And look what he achieved! He only had what we call the “Old Testament”, the intimacy with the Creator which we call “prayer”, and the spirit of God, either through birth or baptism, which we too can have since Pentecost, if only we can accept it. And principally from the psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, he worked out with penetrating logic the messianic message. And having taunted the congregation in the synagogue at Nazareth that the last act of Divine healing was of Naaman the Syrian, hundreds of years before, he recovered the art of Divine healing, which by and large the clergy have lost. He was peerless!
But it is no good our saying, “Jesus did it all; and what we have to do is simply to believe in him”. He may have been a humble Galilean prophet, who was almost wholly immersed in the thought and culture of his own people, and who resolutely turned his back on the Greek thought and culture adopted by many Jews, and which probably flourished as close to home as in Capernaum, but he was still a highly intelligent man. And he told his followers, “As God sent me, so I send you”. In other words, we are to achieve all he did, and greater things still now he is gone.
Professor Caird, in his Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, his Gifford Lectures of 1900 & 1901, considered in his last chapter the effect of Greek thought on the Church. In particular he considered its effect on the debate in the early centuries of the Church about the relationship of human nature with the Divine nature. He says that in the Church this debate was necessarily limited to a consideration of the different conceptions of the personality of Christ. This had two disadvantages, he says; it was confined to the person of Christ alone, and never branched out to consider the personality of normal man; and it was a static rather than a dynamic unity. In other words, not a unity that provided a way of life, but rather a unity that was independent of process, or conduct. The Quaker idea of “that of God in everyman”, which is exactly the same as the Jewish idea of “we have Abraham for our Father”, is a good example of this defect; it is independent of conduct.