[Footnote 442: Lev. 24. 16.] In none of these instances did Christ repudiate the claims attributed to Him, or say He had been misunderstood. In fact, only once did He offer any explanation at all. He then appealed to the passage in the Old Testament, 'I said, Ye are gods,'[443] and asserted that He was much better entitled to the term, since He was sent into the world by the Father, and did the works of the Father. After which He again asserted His unity with the Father, which was the very point objected to by the Jews. [Footnote 443: Ps. 82. 6.] Moreover, not only during His life did Christ make these claims to be Divine, but He persevered with them even when it brought about His death. It is undisputed that the Jews condemned Him for _blasphemy_, and for nothing else. This is the teaching not of one Gospel alone, but of each of the four.[444] Every biography of Christ that we possess represents this as the real charge against Him; though, of course, when tried before the Roman governor that of disloyalty to Cæsar was brought forward as well. [Footnote 444: Matt. 26. 65; Mark 14. 64; Luke 22. 71; John 19. 7.] There is only one conclusion to be drawn from all this. It is that Christ did really claim to be both superhuman and Divine; that He deliberately and repeatedly asserted these claims during His life; that this provoked the hostility of the Jews, who frequently wanted to kill Him; that He never repudiated these claims, but persevered with them to the end; and was finally put to death in consequence. (_C._) THE GREAT ALTERNATIVE. We pass on now to the _great alternative_, which is forced upon us by combining the teaching and the claims of Christ. Before pointing out its importance we must notice a favourite method of trying to get out of the difficulty, which is by saying that the teaching of Christ occurs in the _first three Gospels_, and the claims in the _Fourth_; so if we deny the accuracy of this single Gospel the difficulty is removed. But unfortunately for this objection, though the Divine claims occur chiefly in the Fourth Gospel, the superhuman ones are most prominent in the other three; and we have purposely chosen all the passages illustrating them from these Gospels _alone_. And what is more, they occur in all the supposed _sources_ of these Gospels--the so-called Triple Tradition, the source common to Matthew and Luke, etc. Everywhere from the earliest record to the latest, Christ is represented as claiming to be superhuman. And such claims are equally fatal to His moral character if He were only a man. For no good man, and indeed very few bad ones, could be so fearfully presumptuous as to claim to be the absolute Ruler of the world, still less to be its Redeemer, and, least of all, to be its one and only Judge hereafter.