humanity--would seek to be spared the fate for which he was ordained
from all eternity?

The objection that Jesus' hesitation on the eve of the crucifixion, as
well as his cry of despair on the cross, were meant to show that he
was as human as he was divine, does not solve the difficulty. In that
event Jesus, then, was merely acting--feigning a fear which he did not
feel, and pretending to dread a death which he knew could not hurt
him. If, however, Jesus really felt alarmed at the approach of death,
how much braver, then, were many of his followers who afterwards faced
dangers and tortures far more cruel than his own! We honestly think
that to have put in Jesus' mouth the words above quoted, and also to
have represented him as closing his public career with a shriek on the
cross: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" was tantamount to
an admission by the writers that they were dealing with a symbolic
Christ, an ideal figure, the hero of a play, and not a historical
character.

It is highly dramatic, to be sure, to see the sun darkened, to feel
the whole earth quaking, to behold the graves ripped open and the dead
reappear in their shrouds--to hear the hero himself tearing his own
heart with that cry of shuddering anguish, "My God! my God!"--but it
is not history. If such a man as Jesus really lived, then his
biographers have only given us a caricature of him. However beautiful
some of the sayings attributed to Jesus, and whatever the source they
may have been borrowed from, they are not enough to prove his
historicity. But even as the Ten Commandments do not prove Moses to
have been a historical personage or the author of the books and deeds
attributed to him, neither do the parables and miracles of Jesus prove
him to have once visited this earth as a god, or to have even existed