took council against him he fled (Matthew xii, 14, 16): at Gethsemane, in the agonies of fear, he prayed that the cup might pass from him; at Calvary, he frantically exclaimed, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!”
Commenting on this dying exclamation of Christ, Dr. Conway says: “That cry could never be wrung from the lips of a man who saw in his own death a prearranged plan for the world’s salvation, and his own return to divine glory temporarily renounced for transient misery on earth. The fictitious theology of a thousand years shrivels beneath the awful anguish of that cry.”