Like and unlike

Jesus was a human being, a Jew in Galilee with a name and a family, a person who was in a way just like everyone else.  Yet in another way he was something different than anyone who had ever lived on earth before.  It took the church five centuries of active debate to agree on some sort of epistemological balance between “just like everyone else” and “something different.”

Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew 24 (Zondervan 1995).

The uniqueness of Jesus

Jesus Christ is unique–unique among gods and men.  There have been incarnate gods a-plenty, and slain-and-resurrected gods not a few; but He is the only God  who has a date in history.  And plenty of founders of religions have had dates, and some of them have been prophets or avatars of the Divine; but only this one of them was personally God.  There is no more astonishing collocation of phrases than that which in the Nicene Creed, sets these two statements flatly side by side: “Very God of very God. . . .  He suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

Dorothy Sayers, The Man Born to be King 4 (Harper & Brothers, 1943) (Introduction).