suffering, and be baptized with His baptism of blood. But He did speak
of Himself as King, He accepted the designation of Himself as the
Christ of GOD, and spoke strange words about His coming upon the
clouds of heaven to judgment. He held that by their relation to
Himself and to His ideals the lives of all men should be tested, and
the verdict passed upon their deeds. For making these and similar
claims He was convicted of blasphemy and put to death.

His disciples failed to understand Him. The Gospels are full of the
contrast between their minds and His. Of the chosen Twelve who, as He
said, had continued with Him in His trials and to whom He promised
that they should eat and drink at His table in His Kingdom, and sit on
thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, one betrayed and one
denied Him when the time of crisis came, and the rest forsook Him and
fled. The fact that their faith and loyalty were subsequently re-
established--that the execution which took place on Calvary was not
the complete and summary ending of the whole Christian movement--that,
in the days that followed, the recreant disciples became the confident
Apostles, requires for its explanation the assertion in some form of
the truth of the Resurrection.

With regard to the precise form which the Resurrection took there may
be room for differences of opinion: the accounts of the risen Jesus in
the various Gospel records cannot be completely harmonized, and the
story may here and there have been modified in the telling. The fact
remains that apart from the assumption as a matter of historical truth
that Jesus was veritably alive from the dead, and that He showed
Himself alive to His disciples by evidences which were adequate to
carry conviction to their incredulous minds, the origins of historical
Christianity cannot really be explained.