The First Church Historian Describes Jesus
The secret of Christ’s life lay not in what He had gained materially or by force, but in the lives that He impacted during only three years of ministry on Earth. He did not sway them forcibly, but with a life completely devoted to the will of His Father in Heaven, even suffering through a cruel death by execution on a cross (a common type of torture for criminals in his day), because it is what God the Father had sent Him to Earth to accomplish. Jesus mentioned His path to the cross many times before it actually happened, predicting how He would die, and promising those closest to Him that He would be resurrected from the dead.
Jesus’ whole life was revolutionary to His disciples—those students whom Jesus trained to become apostles and go on Christ’s global mission of spreading the good news. The secret of Jesus’ impact on Earth was that He, in obscurity, poured out the truth of His Father into the lives of those few individuals who would multiply themselves. Over the centuries, God’s revolution, eventually called Christianity, would become a worldwide phenomenon ...
Eusebius, writing his Church History between the 3rd and 4th centuries based on a collection of authors in diverse parts of the world, shares of Christ:
No language could adequately describe the origin, essence, and nature of Christ … and who but the Father could conceive of the Light that existed before the world, the Wisdom that preceded time, the living Word that was in the beginning with the Father and was God?
Before all creation and fashioning, visible or invisible, He was the first and only offspring of God, the commander-in-chief of the spiritual host of heaven, the messenger of mighty counsel, the agent of the ineffable plan of the Father, the creator – with the Father – of all things, the second cause of the universe after the Father, the true and only begotten Child of God, the Lord and God and King of everything created, who has received Lordship, power, honor and deity itself from the Father.
According to the mystic ascription of divinity to Him in the Scriptures: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … All things were made by Him, and apart from Him nothing was made.’ (John 1:1, 3, Scripture translation taken from Eusebius).
