"History is full of men who have claimed that they came from God, or that they were gods, or that they bore messages from God--Buddha, Mohammed, Confucious, Christ, Lao-tze, and thousands of others, right down to the person who founded a new religion this very day. Each of them has a right to be heard and considered. But as a yardstick external to and outside of whatever is to be measured is needed, so there must be some permanent tests available to all men, all civilizations, and all ages, by which they can decide whether any one of these claimants, or all of them, are justified in their claims. These tests are of two kinds: reason and history. Reason, because everyone has it, even those without faith; history, because everyone lives in it and should know something about it.
Reason dictates that if any one of these men actually came from God, the least thing that God could do to support His claim would be to pre-announce His coming...With this test one can evaluate the claimants. (And at this preliminary stage, Christ is no greater than the others.) Socrates had no one to foretell his birth. Buddha had no one to pre-announce him and his message or tell the day when he would sit under the tree. Confucious did not have the name of his mother and his birthplace recorded, nor were they given to men centuries before he arrived so that when he did come, men would know he was a messenger from God. But, with Christ it was different. Because of the Old Testament prophecies, His coming was not unexpected. There were no predictions about Buddha, Confucious, Lao-tze, Mohammed, or anyone else, but there were predictions about Christ...What separates Christ from all men is that first He was expected...A second distinguishing fact is that once He appeared, He struck history with such impact that He split it in two, dividing it into two periods: one before His coming, the other after it...A third fact separating Him from all the others is this: every other person who ever came into the world came into it to live. He came into it to die."
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