With what joy must John the Baptist have exclaimed, "Behold the Lamb of God"! Prophetically he had been foretelling the coming of a teacher mightier than he, but apparently their paths had not crossed up to the time that Jesus came to him for baptism. According to three of the Gospels, John definitely heard a "voice from heaven" identifying the Master as the promised Messiah; hence his glad salutation (John 1:29), "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world."
In the Old Testament a lamb is often associated with the Jewish sacrificial rites. In the book of Revelation the Apostle John uses the symbolism of the earlier John twenty-eight times, wherein the Christ and the Lamb are synonymous terms. How correlative is this use with the inspirational definition of "Lamb of God" which Mary Baker Eddy gives in the Glossary of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 590), "The spiritual idea of Love; self-immolation; innocence and purity; sacrifice."
Did not the man of Nazareth exemplify just these spiritual qualities? In this definition we find portrayed what Mrs. Eddy calls on page 334 of Science and Health the "dual personality" of Christ Jesus. She writes, "This dual personality of the unseen and the seen, the spiritual and material, the eternal Christ and the corporeal Jesus manifest in flesh, continued until the Master's ascension, when the human, material concept, or Jesus, disappeared, while the spiritual self, or Christ, continues to exist in the eternal order of divine Science, taking away the sins of the world, as the Christ has always done, even before the human Jesus was incarnate to mortal eyes."
