If there’s any aspect of the life of Jesus that has given rise to doubts about whether he really was the Messiah and the divine Son of God, it is the fact that he was crucified. Already in the first century AD, the apostle Paul could refer to the crucifixion of Christ as a “stumbling block (Greek skandalon) to the Jews and folly (Greek mō ria) to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). If you look carefully at the two Greek terms Paul uses here, you can see that we get the English words “scandal” and “moron” from them. In other words, Paul is saying that the very idea of “Christ crucified”—a crucified
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