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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 561. Nicodemus
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Literature
Baldwin, G. C., Representative Men of the New Testament (1859), 161.
Banks, L. A., Christ and His Friends (1895), 116.
Banks, L. A., The Great Saints of the Bible (1902), 276.
Beecher, H. W., Henry Ward Beecher in England, 1886, pt. iii. 49.
Bell, C. D., Night Scenes of the Bible, ii. (1886) 95.
Bernard, J. H., From Faith to Faith (1895), 33.
Carpenter, W. B., The Son of Man among the Sons of Men (1893), 185.
Chapin, E. H., in The World's Great Sermons, vi. (1909) 29.
Clow, W. M., The Day of the Cross (1909), 353.
Davidson, A. B., The Called of God (1902), 247.
Drummond, H., The Ideal Life (1897), 185.
Durell, J. C. V., The Self-Revelation of Our Lord (1910), 84.
English, E., Sermons and Homilies (1913), 155.
Gray, W. A., Laws and Landmarks of the Spiritual Life (1895), 151.
Greenhough, J. G., in Men of the New Testament: Matthew to Timothy (1905), 129.
Hough, L. H., The Men of the Gospels (1913), 55.
Jones, J. D., The Hope of the Gospel (1911), 126.
Lucas, B., Conversations with Christ (1905), 12.
Matheson, G., The Representative Men of the New Testament (1905), 115.
Reid, J., Jesus and Nicodemus (1906).
Rendall, G. H., Charterhouse Sermons (1911), 85.
Sanday, W., The Authorship and Historical Character of the Fourth Gospel (1872), 69.
Skrine, J. H., Saints and Worthies (1901), 121.
Whyte, A., Bible Characters: Joseph and Mary to James (1900), 36.
Dictionary of the Bible, iii. (1900) 543 (J. H. Bernard).
Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, ii. (1908) 244 (E. H. Titchmarsh).
Encyclopœdia Biblica, iii. (1902), col. 3406 (E. A. Abbott).
Never is the mysterious difference between Jesus and other men more apparent than in the supremely instructive and impressive account of the quiet interview which He gave in the silence of night to Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. The one theme which occupies the strained attention of the two men, the one point on which they speak with intense earnestness and latent passion, is the condition of entrance into the Kingdom of God, the state of mind and heart which fits a man for the Divine régime which they both expect to begin without delay. And we are smitten with awe as we observe that one of the two Teachers who together discuss this absolutely vital problem offers a solution which is intended for other men, but has no reference to Himself. He who lays down the law, “Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” speaks as one who has never been, because He has never needed to be, born again. Here is an amazing assumption, which will be found to underlie all His teaching from the beginning to the end. He can say, as no other man has ever been able to say, “Which of you convinceth me of sin?” “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.” “I do always the things which are well pleasing in my Father's sight.” He who knows what is in man makes no mistake about Himself, and His consciousness is the consciousness of sinless perfection-the consciousness of a man who never needs to repent and ask forgiveness, never requires to be born again. Let this supreme miracle be once accepted and appreciated, and every other miracle falls into its proper place. That the conqueror of sin should also be the conqueror of disease and sorrow and death seems nothing strange. The moment we grant the sinlessness of Jesus, we enter a region in which the supernatural becomes the natural.
Renan claimed for himself the absolute coldness which proposed as its only object to take note of the most delicate and the most severe shades of truth. Yet when he wrote his Life of Christ for the people, he expunged the frank passages in his famous book, passages such as that in which he argued that Christ countenanced a fictitious resurrection of Lazarus arranged by the sisters. He omitted also what he had said about Christ's devouring fanaticism. These were fit for his scientific readers; but he was willing to make concession to the preference of the vulgar for a popular hero. So, without in the least changing his real opinion, he indulged the general appetite for a stainless figure, and erased all the traces of fanaticism and finesse. To do that was to forget that, after all, truth is sacredness, and sacredness is truth, and that deception in any and every form can in the end work nothing but evil. Yet we will not bear too hardly on Renan. What we are convinced lay at the back of his reticence was the feeling that if Christ were once proved to be frail and stained like the rest of us, the glory of the world would be quenched.1 [Note: W. R. Nicoll, The Church's One Foundation, 112.]