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REDEMPTION.
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to be more emphatic and unambiguous. Luke here actually contradicts the earlier parts of the gospel after his name, and must be deemed to be acting deliberately, if the imputation of forgery is to be avoided in respect of the first two chapters of his gospel. The contradiction cannot possibly be explained away on the orthodox view, but it finds an easy solution on the hypothesis of symbolical thought. Jesus would thus have a natural human birth, while Christ would be conceived of spirit. Jesus himself never claimed an immaculate conception for his physical self; on the contrary, he said to his opponents :-- “ Ye judge after the flesh; I judge no man " (John, viii. 15).
This means nothing if not that they did not err in their judgment in so far as the tabernacle of flesh was concerned. The next preceding verse which reads
"I know whence I came, and whither I go; but ye cannot tell whence I come, and whither I go.”makes his position perfectly clear. Man consists of a physical body and a soul, though unthinking materialisms only knows him as a bundle of flesh and bones. Jesus condemns the materialist's view, not because it is untrue in respect of the genesis of the body itself, but because it ignores the soul. Put in plain language, he says : 'I know about my true Self, i.e., spirit, whence it came and whither it goes ; but you cannot tell that. Your wisdom exhausts itself with the body of flesh. I don't say you are wrong there, in your ideas about its origination and the like, but I do say that you have thrown away the substance and are grappling with a mere shadow.'
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