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Updated: May 3, 2025
Still at the most I shall only tell the priests where my Master is." And thus the good and bad impulses struggle for the mastery, giving to this character the greatest tragic interest. He visibly shrinks before the words of Christ, "One of you shall betray me." In the High Council he cringes under the scorching reproach of Nicodemus.
Bishop Nicodemus, who watched the current of observations, began telling hunting stories of the time of the Emir Bescheer, when that prince resided at his splendid castle of Bteddeen, near Deir el Kamar. This was to recall the days when the mountain had only one ruler, and that ruler a Shehaab, and when the Druse lords were proud to be classed among his most faithful subjects.
Riding on a mule, clad in a coarse brown woollen dress, in Italy or Spain we should esteem him a simple Capuchin, but in truth he is a prelate, and a prelate of great power; Bishop Nicodemus, to wit, prime councillor of the patriarch, and chief prompter of those measures that occasioned the civil war of 1841.
But if you observe the similar incident which follows in the conversation with Nicodemus, and the emphatic declaration of the next chapter that Jesus knew both 'all men, and 'what was in man' both human nature as a whole, and each individual it is more natural to see here superhuman knowledge.
As Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and other well-intentioned persons were members of this Council, the Apostles undertook to let them know what was going to be done in the Council, thus securing the presence of those friends of Jesus whom the Pharisees had purposely omitted to invite.
He did not suppose fraud on the part of the first preachers of Christianity; they sincerely believed that Christ died and rose again. Joseph and Nicodemus probably knew the truth but kept silence. The idea of what might follow from belief in one single supposed miracle was never hereafter absent from Butler's mind. In 1869, having been working too hard, he went abroad for a long change.
But the story is a somewhat perilous one, and as it rains no longer I will walk with you along the hillside and tell it to you. He raised his hand to Joseph, forbidding him to speak, and it was not till they reached a lonely track that Nicodemus stopped suddenly: his death had been resolved upon, he said, and the two men stood for a moment looking into each other's eyes without speaking.
The importance of this change is intimated in the remarkable declaration of Jesus Christ to Nicodemus, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of heaven." It is essential to the possession of paradise; it constitutes the very basis of the Christian character; and to be indifferent to it is a mark of condemnation.
WE are NOT ignorant; we KNOW that Christ died, inasmuch as we have the testimony of all the four Evangelists to this effect, the testimony of the Apostle Paul, and through him that of all the other Apostles; we have also the certainty that the centurion in charge of the soldiers at the Crucifixion would not have committed so grave a breach of discipline as the delivery of the body to Joseph and Nicodemus, unless he had felt quite sure that life was extinct; and finally we have the testimony of the Church for sixty generations, and that of myriads now living, whose experience assures them that Christ died and rose from the dead; in addition to this tremendous body of evidence we have also the story of the spear wound recorded in a Gospel which even our opponents believe to be from a Johannean source in its later chapters; and though, as has been already stated, this wound cannot be insisted upon as in itself sufficient to prove our Lord's death, yet it must assuredly be allowed its due weight in reviewing the evidence.
And, therefore, our Lord explained what he meant to Nicodemus, and told him that, by being born again, he did not mean the natural birth of the body; but a birth caused by the Spirit, and therefore itself a birth of a spirit: for, as that which is born from a body is itself also a body, so that which is born of a spirit is itself also a spirit.
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