Napoleon the Theologian

I used the following passage in our high school Sunday school class last year to help in a discussion on the influence Jesus has had in the world. I thought I'd share it again.

I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires, and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of infinity…
Everything in Christ astonishes me. His spirit overawes me, and his will confounds me. Between him and whoever else in the world there is no possible term of comparison. He is truly a being by himself. His ideas and his sentiments, the truth which he announces, his manner of convincing, are not explained either by human organization or by the nature of things.
The nearer I approach, the more carefully I examine, everything is above me; everything remains grand, - of a grandeur which overpowers. His religion is a revelation from an intelligence which certainly is not that of a man. There is a profound originality which has created a series of works and of maxims before unknown. Jesus borrowed nothing from our science. One can absolutely find nowhere, but in him alone, the imitation or the example of his life.
…I search in vain in history to find the similar to Jesus Christ, or anything which can approach the gospel. Neither history, nor humanity, nor the ages, nor nature, offer me anything with which I am ale to compare it or to explain it. Here everything is extraordinary. The more I consider the gospel, the more I am assured that there is nothing there which is not beyond the march of events, and above the human mind.

-- Napoleon Bonaparte

Bonaparte, Napoleon, “Conversations with General Bertrand at S. Helena,” in Anthology of Jesus, arr. and sel. Sir James Marchant, ed. Warren W. Wiersbe (1926; Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1981), 260